london stone history and myth.docx: 26/11/2020 12:35 52,203 words

LONDON STONE: HISTORY AND MYTH

John Clark

This unfinished paper brings together material published previously as 'Jack Cade at London Stone' (Clark

2007) and 'London Stone: Stone of Brutus or fetish stone – making the myth' (Clark 2010), expanded and

updated, together with much unpublished text, particularly in the 'Brief history' and 'Documentary evidence'

sections. The section ‘Pasquill’s Protestation upon London Stone’ has also appeared in print (Clark 2015), as

well as a paper ‘“Brut sett Londen Ston”: London and London Stone in a 14th-century English Metrical

Chronicle’ (Clark 2018). It is hoped that the final section 'The incredible shrinking monolith', yet to be

written, will reassess the archaeological evidence, particularly in the light of the 'new' information described

in 'London Stone and the Great Fire' and the results of examination of the Stone at the Museum of London

before it went on display there in 2016.

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CONTENTS

1: Introduction: the Stone of Brutus 2

2: A brief history 4 2.1: ‘A great stone... pitched upright’ 4 2.2: London Stone and the Great Fire 6 2.3: The Stone in the wall 9

3: Documentary Sources 16 3.1: John Stow and the earliest records 16 3.2: Henry Fitz Ailwin 19 3.3: ‘Brut sett Londen ston’ 20 3.4: Thomas Walsingham and ‘London Lickpenny’ 26 3.5: Jack Cade at London Stone 27 3.6: The rebellion of 1450 29 3.7: Jake Cade in the chronicles 31 3.8: Jack Cade: what did he mean? 33 3.9: Lud’s Stone 35 3.10: ‘So sure a stone’ 37 3.11: A marriage is announced... 38 3.12: Pasquill’s Protestation upon London Stone 39 3.13: Bills, libels and ‘siquises’ 42 3.14: ‘Sights most strange’ 44

4: Reading London Stone 47 4.1: Early interpretations 47 4.2: The London Palladium 50 4.3: William Blake: to hear Jerusalem’s voice 52 4.4: The Welsh connection 56 4.5: A turbulent priest 58 4.6: The Stone of Brutus revealed 60 4.7: Prydein son of Aedd the Great 62 4.8: Prydein and Brutus 65 4.9: Richard Williams Morgan and the Short English Metrical Chronicle 67 4.10: The Stone of Brutus: first reactions 68

5: Anthropology, archaeology, mythology 70 5.1: The fetish stone 70 5.2: ‘Mighty unhewn monoliths’? 72 5.3: Archaeology: the official line? 76 5.4: A Stone for the New Age 77 5.5: The psychogeographers’ Stone 78 5.6: Myth upon myth 81 5.7: Urban fantasy 83 5.8: The incredible shrinking monolith 86

6: Conclusion? 87

Bibliography 89

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1: Introduction: the Stone of Brutus

So long as the Stone of Brutus is safe,

So long will London flourish.

This reputedly traditional saying (quoted for example in Peter Ackroyd’s London: The

Biography (2000, 18)) not only identifies the fragment of limestone that normally

stands on the north side of Cannon Street in the City of London, the last remaining piece

of the mysterious London Stone, as London’s talisman or palladium, the object that both

symbolises and embodies the well-being of the city, but links it explicitly with the belief

that London was founded, as New Troy or Troia Nova, by Brutus, descendant of the

Trojan exile Aeneas and legendary first king of Britain.

Yet although the story of Brutus and his foundation of New Troy originated in the

Middle Ages, in the inventions of Geoffrey of Monmouth, the saying concerning the

‘Stone of Brutus’ is far from ‘a medieval proverb’ (as described by Westwood and

Simpson (2005, 478) and by others). The figure of Britto or Brutus, a descendant of

Aeneas who settled and named Britain, is first found in the Historia Brittonum, compiled

in Wales at the beginning of the ninth century (Nennius 1980, 19–20 and 60–1); but

there was nothing in that source to suggest that he had established the city of London.

New Troy was one of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s wholesale elaborations on the Historia

Brittonum story of Brutus (Geoffrey of Monmouth 2007, 28–31; Kendrick 1950, 3–7;

Clark 1981). Yet Geoffrey in his turn said nothing of any stone associated with Brutus.

