In December 1807, almost fifty years after the publication of Thomas Percy's foundational three-volume collection of ballads, sonnets, and songs, Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765), a rather less impressive-looking duodecimo volume appeared on the literary market announcing itself as Ancient Ballads; Selected from Percy's Collection; with Explanatory Notes, taken from Different Authors, for the Use and Entertainment of Young Persons. Containing only a slim seventeen of Percy's 180 pieces, Ancient Ballads is a fraction of the size of the Reliques' weighty three tomes. This single-volume redaction was the work of an anonymous “lady” who felt compelled to compile a “selected” version of the influential anthology after hearing her female benefactor repeatedly complain that she was “under the necessity of refusing [her] daughters the pleasure of reading Percy's Collection of Ancient Ballads, on account of the great number amongst them which were unfit to meet the eye of youth.” Indeed, modern readers might be inclined to agree with the lady's decorous patron. As Nick Groom has strikingly put it, “[t]he Reliques […] welters in gore: the bloodiness of death and dismemberment incarnadines the entire three volumes, and if occasionally watered by humour or levity, it is more often deepened by a colossal amorality.” For the lady editing Percy's ballads in 1807, so pervasive was the amorality and violence that even those poems which passed her strict selection process were subject to further bowdlerization in her edition.