The Percy Folio (British Library, Additional MS 27879) has been an enigma to several generations of literary scholars and historians. The inclusion of “Newarke,” a Royalist song referencing the 1644 siege of Newark-on-Trent, sets the manuscript's terminus a quo; the manuscript was probably compiled in the decade after that date. However, many of the other 194 separate items contained in the manuscript originated one or even two hundred years earlier. The manuscript derives its name from Bishop Thomas Percy, an antiquarian who discovered the manuscript when he was visiting Sir Humphrey Pitt in Shropshire (c. 1760). Pitt's maids were using the manuscript to start fires. Percy rescued most of the manuscript from becoming kindling, but the first twenty items in the manuscript are missing a half of each page because of the maids’ destruction. Because the texts are written on folio-sized paper instead of vellum, Percy usually referred to it as his “ancient folio manuscript”; thus, Percy's Folio became its de facto title. The Folio, written in a single hand in the Lancashire dialect, has only been printed in toto once, edited by John W. Hales and Frederick J. Furnivall in 1867–68. Their prudish attitudes caused them to excise texts they judged lewd and place these in a subsequent volume, subtitled Loose and Humorous Songs. The order of the texts in the previous three volumes is otherwise unchanged. Percy called the manuscript “an infinite farrago of ancient Songs, Ballads, Metrical Romances, Legends in verse and poems of the low and popular kind.” An early commentator, Joseph Ritson, similarly calls the Percy Folio “a multifarious collection.”