As this paper will show, although it is indeed now ‘traditional’, having been passed

on unquestioningly from author to London author, and more recently circulated widely

by the media and the worldwide web, there is every reason to conclude that the saying

has only existed since the 1860s. The development of a belief in the ‘Stone of Brutus’

and its role in ensuring the safety of London is just part of the myth-making that has

focussed on London Stone over the years, and this paper will consider how its

undoubted mystery has encouraged further mystification by apparently mischievous as

well as well-meaning interpreters.

First referred to by name (as we shall see) at the beginning of the twelfth century,

London Stone consists today of nothing more than a small sub-rectangular block of

oolitic limestone, about 530 mm wide, 430 mm high and 300 mm front to back.1 This

remnant is now set behind glass within a decorative and impressive stone casing built

into the outside wall of a new office building (number 111) on the north side of Cannon

Street (formerly Candlewick Street2) in the City of London, nearly opposite Cannon

Street station. The title ‘LONDON STONE’ is carved into the stonework above, and there

are information panels, one in Braille, on either side.

Yet, in spite of its prominent position in Cannon Street – as journalists often pointed

out – few of the thousands of commuters who have passed it every working day have

1 Measurements taken at the Museum of London in May 2016.

2 See Ekwall (1954, 79) for the naming of this street, originally ‘Candle-wright Street’ in the twelfth century, ‘Candlewick Street’ in the later Middle Ages, and ‘Cannon Street’ since the late seventeenth century.

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had any knowledge of (or interest in) London Stone, or the mythology that has grown

up around it and its supposed significance.

The origin and purpose of London Stone may be, like those other questions referred

to by Sir Thomas Browne in his Hydriotaphia: Urn-Burial of 1658, ‘though puzzling

questions, [...] not beyond all conjecture’ (Browne 1972, 127). And since at latest the

sixteenth century there has been no shortage of those willing to conjecture – and many

more who have accepted such conjectures as historical fact without questioning them.

One should perhaps heed the warning inherent in another passage – less often

quoted – that appears in the same paragraph in Browne’s essay, where, in contrast to

the questions not beyond conjecture, he laments the impossibility of recovering the

names of those represented only by the ashes found in the ‘urn-burials’ of his title: ‘But

who were the proprietaries of these bones, or what bodies these ashes made up, were a

question above antiquarism, and not to be resolved by man’ (ibid). In the absence of

new archaeological evidence, the origin and first function of London Stone may well

also be questions ‘above antiquarism’. Instead we shall look at the known history of the

Stone, and the ways in which it has been interpreted in the past, and is interpreted in

the early years of the twenty-first century.3

3 Parts of this paper have been published, in revised and edited form, as Clark 2007b, Clark 2010, Clark

2015 and Clark 2018. The present paper enlarges on some aspects of the subject, ventures into new territory, and includes corrections and updated references.

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2: A brief history

2.1: ‘A great stone... pitched upright’

The present small block of stone is unimpressive – although, thanks to its weathered

state, it has an air of extreme antiquity. Yet London Stone was once rather more

imposing. In 1598 John Stow described it as ‘a great stone’ (Stow 1908, 1: 224); it was

‘pitched upright’, he tells us, ‘fixed in the ground very deep, fastened with bars of iron,

and otherwise so strongly set, that if carts do run against it through negligence, the

wheels be broken, and the stone itself unshaken’. It stood on the south side of the then

Candlewick Street, ‘near unto the channel’ according to Stow. It lay within the parish of

St Swithin (the church on the opposite side of the street, called ‘St Swithin at London

Stone’ in 1557 (Harben 1918, 565)) and in Walbrook ward.

London Stone, clearly then regarded as an important landmark, was drawn and

named on the so-called ‘copperplate’ map of the late 1550s, the earliest map of the city

of London to be printed, of which just three engraved printing plates survive. On one of

the two plates in the collection of the Museum of London, London Stone is shown in

profile as an apparently rectangular block, its right hand end just visible (Clark 2007b,

fig 2).4 It is one of very few structures to be named on the map, along with buildings

such as Guildhall, Leadenhall, some of the parish churches, and the city gates, perhaps

indicating its perceived importance, if only as a landmark. It is not drawn to scale, and it

is impossible to estimate its actual size. It is positioned in the roadway opposite the

main door of St Swithin’s church. This door is shown as being set in the church tower, at

the south-west corner of the church. However, John Schofield has pointed out that this

depiction of the church seems to conflict with archaeological evidence that suggests

that the medieval tower stood in the north west of the building (Schofield 1994, 131;

Grimes 1968, 199–203), and we certainly cannot trust this map as necessarily an

accurate representation of the location of the Stone – or indeed of its appearance.

