The Rowley poems by Thomas Chatterton

and churches, and heraldic designs in red and yellow 

ochre, charcoal, and black-lead. In this attic too he 

had stored -- though at what date is uncertain -- a 

number of writings on parchment which had a rather 

singular history. In the muniment room of St. Mary 

Redcliffe, the church in which Chatterton's ancestors 

had served as sextons, there were six or seven great 

oak chests, of which one, greater than the others and 

secured by no fewer than six locks, was traditionally 

called 'Canynges Cofre' after William Canynge the 

younger, with whose name the erection and completion of 

St. Mary's were especially associated. These had 

contained deeds and papers dealing with parochial 

matters and the affairs of the Church, but some years 

before Chatterton's birth the Vestry had determined to 

examine these documents, some of which may have been as 

old as the building itself. The keys had in the course 

of time been lost, and the vestrymen accordingly broke 

open the chests and removed to another place what they 

thought of value, leaving Canynge's Coffer and its 

fellows gutted and open but by no means void of all 

their ancient contents. Such parchments as remained 

Chatterton's father carried away, whole armfuls at a 

time, using some to cover his scholars' books and 

giving others to his wife, who made them into thread- 

papers and dress patterns.

In the house to which Mrs. Chatterton had moved upon 

her husband's death there was still a sufficient number 

of these old manuscripts to make a considerable trove 

for the boy who, then nine or ten years old, had first 

learnt to read in black-letter and was in a few years 

to produce poetry which should pass for fifteenth 

century with many well-reputed antiquaries. It was no 

doubt on blank pieces of these parchments that he 

inscribed the matter of the few Rowley documents which 

he ever showed for originals. We have the account of a 

certain Thistlethwaite, one of the 'solid lads' with 

whom Chatterton had made friends at school, that his 

friend Thomas in the summer of 1764 told him 'he was in 

possession of some old MSS. which had been found 

deposited in a chest in Redcliffe Church, and that he 

had lent some or one of them to Thomas Phillips' -- an 

usher at Colston's, an earnest and thoughtful man fond 

of poetry, and a great friend of Chatterton's. 'Within 

a day or two after this,' (Thistlethwaite wrote to Dean 

Milles,) 'I saw Phillips . . . who produced a MS. on 

parchment or vellum which I am confident was " Elenoure 

and Juga" [1] a kind of pastoral eclogue afterwards 

published in the Town and Country Magazine for May 

1769. The parchment or vellum appeared to have been 

closely pared round the margin for what purpose or by 

what accident I know not... The writing was yellow and 

pale manifestly as I conceive occasioned by age.'

This was the beginning of the Rowley fiction -- which 

might be metaphorically described as a motley edifice, 

half castle and half cathedral, to which Chatterton all 

his life was continually adding columns and buttresses, 

domes and spires, pediments and minarets, in the shape 

of more poems by Thomas Rowley, (a secular priest of 

St. John's, Bristol); or by his patron the munificent 

William Canynge (many times Mayor of the same city), or 

by Sir Thibbot Gorges, a knight of ancient family with 

literary tastes; or by good Bishop Carpenter (of 

Worcester) or John à Iscam (a Canon of St. Augustine's 

Abbey, also in Bristol); together with plays or 

portions of plays which they wrote -- a Saxon epic 

translated -- accounts of Architecture -- songs and 

eclogues -- and friendly letters in rhyme or prose. In 

short, this clever imaginative lad had evolved before 

he was sixteen such a mass of literary and quasi- 

historical matter of one kind or another that his 

fictitious circle of men of taste and learning (living 

in the dark and unenlightened age of Lydgate and the 

other tedious post-Chaucerians) may with study become 

extraordinarily familiar and near to us, and was 

certainly to Chatterton himself quite as real and vivid 

as the dull actualities of Colston's Hospital and the 

Bristol of his proper century.

Chatterton's own circle of acquaintance was far less 

brilliant. His principal patrons were Henry Burgum and 

George Catcott, a pair of pewterers, the former vulgar 

and uneducated but very ambitious to be thought a man 

of good birth and education, the latter a credulous, 

selfish and none too scrupulous fellow, a would-be