The present volume contains a reproduction[2] in black and white of the original MS. of Chatterton's '_Accounte of W. Canynges Feast_'. This was written in red ink. The parchment is stained with brown, except one corner, and the first line written in a legal texting hand. The ageing of his manuscript of the _Vita Burtoni_, to take a further instance, was effected by smearing the middle of it with glue or varnish. This document was also written partly in an attorney's regular engrossing[3] hand. During the next four years Chatterton 'transcribed' a great quantity of ancient documents, including _Ælla, a Tragycal Enterlude_--far the finest of the longer Rowleian poems--the _Songe to Ælla_ and _The Bristowe Tragedy_ (the authorship 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.