"Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, Volume 3 (of 3)" by Percy and Wheatley is a ballad collection published in 1765. This groundbreaking anthology gathered 180 traditional ballads and songs from manuscripts and oral sources, including famous works like "Sir Patrick Spens" and Robin Hood tales. Bishop Thomas Percy's collection captured public imagination, inspiring Romantic poets like Coleridge and Wordsworth while helping shift literary taste from Neo-Classicism toward Romanticism. The work sparked a movement in folklore collecting across Europe and established the study of oral poetry as a serious pursuit. (This is an automatically generated summary.)
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