George Bannatyne

Antiquary and collector of poems, born in Edinburgh, EC Scotland, UK. He became a wealthy merchant in Edinburgh, but his claim to fame was his 800-page manuscript of early Scottish poetry of the 15th and 16th-c (the Bannatyne Manuscript). The Bannatyne Club was founded in his honour in 1823 to encourage the study of Scottish history and literature.

George Bannatyne (1545-1608), collector of Scottish poems, was a native of Newtyle, Angus. The manuscript descended to his only daughter Janet, and later to her husband's family, the Foulises of Woodhall and Ravelston, near Edinburgh.

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 Robert Henryson, William Dunbar, David 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 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.