There is little doubt that it was intended to be enjoyed by the masses rather than the wealthy or aristocratic sections of society,[1] and, perhaps in consequence of this, it was one of the better-known of the English romances during the Elizabethan and Jacobean eras, and again in the 19th century.
There are three texts of the poem: it was printed by Wynkyn de Worde c. 1520 under the title Undo Youre Dore, though only fragments totalling 180 lines survive of this book; around 1555 or 1560 another edition in 1132 lines was produced by William Copland; and a much shorter version, thought to have been orally transmitted, was copied into Bishop Percy's Folio Manuscript around the middle of the 17th century.
i, Fluellen says "You called me yesterday mountain-squire, but I will make you to-day a squire of low degree" – but as the 17th century advanced the poem fell into neglect.
He communicated these opinions together with an extract from The Squire of Low Degree to his friend Thomas Warton, who included them in the 1762 edition of his Observations on the Fairy Queen of Spenser.
[12] Walter Scott refers to the poem in several of his novels, and it particularly influences his Quentin Durward and The Fair Maid of Perth, in each of which the hero finds himself in a situation so parallel to that of the squire that he cannot help identifying with him.
The bibliographer William Carew Hazlitt produced another edition of the Copland text in his Remains of the Early Popular Poetry of England (1864–1866), and shortly afterwards the Folio MS text was published for the first time by John W. Hales and Frederick J. Furnivall in their edition of Bishop Percy's Folio Manuscript (1867–1868).
"[14] William Edward Mead, in his standard edition of the romance, published in 1904, expressed an opinion closer to that of most modern critics when he said that We can praise The Squyr of Lowe Degre only with considerable reservations, and do not seek a place for it among the great creative poems of the world.