Book contents
- Frontmatter
- CONTENTS
- Acknowledgements
- List of Figures
- Introduction
- 1 The Heart of the Lion: The ‘Princely Song’ and the Transmission of Richard
- 2 The Psalms that Bind: ‘Sternhold and Hopkins’, the ‘Old Hundredth’ and the Ballad
- 3 Songs as Philippics: The ‘Harmodium Melos’ and the ‘Io Paean’ of Revolution
- 4 Song and Pikes in Sheffield: The Trial of James Montgomery
- Afterword
- Notes
- Works Cited
- Index
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Afterword
Book contents
- Frontmatter
- CONTENTS
- Acknowledgements
- List of Figures
- Introduction
- 1 The Heart of the Lion: The ‘Princely Song’ and the Transmission of Richard
- 2 The Psalms that Bind: ‘Sternhold and Hopkins’, the ‘Old Hundredth’ and the Ballad
- 3 Songs as Philippics: The ‘Harmodium Melos’ and the ‘Io Paean’ of Revolution
- 4 Song and Pikes in Sheffield: The Trial of James Montgomery
- Afterword
- Notes
- Works Cited
- Index
Summary
In 1868 when the nineteenth-century scholars Frederick Furnivall and John Hales published the old folio manuscript upon which Thomas Percy had based his Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765), they conceptualized the eighteenth century ballad revival by drawing upon the story of Blondel's rescue of Richard the Lionheart.
The nation lay in prison like its old Troubadour king; in its durance it heard its minstrel singing beneath the window its old songs, and its heart leapt in its bosom. It recognized the well-known, though long-neglected, strains that it had heard and loved in the days of its youth. The old love revived. The captive could not at once cast off its fetters, and go forth. But a yearning for liberty awoke in it; a wild, growing, passionate longing for liberty, for real, not artificial flowers; for true feeling, not sentimentalism; for the fresh life-giving breezes of the open country, not the languid airs of enclosed courts.
In this context Percy is the minstrel who sings the ‘old songs’ beneath the window, awakening the nation to a consciousness of growing liberty through these songs and the creation of a new literary tradition in which poets such as Wordsworth and Coleridge, in their Lyrical Ballads, would play a major role.
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- The Politics of Songs in Eighteenth-Century Britain, 1723–1795 , pp. 171 - 174Publisher: Pickering & ChattoFirst published in: 2014
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