A derivative from the copperplate map, the so-called ‘Agas’ or ‘woodcut’ map,

printed from eight woodblocks at a date between 1561 and 1571, also names London

Stone and marks its location by a small square in the same position as the block on the

copperplate map (Prockter & Taylor 1979, 24).5 The Stone is neither named nor

marked on the smaller scale map by Braun and Hogenberg, derived from the same

original (Goss 1991, 68–9).

The next map to mark its site clearly is John Leake’s manuscript map showing the

extent of the Great Fire, completed in March 1667 (British Library Add Ms 5415.1.E;

reproduced in Reddaway 1940, foldout opp 54). This shows London Stone, marked by a

dot, in the roadway of Cannon Street, close to its south side, opposite the western end of

4 Although these details are visible on the original engraved plate, they do not show up well in

reproductions of the map such as that in Saunders & Schofield (2001, pl II). See http://www.museumoflondonprints.com/image/129162/frans-franken-city-map-image-made-from-the-copperplate-map-1559 [accessed 2 June 2015] for this plate of the map.

5 Zoomable image at https://mapoflondon.uvic.ca/agas.htm [accessed 21 June 2019].

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the site of the destroyed St Swithin’s church (shown as a blank area, and yet to be

rebuilt to the design of Christopher Wren) – thus perhaps slightly to the west of the

location we might infer from the copperplate map. It is similarly shown in the printed

version of this same map, engraved by Wenceslaus Hollar as ‘An Exact Svrveigh of the

Streets Lanes and Chvrches Contained within the Rvines of the City of London’ in 1667

(Hollar 1966).6

More recent southward widening of Cannon Street would place this original location

closer to the middle of the present roadway, and it is marked in this position on Ralph

Merrifield’s map of Roman sites in London (Merrifield 1965, 271–2 and map, no 268).

Any hopes that the original location might be identified or a remaining stump of the

Stone be found by excavation (as expressed, for example, by Merrifield (1965, 271)) are

dashed by the realisation that the ground underlying the full width of the modern street

was quarried away during the building of the Metropolitan District Railway (now the

District Line) and its Cannon Street underground station by the ‘cut-and-cover’ method,

when the line was extended from Mansion House to Tower Hill in 1884 (Lee 1988, 18–

19).7

Stow gives no dimensions for the ‘great stone’, and its depictions on the copperplate

and ‘Agas’ maps are unhelpful, but twenty years before Stow’s account, in 1578, a

French visitor, L Grenade, had described it as standing three feet above the ground, and

being two feet wide and one foot thick:

Environ le milieu de cette rue y a vn grand Saxe ou Pierre quarree, plantee

profondement en terre, et hors de terre enuiron trois piez de haut. Elle est large environ

de deux piez, et espesse d’un. (Grenade 2014, 224)8

And some near-contemporary evidence confirms that the ‘great stone’ was, at least

the part of it visible above ground, not particularly large or impressive.

In 1591 or 1592 William Shakespeare included in the play known today as Henry VI

Part 2 a scene (Act IV scene vi; Shakespeare 1999, 317–8) based upon the famous

episode in 1450 when Jack Cade, leader of the Kentish rebels against the government of

Henry VI, reputedly struck London Stone with his sword and claimed the Lordship of

London. In Shakespeare’s darkly comic development of this episode, which we shall

consider later, Cade sits on the Stone as if on a royal throne to issue commands and

dispense justice: ‘And here, sitting upon London-stone, I charge and command, that, of

6 Zoomable image at http://www.british-history.ac.uk/no-series/london-map-leake/1667/map

[accessed 2 June 2015].

7 This fact was pointed out by Kathryn Stubbs of the City of London Planning Department (now Department of the Built Environment) in correspondence. The limits of the underground station and the railway tracks are clearly marked on large scale Ordnance Survey maps, and the extent of the excavations, to a depth of over 30 feet below the surface of Cannon Street, is apparent from contemporary cross-sections of the works in progress, now in the collection of the London Transport Museum (illustrated in Taylor 2001, 54).

8 Grenade’s description of London Stone was first noted by Groos (1981, 174). The French pied du roi, presumably the measure Grenade was using, was, at 32.48 cm, slightly larger than the English foot of 30.48 cm. However, these dimensions of width and thickness suggest that the existing block is indeed just the top foot and a half of the original stone.

