Roxburghe Ballads
Encyclopedia
In 1847 John Payne Collier
John Payne Collier
John Payne Collier , English Shakespearian critic and forger, was born in London.-Reporter and solicitor:...

 (1789 - 1883) printed "A Book of Roxburghe Ballads". It consisted of 1,341 broadside ballads from the seventeenth century, mostly English
England
England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, with the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...

, originally collected by Robert Harley, 1st Earl of Oxford and Mortimer
Robert Harley, 1st Earl of Oxford and Mortimer
Robert Harley, 1st Earl of Oxford and Earl Mortimer KG was a British politician and statesman of the late Stuart and early Georgian periods. He began his career as a Whig, before defecting to a new Tory Ministry. Between 1711 and 1714 he served as First Lord of the Treasury, effectively Queen...

 (1661 - 1724), later collected by John Ker, 3rd Duke of Roxburghe
John Ker, 3rd Duke of Roxburghe
John Ker, 3rd Duke of Roxburghe KG, KT, PC was a Scottish nobleman and bibliophile.Born in Hanover Square, London, on 23 April 1740, Ker succeeded his father to become the 3rd Duke of Roxburghe in 1755. It is said that he fell in love with Christina Sophia Albertina, oldest daughter of the Duke...

.

Unfortunately Collier also interpolated his own forgeries. He used ancient paper and wrote on the pages with a rare ink which has proved to be very enduring. Scholars have discredited these forgeries, apart from one or two which fooled singers of the 1960s. The collection is not as famous as the Child Ballads
Child Ballads
The Child Ballads are a collection of 305 ballads from England and Scotland, and their American variants, collected by Francis James Child in the late nineteenth century...

 or Percy's Reliques, but important nevertheless. From 1869 to 1899 a better edition was created, this time by William Chappell. There are copies in the British Library, Manchester University and America. The library of the University of Iowa
University of Iowa
The University of Iowa is a public state-supported research university located in Iowa City, Iowa, United States. It is the oldest public university in the state. The university is organized into eleven colleges granting undergraduate, graduate, and professional degrees...

 has an almost complete collection of Roxburghe Club
Roxburghe Club
The Roxburghe Club was formed on 17 June 1812 by leading bibliophiles, at the time the library of the Duke of Roxburghe was auctioned. It took 45 days to sell the entire collection. The first edition of Boccaccio's Decameron, printed by Chrisopher Valdarfer of Venice in 1471, was sold to the...

publications.
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