The Rowley Poems | Page 2

Name over the World.'
At ten he was making progress in arithmetic, and it should be
mentioned that he 'occupied himself with mechanical pursuits so that if
anything was out of order in the house he was set to mend it.' At school
he read during play hours and made few friends, but those were 'solid
fellows,' his sister tells us; while at home he had appropriated to
himself a small attic where he would read, write and draw pictures--a
number of which are preserved in the British Museum--of knights 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