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the city’s cost, the pissing-conduit run nothing but claret wine this first year of our

reign’. A London audience would know London Stone as well as they knew the ‘Pissing

Conduit’ by the Stocks Market (presumably so called because it provided only a thin and

intermittent stream of water) (Stow 1908, 1: 183). One assumes they saw nothing

incongruous in a character sitting on the Stone – as the height of three feet described by

Grenade would certainly have permitted.

There is a further hint in Thomas Dekker’s The Shoemaker’s Holiday (first staged in

1600), when the character Firk pleads the truth of a previous lie while making a joking

contrast between the height of London Stone and that of the tower of St Paul’s

Cathedral:

Oatley. But art thou sure of this?

Firk. Am I sure that Paul’s Steeple is a handful higher than London Stone? Or that the

Pissing Conduit leaks nothing but pure Mother Bunch? Am I sure I am lusty Firk?

(scene xvi, lines 110–14; Dekker 1979, 170–1)

That St Paul’s tower (still, even after the destruction of its spire by lightning in 1561,

the tallest structure in the city) was just four inches – the handful or hand used in

measuring the height of horses – higher than London Stone, and that the notorious

Pissing Conduit ran with strong ale (the supposed meaning of ‘Mother Bunch’ (Dekker

1979, 171 note)) seem equally extravagant claims. The joke is a better one if London

Stone was, for all its fame, a relatively unimpressive monument.

2.2: London Stone and the Great Fire

By the time of the Great Fire of 1666 London Stone’s height above ground seems to

have been diminished from the three feet recorded by Grenade, either by damage to the

Stone itself or as a result of the continual raising of the surface of the street around it.

The antiquary and writer John Aubrey (1626–1697), writing after the Fire, says ‘as I

remember before the fire it was about two feet or a foot ½ high’ (Aubrey 1980, 508–9).

It was then, he adds in another note ‘a kind of broken cubicall figure’ (ibid). But now, he

tells us, the Stone ‘scarce peepes his head above ground’. In another manuscript note,

he confirms that in 1673:

London-stone is now since the fire burning of London even with the street, whereas

before the conflagration it was three quarters of a yard (or more) above ground. The

fire did calcine it, which is the cause of its equation [levelling], only the upper part of it

about two inches above the surface is to bee seen now (1663 1673). (ibid – the deletions

in the original)

It is debatable whether the reduction in the Stone’s height was entirely due to

‘calcining’ as Aubrey thought, or perhaps owed something to the raising of the street

level after the Fire. However, it would seem that in 1671, when officers of the

Worshipful Company of Spectacle Makers chose ‘the remaining parte of London Stone’

as the venue for the ceremonious destruction of a batch of spectacles that had been

confiscated as ‘all very badd in the glasse and frames not fitt to be put on sale’ (Law

1977, 11), they would have found little more than a raised area of stone in the street

surface on which the spectacles could be smashed.

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The Great Fire which ‘calcined’ London Stone had also destroyed St Swithin’s church

and the neighbouring buildings on both sides of the street. During the rebuilding work

that followed there was an opportunity to investigate just how deeply set in the ground

was the stone that John Stow had, as we have seen, described as ‘a great stone called

London stone, fixed in the ground verie deep’ and ‘so strongly set, that if Cartes do run

against it through negligence, the wheeles be broken, and the stone it selfe vnshaken’

(Stow 1908, 1: 224).

Within months of the Great Fire, the City of London’s Court of Common Council had

appointed Robert Hooke (1635–1703) of the Royal Society, scientist, polymath and

architect, as one of three Surveyors to oversee the rebuilding programme. Hooke seems

to have taken occasional note of the discovery of antiquities in the course of the

building works. His friend John Aubrey included in his manuscript notebooks, brought

together under the general title Monumenta Britannica, a page of archaeological notes

headed ‘From Mr Rob: Hooke, R.S.S. [Secretary of the Royal Society]’ (Aubrey 1980,

508–9) – Aubrey’s own description of the fate of London Stone after the Great Fire

appears as an added note in the bottom margin.

