Shakespeare’s Henry IV and ‘the old song of Percy and Douglas’

Abstract

In the centre of Newcastle upon Tyne, between the eighteenth-century thoroughfares called Percy Street and Northumberland Street, is a shopping centre, now twenty years old. It consists of shopping malls which disregard both the level of the ground and former street patterns. In its middle is a square called Chevy Chase, leading from which are malls called Hotspur Way, Douglas Way, and Earls Way. These names allude to Border confrontations celebrated in ballads between Percy and Douglas, Percy from the great Northumberland family of that name and Douglas from an equally famous Scottish family. In so naming the malls of a modern commercial development Newcastle is reasserting its ancient claim to be the major city of the eastern English Border and to the ballad tradition associated with it.