The revival of interest in medieval life and literature during the 18th century led to a fanatical search for antiquarian literary treasures - forgers such as James Macpherson, William Henry Ireland and Thomas Chatterton provided them to their willing and eager patrons. Chatterton wrote on scraps of old parchment and posed it as the work of Thomas Rowley and others.
The publication of Thomas Tyrwhitt's first collection of Rowley poems in 1777 gave rise to a heated literary controversy regarding their authenticity. This is a collection of the major contemporary contributions to this controversy - all of them extremely rare.