Chatterton sends the Rowley forgeries to Horace Walpole

1769

Thomas Chatterton wrote pseudo-medieval poetry which he attributed to 'Thomas Rowley', an invented 15th-century Bristol monk. In 1769 he sent specimens to Horace Walpole, who initially praised them before Thomas Gray and William Mason identified them as forgeries. Chatterton died on 24 August 1770 at seventeen. A 1777 edition still presented the poems as genuine medieval work; the following year's edition conceded they were probably Chatterton's own.