Mormal, in this passage, means a cancerous sore, and blankmanger is a certain dish or confection—the modern blancmange. But a confused recollection of the whole was in Chatterton’s mind, when among the fragments of paper and parchment which he covered with imitations of ancient script, and which are now in the British Museum,—“The Yellow Roll,” “The Purple Roll,” etc.,—he inserted the following title in “The Rolls of St. Bartholomew’s Priory,” purporting to be old medical prescriptions; “The cure of mormalles and the waterie leprosie; the rolle of the blacke mainger”; turning Chaucer’s innocent blankmanger into some kind of imaginary black mange.
Skeat believes that Chatterton had read very little of Chaucer, probably only a small portion of the Prologue to the “Canterbury Tales.” “If he had really taken pains,” he thinks, “To read and study Chaucer of Lydgate or any old author earlier than the age of Spenser, the Rowley poems would have been very different. They would then have borne some resemblance to the language of the fifteenth century, whereas they are rather less like the language of that period than of any other. The spelling of the words is frequently too late, or too bizarre, whilst many of the words themselves are too archaic or too uncommon."[14] But this internal evidence, which was so satisfactory to Scott, was so little convincing to Chatterton’s contemporaries that Tyrwhitt felt called upon to publish in 1782 a “Vindication” of his appendix; and Thomas Warton put forth in the same year an “Enquiry,” in which he reached practically the same conclusions with Tyrwhitt. And yet Warton had devoted the twenty-sixth section of the second volume of his “History of English Poetry” (1778,) to a review of the Rowley poems, on the ground that “as they are held to be real by many respectable critics, it was his duty to give them a place in this series”: a curious testimony to the uncertainty of the public mind on the question, and a half admission that the poems might possibly turn out to be genuine.[15]
Tyrwhitt proved clearly enough that Chatterton wrote the Rowley poems, but it was reserved for Mr. Skeat to show just how he wrote them. The modus operandi was about as follows: Chatterton first made, for his private use, a manuscript glossary, by copying out the words in the glossary to Speght’s edition of Chaucer, and those marked as old in Bailey’s and Kersey’s English Dictionaries. Next he wrote his poem in modern English, and finally rewrote it, substituting the archaic words for their modern equivalents, and altering the spelling throughout into an exaggerated imitation of the antique spelling in Speght’s Chaucer. The mistakes that the he made are instructive, as showing how closely he followed his authorities, and how little independent knowledge he had of genuine old English. Thus, to give a few typical examples of the many in Mr. Skeat’s notes: in Kersey’s dictionary occurs the word gare, defined as “cause.” This is the verb gar, familiar to all readers of Burns,[16] and meaning to cause, to make; but Chatterton, taking it for the noun, cause, employs it with grotesque incorrectness in such connections as these: