Many myths and tales of folklore have obscure origins, one such appears to be the story of the Warkworth Hermit.
Whilst obscure, much of the notoriety of the tale can be traced to the publication of the ballad published in 1771 by Bishop Thomas Percy. Percy was born in Shropshire and studied at Oxford, he was ordained in 1751 and eventually became Rector of Wilby in Northamptonshire, as well becoming the personal chaplain of the Earl of Sussex. Percy was a worldly man and had many varied and wide ranging interests, including reading on a huge number of subjects. This in turn led to his composing of verse with which he was to have some success. It was however, the discovery and collection of older verses which was to provide the greatest element of Percy’s success.
While visiting his friend Humphrey Pitt at Shifnal in Shropshire, Percy noticed a battered volume lying on the floor, under a bureau in the parlour, pages of which were being used by the maids to light the fire. It proved to be a seventeenth-century collection, which Percy rescued from the flames. In due course, it provided the basis for Percy’s anthology, “The Reliques of Ancient English Poetry” which was published in 1765 and became the source of his enduring fame. Not only did the collection influence Percy’s own works, particularly his “Hermit of Warkworth”. The publication of it was to begin a fashion for the rediscovery of historic ballads, and for the revival of Ballads in general, which was to become a key element of the Romantic movement. One of Percy’s own compositions, simply entitled ‘Song’ was later set to music and described as ‘perhaps the most beautiful Ballad in the English language’ by none other than Robert Burns.
In 1765 Percy became the Chaplain and Secretary to Lord Northumberland and tutor to his son, Algernon. It might be in light of this move that he had begun to focus more on his adoptive home of Northumberland and so wrote the ballad of the Warkworth Hermit. It was certainly around this time that the spelling of his name, which had been ‘Pearcy’, then ‘Piercy’, became ‘Percy’, perhaps to copy the name of his illustrious patron. It was Lord Northumberland’s influence that allowed Percy to become Dean of Carlisle Cathedral and latterly Bishop of Dromore in County Down. It is in County Down that Percy died and it was in the Cathedral there that he was buried in 1811.
The manuscript collection that Percy saved now bears his name; it is known as the Percy Folio and is held by the British Library. Little is known about its origins, or who owned it before Humphrey Pitt. None of its owners appear to have treated it well; even Percy marked and annotated the pages. While it was probably compiled in the seventeenth-century, some of its contents date from the twelfth. Editions of the folio are available via the British Library’s catalogue online and the Internet Archive:
