“Those rules of old discovered, not devised, / Are Nature still, but Nature methodized… / Hear how learn’d Greece her useful rules indites” (Alexander Pope Essay on Criticism, 88-91). 

“The Worlde bie dyffraunce is yn order founde: / Wythoute unlykenesse nothynge could be made” (Thomas Chatterton, The Tournament, an Interlude, 17-18)

Both Chatterton’s controversial career as a forger and his influence on the later generations of Romantics have sometimes obscured Chatterton’s efforts and contributions as an artist (Groom, 5). For most of the first few decades after his life, discussions of his works centered around whether the works he produced under the name of Thomas Rowley and others were genuine medieval works, critics mainly analyzing the poems to find anachronisms that would prove that they were written in the 18th century. The other aspect of Chatterton’s legacy that has been most interesting to critics since the 19th century has been the massive impact that he had on the next generation of Romantics (Groom, 4-5). 

Neither of these would have been relevant for those generations coming after Chatterton if not for the distinct power of Chatterton’s work itself. This section will take a closer look at Chatterton’s medieval style poems on their own terms, analysing them as works of art intended to create an imaginative medieval world for the reader. These works are part of what scholar Nick Groom calls Chatterton’s “vast tapestry of 15th century Redcliffe - literature and dramatic pageants, antiquarian collecting and folklore, commerce and trade” (Groom, “Four Ways of Literary Terra-Forming,” 136), that helps to give Chatterton’s works such a veneer of authenticity, but it also stands as an important artistic achievement in its own right.

This section will look closely at two of Chatterton’s poems that were collected by Thomas Tyrwhitt in 1777 in Poems, Supposed to Have Been Written at Bristol, by Thomas Rowley, and Others, in the Fifteenth Century, the first collection of Chatterton's works to hit the London book market in the 18th century that set off so much of the controversy. In addition to these, we will look at one of Chatterton’s main sources for his medieval dialect that he invented for his works, Nathaniel Bailey’s An Universal Etymological English Dictionary, first published in 1737 (Groom, “Four Ways of Literary Terraforming,” 139). This is just one of the many sources that Chatterton used to source words that to his ear sounded distinctly medieval, adapting them to his own usage. 

The two poems that we will look at are important ones in Chatterton’s oeuvre because in some way they bookend his career. The first poem “Elinour and Juga” was one of only a few poems attributed to Rowley to be published during Chatterton’s lifetime in London. This poem, about two “pynynge maydens” who discover their loves have been killed in the Wars of the Roses is particularly interesting for its historical perspective. The second, “An Excelente Balade of Charitie” is often speculated to be one of Chatterton’s last poems and it is perhaps his most widely anthologized in the modern day.

In this section I have also expanded on Chatterton's original footnotes to include some information about where Chatterton sourced these words from, using Donald S. Taylor's glossary to the Rowleyan writings found in The Complete Works of Thomas Chatterton. Viewing the poems in this way will allow the reader to see the wide range of sources that Chatterton took from, both source texts and glossaries and etymological sources. This may give an insight into how Chatterton constructed his language that other writers found to be so purely and intrinsically English that they sought to copy its rhythms and dimensions in their own work (Cook, 30). 

This poem takes the form of a dialogue between two women (“twa pynynge maydens”) wondering about the fate of their loved ones in a fifteenth century battle during the Wars of the Roses. There is some beautiful medieval imagery that is enhanced by the fake medieval language. 

Some of the words that Chatterton uses and marks in his footnotes are archaic spellings of modern words, but in a lot of cases Chatterton chooses words with distinctly Old English roots. Two of my favorite examples here are “bementynge,” which Chatterton footnotes as “lamenting,” and “morthynge,” which Chatterton footnotes as “murdering.” Both of these words are inventions of Chatterton, taken from Old English root words found in Nathaniel Bailey’s An Universal Etymological English Dictionary. These words add a distinctly medieval flavour to Chatterton’s works, but they also link Chatterton to a more experimental view of how to use and adapt the English language that scholar Daniel Cook calls “impressionistic” (Cook, 42).

This is also one of only three Rowley poems published by Chatterton during his lifetime, and so the reader can see both Chatterton’s original publication in Farley’s Bristol Magazine in 1768, and Thomas Tyrwhitt’s 1777 edition. In both of these Chatterton includes his explanatory footnotes to help modern readers.

This is probably Chatterton’s most widely studied and anthologized works in the modern day. It is a retelling of the Biblical story of the Good Samaritan set in the 15th century. The poem was noted for its particular influence on the Romantic poet William Wordsworth. For this poem, Chatterton includes a staggering fifty-three footnotes, most of them defining unfamiliar words, but two of which make social commentary on figures of the 15th century that the poem references. This is a big part of what scholar Nick Groom calls the “vast tapestry of 15th century Redcliffe” (Groom, Literary terraforming, 136) that Chatterton creates with his poems. Through his footnotes Chatterton builds an entire world around his poem for it to exist in, helping to sell the fantasy of the medieval writer.  

The majority of the non-standard English words that Chatterton employs here are adapted from words found in Nathaniel Bailey’s An Etymological English Dictionary, and as in Elinour and Juga, most words are taken from Old English sources. A particularly interesting example is Chatterton’s use of the word “glommed,” where Chatterton goes into a lengthy explanation to justify his use of the term in a medieval context. 

Works Cited

Cook, Daniel. “Wordsworth’s Chatterton.” Essays in Criticism, vol. 66, no. 1, pp. 29-53. 

Groom, Nick. “Introduction.” Thomas Chatterton and Romantic Culture, edited by Nick Groom, Macmillan Press, 1999, pp. 3-14. 

Groom, Nick. “Thomas Chatterton: Four Ways of Literary Terra-Forming.” Journal of the British Academy, vol. 10, pp. 135–155.

Taylor, Donald S. The Complete Works of Thomas Chatterton. Clarendon Press, 1971.