The first note describes the discovery in Bush Lane, just to the south of Cannon

Street, of a Roman tessellated pavement and stone foundations.9 The second continues:

mđm [memorandum] London-stone was not a lapis milliaris, as was supposed. It was

rooted a matter of ten foot deep; the roote was broad and went a great way under the

Houses. It was a kind of Obelisque, and stands about ye middle of London (i) [ie]

between Ludgate and Algate. It was so fast sett with Roman mortar that Mr Hooke ↑one

of the City Surveyors↑ was fain to get a Derbyshire miner to break it up and he was 2 or

3 dayes before he could fetch up a little core[?]. This was for the foundation of a Cellar;

the stone remaynes still, but now scarce peepes his head above ground […] Mr Hooke

thinks it is a kind of hard stone. (ibid – underlining and interlineal insertion in the

original)

The extraordinary depth and solidity of London Stone’s ‘roote’ is confirmed in a note

by the foremost antiquary of the eighteenth century, William Stukeley. Stukeley (1687–

1765) lived in London from 1717 until 1726 (only returning to the capital in 1747),

during which time he was also Secretary of the fledgling Society of Antiquaries.

Although his published writings betray little specific interest in the history and

antiquities of London, his manuscript Commonplace Book, dating to this period of his

residence in London, now in the library of the Wiltshire Archaeological and Natural

History Society, Devizes (Hatchwell & Burl 1998), contains three pages of antiquarian

9 These remains, also as we shall see noted by Christopher Wren (Wren 1750, 265–6), formed part of

the large complex of buildings later identified as the Roman ‘Governor’s Palace’ (Marsden 1975). Although the identification of this structure as the residence of the governor is no longer widely accepted (Milne 1996), there was clearly a major Roman building lying south of Cannon Street opposite London Stone

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notes about London and its archaeology (Stukeley 1717– , fols 25–6).10 Apart from

some personal observations dated February and March 1725, these are largely brief

summaries of discoveries and theories previously recorded by others – principally it

seems derived from a now lost annotated transcript of Aubrey’s Monumenta Britannica

made by the classicist and antiquarian Thomas Gale (1635/6–1702) (Piggott 1985,

157). Among them is a brief and confusing note on London Stone: ‘foot of it laid in Rom.

Mortar (so hard as the workmen could scarce in 3 days beat it thro)’ (Stukeley 1717– ,

fol 25 recto). It was ‘10´ deeper than the Roman level’; there were ‘coals under it’. His

note concludes ‘It seems to have been an Obelisk’. The differences from Aubrey’s

original (the depth of ten foot being measured from ‘Roman level’, the mysterious

‘coals’) may suggest he had another source, or that Gale had amended his transcript of

Aubrey’s text before Stukeley saw it.

Christopher Wren, who was appointed Surveyor of the King’s Works in 1669 and

whose involvement in the rebuilding of St Paul’s Cathedral and the City churches

brought him into constant contact with Hooke, also took note of the evidence for the

foundations of London Stone and of the Roman structures revealed nearby. His views

on the matter were later reported by his son:

London-stone, as is generally suppos’d, was a Pillar, in the Manner of the Milliarium

Aureum, at Rome, from whence the Account of their Miles began; but the Surveyor

[Wren] was of Opinion, by Reason of the large Foundation, it was rather some more

considerable Monument in the Forum; for in the adjoining Ground on the South Side,

(upon digging for Cellars, after the great Fire) were discovered some tessellated

Pavements, and other extensive Remains of Roman Workmanship, and Buildings. (Wren

1750, 265–6)

We shall return later to the significance of the extraordinary depth of the Stone’s

setting, and its interpretation as ‘milliarium’ or obelisk. But John Aubrey provides an

unexpected insight into its fate after the Great Fire. He concludes his marginal note at

the foot of his page of information from Robert Hooke with the words:

The stone is now taken upp and buried and sett in ye same place about 2 foot high:

planed by a rule ye dimensions yt appear above ground. (Aubrey 1980, 508–9)

I have found no other reference to this resetting of the Stone, and it is unclear

whether the full 10 foot high monolith was lifted bodily and reburied with just two foot

of stone protruding above ground, or just part of it cut off and reset, leaving the lower

part still at its original depth. Certainly, as we shall see, a little later when the Stone was

moved to a new location it was apparently only about four feet in length overall.11

10 I am grateful to the Wiltshire Heritage Museum, Devizes (Wiltshire Archaeological and Natural

History Society) and to the Sandell Librarian and Archivist Dr Lorna Haycock for the opportunity to consult Stukeley’s Commonplace Book, which I did in connection with my study of Stukeley’s maps of Roman London (Clark 2008).

11 Aubrey’s notes are confusing, and not entirely consistent. Elsewhere he comments that ‘The stone that stands there now […] is only a mock-stone; I have known one or two worn out in my time with carts &c.’ (Aubrey 1980, 506–7).

