With Chatterton, too, this absorption in the past derived its intensity from his love of place.  Bristol was his world; in “The Battle of Hastings,” he did not forget to introduce a Bristowan contingent, led by a certain fabulous Alfwold, and performing prodigies of valor upon the Normans.  The image of mediaeval life which he succeeded in creating was, of course, a poor, faint simulacrum, compared with Scott’s.  He lacked knowledge, leisure, friends, long life—­everything that was needed to give his work solidity.  All that he had was a creative, though undisciplined imagination, together with an astonishing industry, persistence, and secretiveness.  Yet with all his disadvantages, his work, with all its imperfections, is far more striking than the imitative verse of the Wartons, or the thin, diffused medievalism of Walpole and Clara Reeve.  It is the product of a more original mind and a more intense conception.

In the muniment room over the north porch of St. Mary Redcliffe’s were several old chests filled with parchments:  architectural memoranda, church-wardens’ accounts, inventories of vestments, and similar parish documents.  One of these chests, known as Master Canynge’s coffer, had been broken open some years before, and whatever was of value among its contents removed to a place of safety.  The remainder of the parchments had been left scattered about, and Chatterton’s father had carried a number of them home and used them to cover copy-books.  The boy’s eye was attracted by these yellow sheep-skins, with their antique script; he appropriated them and kept them locked up in his room.

How early he conceived the idea of making this treasure-trove responsible for the Rowley myth, which was beginning to take shape in his mind, is uncertain.  According to the testimony of a schoolfellow, by name Thistlethwaite, Chatterton told him in the summer of 1764 that he had a number of old manuscripts, found in a chest in Redcliffe Church, and that he had lent one of them to Thomas Philips, an usher in Colston’s Hospital.  Thistlethwaite says that Philips showed him this manuscript, a piece of vellum pared close around the edge, on which was traced in pale and yellow writing, as if faded with age, a poem which he thinks identical with “Elinoure and Juga,” afterward published by Chatterton in the Town and Country Magazine for May, 1769.  One is inclined to distrust this evidence.  “The Castle of Otranto” was first published in December, 1764, and the “Reliques,” only in the year following.  The latter was certainly known to Chatterton; many of the Rowley poems, “The Bristowe Tragedie,” e.g., and the ministrel songs in “Aella,” show ballad influence[6]; while it seems not unlikely that Chatterton was moved to take a hint from the disguise—­slight as it was—­assumed by Walpole in the preface to his romance.[7] But perhaps this was not needed to suggest to Chatterton that the surest way to win attention to his poems would be to ascribe them to