“‘The King to all to whom these presents shall come,--Greeting. Know ye, that of our special grace, and for the good service of our beloved Walter Fesecock, one of our Bargemen, we grant to the same Walter, for as much as in us lieth, the Officer of Gate-keeper of the Bridge of our City of London; he being near to us, and paying to us a price not exceeding thirteen shillings and four pence by the year: that is to say, he is to have the said office, with the profits belonging thereto, for the term of his life; in the manner that John Chese, deceased, had the office aforesaid, by the grant of our most dear Lord and grandfather deceased. In testimony of which thing, Witness the King, at Westminster, on the eighth day of April. By Writ of Privy Seal.’ “I am next, Mr. Geoffrey Barbican, to speak of a famous action on London Bridge, which most authors who have written the history of that edifice, place five or six, and some even eight, years later, than it really happened; which I cannot imagine to have arisen from any other cause, than that of their carelessly following each other, or else copying Stow, in his ‘_Survey_,’ page 61, without turning to the original ancient Author, whom he cites in the margin of his ‘_Annals_,’ pages 312-313, as his authority for the fact. This memorable exhibition was a solemn Justing between an English and a Scottish Knight, as a display of the valour of their different countries; which was held on St. George’s day, the 23d of April, 1390; and not, as Stow has most unaccountably stated, in the works which I have quoted, either in 1395 or 1396. The authorities with which I shall support my argument, are ancient, and some of them even contemporary; but we will first relate the plain story from the elegant Latin of Hector Boethius, a Scottish Historian, who was born at Dundee in 1470: the best edition of whose ‘_Scotorum Historiæ_’ is that printed at Paris in folio, 1575; where, on page 335 b, the passage commencing ‘_Durante inter Anglos Scotosque pace publica_,’ is, in English, to the following effect.