which Hutton, who had never seen it, called " a scrubby alabaster monument," cost £10 1s. 0d. A Latin epitaph, intended to be inscribed on the tomb, stating that it was put up at King Henry's expense, was never actually placed there. It will be found in Nichols' History, with an English translation.
Two contradictory stories are told about the fate of this tomb. According to one tradition, it was broken open by the crowd, when the church was destroyed after the dissolution of the monastery, and the bones of the dead King, after being carried through the town with jeers and insults, were thrown over the Bow Bridge. A spot near the western end of the Bridge was pointed out as their resting-place, and a watering-trough for horses, which stood at the White Horse Inn in Gallowtreegate, was asserted to have been the coffin which once held Richard's remains. This old trough seems to have been an ancient stone coffin, and certainly not of a kind used in King Richard's time. It was long notorious. John Evelyn, in his Diary, records (9th August, 1654) that he visited the "old and ragged city of Leicester, famous for the tomb of the tyrant Richard III, which is now converted into a cistern, at which (I think) cattle drink." Hutton said that it had disappeared when he went to Leicester in 1758 in order to inspect it. But Crutwell wrote in 1806 : "there is a little part of it still preserved at the White Horse Inn, in which one may observe some appearance of the fitting for retaining the head and shoulders." The trough is said to have been broken up in the time of George I, and used for steps to a cellar.
The supposed connection of Bow Bridge with the Plantagenet King owing to the prophecy of the "wise woman," and the subsequent fate attributed to his marauded bones, caused that structure to become known in later times as "King Richard's Bridge"; and, when the bridge was rebuilt in the year 1863, a tablet was placed over it bearing the legend, "Near this spot lie the remains of Richard III, the last of the Plantagenets."
The other story relating to the King's tomb occurs in the Memoirs of the Wren family, and is contained in some notes
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