whatever good office or honour you shall do to him, you ought to esteem the same as done to us. But, should any injury be offered to the said Isenbert, or to the persons employed by him, which we do not believe there will, see that the same be redressed so soon as it comes to your knowledge. Witness myself, at Molinel,’--in the Province of Bourbon, in France,--‘the eighteenth day of April.’ ‘A Letter,’ adds Hearne, on page *471, ‘of the same form, was written to all the King’s faithful subjects constituting the realm of England;’ and the instrument itself is also to be found at length in the original Latin, in Sir Symonds D’Ewes’ extracts from the Records, Harleian MSS. in the British Museum, No. 86, page 1 a. “It is, however, by no means clear, notwithstanding this Royal Writ, that Isenbert was employed by the Citizens to complete the building of London Bridge; indeed, the Rev. John Entick, in his edition of Maitland’s ‘_History of London_,’ volume i. page 45, imagines quite otherwise, because he found that King John, in the seventh year of his reign, 1205, three years, as _he_ says, before the Bridge was finished, granted the custody of it to one Friar West, taking it from the Lord Mayor, and obliging the City to apply certain void places within its walls to be built on for its support. Strype also quotes the former instrument as being yet preserved in the ‘_Rotuli Clausi_,’ or Close Rolls, in the Tower, 7 John, c. 19, for you know it was a private instrument, and therefore sealed up, and directed to the persons whom it specially concerned. “But now let us see how far this supposition is founded in truth. In the first place, the reference to the Close Rolls is erroneous, for the writ is to be found on the 15th Membrane, there being no such article as c. 19; and, in the next place, there was no such person as Friar West, for the title of Friar was not in use until the fourteenth century, and the person referred to was called _Wasce_, though the name of West has been copied and re-copied, and the error thus perpetuated _ad infinitum_. The actual words of the writ are, in English, as follow.