A Verse Chronicle of the House of Percy

Abstract

T NHE hitherto unpublished English verse chronicle printed below survives uniquely in Alnwick Castle MS 79, a roll written in the early sixteenth century. The text records the history of the promi nent northern house of Percy.' The roll was clearly professionally copied and decorated: it has an illuminated border and initial at the start of the text; in the outer margin is a series of roundels depicting the kings of England from William the Conqueror to Henry VIII (with two roundels each for Henry V and VI); in the inner margin is a series of shields de picting various quarterings of Percy arms. The text is set out in forty seven regularly ruled and spaced rhyme royal stanzas. The elaborateness of the form of the roll suggests that it was in tended for presentation, most probably to the person the author des ignates myn awn especall (15) or myn own lorde and maister most deire (309), Henry Algernon Percy, fifth earl of Northumberland (1478-1527). It is designed to rehearse, in verse, a genealogical record of the successive heads of the house, from the Conquest to the early sixteenth century, according to a consistent formula: the names of each head, of their wives and children, their achievements, and their places of burial. No author is identified for this narrative, but the text has been tradi tionally associated with William Peeris, chiefly because he is identified as the author of a much longer (over seven hundred lines) genealogical verse chronicle of the Percies that survives in a number of manuscripts,2