Collector of Scottish poems
Born 1545 Died 1608

George Bannatyne 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 manuscript 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 Advocate's library, where it is still preserved.

This manuscript, known as the Bannatyne Manuscript, constitutes with the Asloan and Maitland Folio manuscripts 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 (1770). 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 manuscript by David Laing.

See also Gregory Smith, Specimens of Middle Scots (1902).

Being the entry for BANNATYNE, GEORGE in the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica, the text of which lies within the public domain.