“It was in this year, you may remember, that the forces of Henry VII., which were proceeding to Scotland, were suddenly recalled to subdue a commotion raised in Cornwall, in consequence of a subsidy voted by Parliament, in 1496. The rebels were headed by one Thomas Flamoke, a Lawyer and a gentleman; and a Blacksmith, or Farrier, of Bodmin, called Michael Joseph; both of them, says Stow, in his ‘_Annals_,’ page 479, ‘men of stout stomackes.’ Under these leaders, then, they penetrated even to Blackheath, but on their march were so valiantly opposed in Kent, that numbers of the insurgents fled from their company. On Blackheath the Royal troops were already encamped under several valiant commanders, by whom the rebels’ retreat was immediately cut off; and in a short engagement which ensued on June the 22nd, Flamoke and Joseph were both taken prisoners. On the 28th following they were executed at Tyburn; and their quarters were to have been erected in various places in Cornwall, but Hall states, in his ‘_Chronicle_,’ folio 43 b, that, as it was supposed it would incite the Cornishmen to new insurrections, they were set up in London: and their heads greeted Henry VII. on London Bridge, as he triumphantly returned over it from Blackheath. “During this same year, London Bridge appears to have been repaired to some extent, although it is probable that the only notice of it may exist in the manuscript records of the Bridge Comptroller. In the ‘_Gentleman’s Magazine_,’ however, for October 1758, volume xxviii., page 469, is a Letter from Joseph Ames, Secretary to the Society of Antiquaries, and Author of the ‘_Typographical Antiquities_,’ containing three inscriptions engraven on stone, found in pulling down a part of the edifice. These, it is supposed, were laid in the building at the different times of its repair, specified by their several dates; but though so very ancient, yet the descriptive account states that, ‘they are all as fresh as if new cut;’ they being then in the possession of Mr. Hudson, the Bridge-Master. The oldest inscription is sculptured upon a stone 9-3/4 inches in height, by 16-3/4 inches long; [Illustration] the letters being raised and blacked, and the words, within a border, being ‘_Anno Domini_,’ with the date of 1497, in small black-letters, and ancient Arabic figures. I shall introduce the other stones to your notice in the years to which they refer; and only now remark, that they are engraven in Plate 1, Numbers I. II. III. page 470, of the work to which I have already referred you, whence they were copied into Gough’s ‘_Sepulchral Monuments_,’ volume ii., part i., page cclxvi., plate xxv.