When only eleven years old, he
began the fabrication of documents in prose and verse, which he ascribed
to a fictitious Thomas Rowley, a secular priest at Bristol in the 15th
century. Chatterton pretended to have found these among the contents of
an old chest in the muniment room of St. Mary Redcliff's. The Rowley
poems included two tragedies, _Aella_ and _Goddwyn_, two cantos of a
long poem on the _Battle of Hastings_, and a number of ballads and minor
pieces. Chatterton had no precise knowledge of early English, or even of
Chaucer. His method of working was as follows. He made himself a
manuscript glossary of the words marked as archaic in Bailey's and
Kersey's English dictionaries, composed his poems first in modern
language, and then turned them into ancient spelling, and substituted
here and there the old words in his glossary for their modern
equivalents. Naturally he made many mistakes, and though Horace Walpole,
to whom he sent some of his pieces, was unable to detect the forgery,
his friends, Gray and Mason, to whom he submitted them, at once
pronounced them spurious. Nevertheless there was a controversy over
Rowley hardly less obstinate than that over Ossian, a controversy made
possible only by the then almost universal ignorance of the forms,
scansion, and vocabulary of early English poetry.
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