Thomas Percy’s ‘Essay on the Metre of Pierce Plowman’s Visions’ (1765) and the Idea of an Alliterative Tradition

This article examines Thomas Percy’s ‘Essay on the Metre of Pierce Plowman’s Visions’ (1765) — the first serious attempt to flesh out the idea of an alliterative tradition — in its immediate intellectual context. Percy, lacking access to the full corpus of alliterative poems known today, was still able to comprehend alliterative poetry as a tradition and a shape in time. Percy, it is suggested, founded the problematic of the study of alliterative verse: the question of tradition. Revaluing his essay recentres the alliterative tradition on one of its very few named authors, William Langland.