Among the important antiquarian text editions of the 18th century, the jurisprudentially and constitutionally-motivated edition (1759) of Magna Charta by Blackstone (author of the classic Commentaries on the laws of England, 4 vols, 1765-69) stands out; it was to trigger the legal historicism expressed in the great undertaking of the Record Commission’s The statutes of the realm (11 vols, 1810-29). In the literary field, pride of place belongs to Thomas Percy’s Reliques of ancient English poetry (1765). The codex Percy edited contained mainly balladry of medieval and early modern vintage, and balladry was to remain a core concern: the Percy Folio was still used by the later ballad-collector Francis James Child. Balladry dominated the editorial work of Walter Scott (Border minstrelsy, 1803) and Percy’s inveterate critic Joseph Ritson, who successively published Pieces of ancient popular poetry from authentic manuscripts and old printed copies (1791), Ancient songs from the time of King Henry the Third to the Revolution (1790; the revolution being that of 1688), Robin Hood, a collection of all the ancient poems, songs, and ballads now extant relating to that celebrated English outlaw (1795) and Ancient Engleish metrical romanceës (spelling sic; 3 vols, 1802). A similar edition by George Ellis, Specimens of early English metrical romances, to which is prefixed an historical introduction on the rise and progress of romantic composition in France and England (3 vols, 1805) was one of the key texts in the Arthurian revival of the 19th century: it pioneered the suggestion that the French romances of the Round Table (by the likes of Chrétien de Troyes) drew on a narrative material that was Welsh in origin and had been transmitted to France through Norman intermediaries. Henry Weber followed suit with his three-volume Metrical romances of the 13th, 14th, and 16th centuries (1810). The Arthurian interest was boosted by Robert Southey’s edition (or rather, reprint) of Caxton’s 1485 The byrth, lyf, and actes of Kyng Arthur; of his noble knyghtes of the rounde table, theyr merveyllous enquestes and aduentures thachyeuyng of the Sanc Greal; and in the end Le Morte Darthur with the dolorous deth and departyng out of thys worlde of them al (1817).

By this time, a taste for balladry was widening to include chivalric romance and epic. At the same time a mode of publishing emerged that was not unique to Britain, but uniquely prominent in Britain all the same: that of the bibliophile society. The trend started with the Roxburghe Club, founded in 1812, and named after the collector of that name; its aim was to print facsimiles of MSS or rare books for its members. The model gave rise to similar societies such as the Bannatyne Club in Scotland (founded by Walter Scott in 1823), the Camden Society (1838), the Percy Society (1840-52; an offshoot of the Roxburghe Club oriented towards balladry; it had a successor of sorts in the – less historicist and more folkloristic – Ballad Society in 1882), the Chetham Society (1843; with a regional focus on Lancaster and Chester) and, most importantly, the Early English Texts Society (founded in 1864 by Furnivall, with a medieval focus). These societies prospered in a climate where textual editing was not, as in Germany, co-opted by an emerging professional and university-based field of philologists. A challenge to their bibliophile method emerged with the rise of such philologists in the wake of burgeoning Anglo-Saxon interest.

Beowulf, the oldest epic text of the English literary tradition, was initially claimed by its first editor, the Dane Thorkelin, as part of the Danish literary tradition (a Danish translation, by Grundtvig, appearing as Bjowulfs drape in 1820); an edition of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle appeared in 1823, and Anglo-Saxon interest, linguistic and literary, took hold. The most notable among the British Anglo-Saxonists was J.M. Kemble, an adept of Grimm, who applied a Grimm-like rigour to the business of editing and who was impatient with the sociability of diplomatic reprints. His anti-Danish Beowulf edition appeared in 1833, and by that time the Anglo-Saxon, pre-Norman turn had been firmly established with Conybeare’s Illustrations of Anglo-Saxon poetry (posthumous, 1826) and J.S. Cardale’s edition of King Alfred’s Anglo-Saxon version of Boethius De consolatione philosophiae (1829). When in 1830 Grundtvig published a prospectus for a Bibliotheca Anglo-Saxonica, proposing “the publication of the most valuable Anglo-Saxon manuscripts”, British scholars were already poised to do just that: Benjamin Thorpe proposed in the Society of Antiquaries to emulate the French, German, Danish and Swedish examples and to tackle “the publication of Anglo-Saxon and early English writers”, kicking off with his Caedmon (1832). In an otherwise favourable review, Kemble attacked the earlier tradition of uncritically reproducing the original, and a sharp controversy over editorial aims and methods ensued. The question whether the old English “black letter” font should be used for such editions was the symbolic line in the sand for the opposing factions in this “Anglo-Saxon controversy”. It pitted a younger, Grimm-inspired generation (Thorpe and Kemble) against the older Anglo-Saxonists such as the lexicographer Bosworth and Sir Frederick Madden (Assistant Keeper of MSS in the British Museum and editor of the tale of Havelok the Dane). In the process, many editions of Anglo-Saxon texts appeared: among others, an edition of Bede (1839) and the Anglo-Saxon law texts from Æthelbirht to Cnut (1840). Kemble himself reverted to the book club model, however, by founding an Ælfric Society in 1842.

In the course of the mid-century, all the major medieval texts were given their modern printed editions. Professionalism was still largely concentrated at the jurisprudential and historical side of the spectrum: while the government-sponsored Rolls Series (Rerum britannicarum medii aevi scriptores) was started in 1858, literary editions were still indebted to the likes of the gentleman-scholar Thomas Wright (who frequently worked in collaboration with the Frenchman Francisque Michel, the discoverer of the Chanson de Roland in the Bodleian Library). Beowulf remained a bone of contention: once another edition by Kemble (1837) had well and truly exploded Danish claims to ownership, the Germanist Heinrich Leo raised German claims in his Beowulf, das älteste deutsche, in angelsächsischer Mundart erhaltene Heldengedicht, nach seinem Inhalte, und nach seinen historischen und mythologischen Beziehungen betrachtet: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte alter deutscher Geisteszustände (1839). Thomas Arnold jr (Matthew Arnold’s brother) in his 1876 translation of Beowulf to some extent acceded to the point of view so insidiously formulated in Leo’s title: he preferred to call the language of the poem Anglo-Saxon, as opposed to the meanwhile more current Old English, so as not to raise a false impression of similarity between it and modern English.

Beowulf thus remained exotic and never became national. In contrast to other countries, the interest of Anglo-Saxon editions remained largely historicist, unlike to the eager embrace of the Arthurian material, which generated a considerable fresh literary productivity starting with Tennyson’s Idylls of the King. Literary spin-offs of Beowulf only began to appear late in the 20th century, and the Romantic-Nationalist English self-image remained rooted in the chivalric, later Middle Ages rather than in the tribal, earlier period.