of which last he appears in an unguarded moment to have acknowledged
to his mother). He told her also that he had himself written one of
the two poems _Onn oure Ladies Chyrche_--which one, Mrs. Chatterton
could not remember[4], but if it was the first of the two printed in
this edition (p. 275) it was a strange coincidence indeed that led
him to repudiate the antiquity of the only two Rowley poems which
are really at all like 'antiques'--Professor Skeat's convenient
expression. The two Battles of Hastings were written during this
period, and it appears that Barrett the surgeon, on being shown the
first poem, was for once very insistent in asking for the original,
whereupon Chatterton in a momentary panic confessed he had written the
verses for a friend; but he had at home, he said, the copy of what was
really the translation of Turgot's Epic--Turgot was a Saxon monk of
the tenth century--by Rowley the secular priest of the fifteenth. This
was the second _Battle of Hastings_ as printed in this book. Again
this strange explanation, so laboured and so patently disingenuous,
was accepted without comment though probably not believed. And if
it appears matter for surprise that there should ever have been any
controversy about the authorship of the Rowley writings, in view of
the lad's admission that he had written three such signal pieces as
the _Bristowe Tragedy_, the first _Battle of Hastings_, and _Onn oure
Ladies Chyrche_, it must be considered that the production of
the greater part of the poems by a poorly educated boy not turned
seventeen would naturally appear a circumstance more surprising than
that such a boy should tell a lie and claim some of them as his own.

With his acknowledged work, as with Rowley, Chatterton by dint of
continued application was making good progress. In 1769 he had become
a frequent contributor to the _Town and Country Magazine_, to which
he sent articles on heraldry, imitations of Ossian (whom he very much