Thomas Chatterton, a teenage poet, sometimes used the pseudonym Thomas Rowley. This fictional character was a 15th Century monk he had invented, whose poetry and prose Chatterton claimed to have discovered in a chest in St Mary Redcliffe Church.

Chatterton took the name from a monument brass at St John's Church, Bristol. The 'real' Thomas Rowley had died in 1478. He had six sons and six daughters. It is believed that his alabaster tomb is in the crypt at St Johns. It is uninscribed but has twelve figures, believed to be Rowley's children, on the side of the tomb.