No More Learning

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 a 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 antiquary, of
whom there is the most delightfully absurd description in Boswell's
_Johnson_. The biographer relates that in the year 1776 Johnson and
he were on a visit to Bristol and were induced by Catcott to climb the
steep flight of stairs which led to the muniment room in order to
see the famous 'Rowley's Cofre'. Whereupon, when the ascent had been
accomplished, Catcott 'called out with a triumphant air of lively
simplicity "I'll make Dr. Johnson a convert" (to the view then still
largely obtaining that Rowley's poems were written in the fifteenth
century) and he pointed to the "Wondrous chest". ' '"_There_" said
he 'with a bouncing confident credulity "_There is the very chest
itself_"! ' After which 'ocular demonstration', Boswell remarks, 'there
was no more to be said. ' It was to such men as these that Chatterton
read his 'Rouleie's' poems.