A Verse Chronicle of the House of Percy

A Verse Chronicle of the House of Percy

The hitherto unpublished English verse chronicle printed below survives uniquely in Alnwick Castle MS 79, a roll written in the early sixteenth century.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 prominent northern house of Percy.¹ 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 depicting 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 intended for presentation, most probably to the person the author designates "myn awn especall lorde" (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 traditionally 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 which incorporates a number of passages from the version edited here. In Peeris's chronicle the author is invariably named and identified as a member of the Percy household. For example, in British Library Royal 18. D. II the work is described as "compilede breuely by me william peeris clerke and preste secretory to the right nobill Erle henry the vth Erle of Northumberlande" (fol. 186).

Little is known about William Peeris. Indeed, the different forms of the chronicle associated with him form the bulk of our knowledge about his life.³ It must be doubtful whether he is the author of the chronicle printed here. All the manuscripts of the chronicle in which Peeris is named are characterized by a lack of sustained awareness of verse form. Instead of the quite firm grasp of the principles of rhyme royal demonstrated in the chronicle printed below, Peeris's work shows a disregard for any formal constraints: stanzas vary in length between four and eleven lines, with an equally variable syllable count. In addition, Peeris's narrative lacks the clear chronological coherence of this narrative.⁴

Since the present chronicle seems to have been the precursor and a source for Peeris's own work, the credit for the creation of a form that has no precedent in language and subject must go to its anonymous author. This is the first and, apart from Peeris's amplification of it, only chronicle of a noble house in Middle English verse.

Even though the chronicler does not specify any sources for his work beyond general references to "cronicles" (1, 58, 68, 181) or to the "booke" (6, 194, 304) or "bookys" (1, 44, 52, 64, 154, 205, 229, 241), he doubtless had access to various family records and documents to assist in his quite extensive chronology of the Percies. He is not, however, an altogether reliable historian of his subject. For example, he offers a wholly fictional account of the origins of the Percy family;⁵ he confuses the achievements of the second and third earls Percy;⁶ and he is in error about the name of the second wife of Henry Percy, first Earl of Northumberland.⁷ Some matters he resolves by what must have been deliberate misreprentation and/or suppression, as with his assertion that Henry, the...