GEORGE

See also:

• GEORGE BANNATYNE (1545—? 1608)

BANNATYNE (1545—? 1608)  , collector of Scottish poems, was a native of Newtyle, Forfarshire . He became an Edinburgh merchant and was admitted a burgess in 1587 . Some years earlier, in 1568, when the " pest " raged in the capital, he retired to his native county and amused himself by writing out copies of poems by 15th and early 16th century Scots poets . His work extended to eight hundred folio pages, divided into five parts . The MS. descended to his only daughter Janet, and later to her husband's family, the Foulises of Woodhall and Ravelston, near Edinburgh . From them it passed to the Advocates' library, where it is still preserved . This MS., known as the " Bannatyne Manuscript," constitutes with the " Asloan " and " Maitland Folio " MSS. the chief repository of Middle Scots poetry, especially for the texts of the greater poets Henryson, Dunbar, Lyndsay and Alexander Scott . Portions of it were reprinted (with modifications) by Allan Ramsay in his Ever Green (1724), and later, and more correctly, by Lord Hailes in his Ancient Scottish Poems (r 770) . The entire text was issued by the Hunterian Club (1873—1902) in a handsome and generally accurate form . The name of Bannatyne was honoured in 1823 by the foundation in Edinburgh of the Bannatyne Club, devoted to the publication of historical and literary material from Scottish sources . The thirty-third issue of the club (1829) was Memorials of George Bannatyne (1545—1608), with a memoir by Sir Walter Scott and an account of the MS. by David Laing . See also Gregory Smith, Specimens of Middle Scots (1902) .