It was the most important of the source documents used by Francis James Child for his 1883 collection The English and Scottish Popular Ballads.
[1][2][3] Those who owned the manuscript before Percy did not treat it well; its owners had probably regarded its Middle English and border dialect as incomprehensible and worthless.
When Percy first came across the manuscript, in the house of its former owner Humphrey Pitt at Shifnal, Shropshire, pages were being used by his housemaids to start fires.
Percy had the manuscript bound, and the bookbinder inflicted additional damage in trimming the edges of the sheets, losing first or last lines on many pages.
[4] Percy's book was the constant companion of Gottfried August Bürger, a childhood hero of Novalis, one of the chief influences of George MacDonald, whom C.S.