9

In spite of the archaeological discoveries and the apparent re-erection of London

Stone after the Great Fire, eighteenth-century writers generally copy John Stow in their

account of it. John Strype, in his edition of Stow’s Survey (Stow 1720, book 2: 193–4),

largely follows Stow’s original text, although he includes speculations about London

Stone’s origin to which we shall return. He does however add a contemporary

description – although an unclear one:

This Stone before the Fire of London, was much worn away, and as it were but a Stump

remaining. But is now for the Preservation of it cased over with a new Stone

handsomely wrought, cut hollow underneath so as the old Stone may be seen, the new

one being over it, to shelter and defend the old venerable one. (ibid 200)

London Stone with its new protective canopy is depicted in the foreground of an

etching of St Swithin’s church by Jacob Smith (fl 1733) in the London Metropolitan

Archives print collection (formerly Guildhall Library; Clark 2007b, fig 3).12 It stands

opposite the south-west corner of the church, the stone casing shown with a domed top,

and with a circular cut-out in the side through which the Stone itself can be glimpsed.

2.3: The Stone in the wall

By the middle of the eighteenth century London Stone was clearly being perceived as an

obstacle to traffic. It was moved, together with its protective casing, and placed by the

kerbstone against the wall of St Swithin’s church on the north side of the street. The

initiative was taken by the Vestry of St Swithin’s, within whose parish the Stone stood,

and a Vestry minute of 13 May 1742 records ‘That the Stone, commonly called London

Stone, be placed against the Church, according to the churchwardens’ discretion’ (Price

1870, 63; White 1898, 185). What was moved in 1742 was presumably that part of the

Stone which had, according to Aubrey, been reset, standing two feet above the ground,

after the Great Fire. It was said to have been (in 1785) ‘nearly four feet high, two feet

broad and one foot thick with a broken ornament on the top’ (Leftwich 1934, 4).

I have not traced the source from which Leftwich derived these measurements, but

the width and thickness are similar to those recorded by the French visitor Grenade in

1578, and the overall proportions are confirmed by a drawing, probably made at the

time of the later 1798 move, in the London Metropolitan Archives (formerly Guildhall

Library; Clark 2007b, fig 4).13 The Stone was clearly cut down to its present sad

remnant during a subsequent move.

The Stone was first placed against the church wall just to the east of the church’s

12 To be see in the London Metropolitan Archives, Main Print Collection Pr.565/SWI

https://collage.cityoflondon.gov.uk/quick-search?q=6249 [accessed 12 March 2017]. This seems to be the earliest surviving depiction of the Stone. Jacob Smith is presumably the ‘obscure English engraver’ of that name who engraved a pair of portraits of Sir Isaac Newton and Sir Hans Sloane, inscribed ‘Jacob Smith del: et Sculpsit 1733’ (examples in the British Library and in the collection of the Royal Society): https://pictures.royalsociety.org/image-rs-9412 [accessed 2 June 2015] (Bryan 1903–5, 5: 93).

13 London Metropolitan Archives, Main Print Collection Pr.121/CAN http://collage.cityoflondon.gov.uk/collage/app?service=external/Item&sp=Z2032&sp=1780&sp=X [accessed 2 June 2015].

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south-west door. It is shown in this position in an engraving published by J T Smith in

1791 (Smith 1791, [plate 1]), later reproduced by J E Price (1870, 61) and Clark (2007b,

fig 5).14 The domed casing with a circular cut-out is surely that which had protected the

Stone in its earlier position in the roadway.

Once more ‘doomed to destruction as a nuisance’ in 1798, London Stone was saved

by ‘the interposition of Mr. Thomas Maiden, of Sherbourn-Lane, who […] prevailed on

one of the parish officers to give his consent that London Stone should be removed to

the situation which it now occupies against the Church-wall’ (Brayley 1810, 101). The

Vestry minutes for 13 June 1798 duly instruct ‘that the porter’s block and seats be

taken away, and a new block be erected in the blank doorway, under the direction of

the surveyor, with the old material, of the length and width of the blank doorway; and

the stone, called London Stone to be fixed at the west end of the same, on a plinth’ (Price

1870, 61; White 1898, 185). It is in this position it is shown in early nineteenth-century

illustrations, standing on a shelf within the arch formed by the blocked doorway (Clark

2007b, fig 6).15 The same domed canopy with a circular cut-out continues to shelter it.

The association with the ‘Porter’s Block’, a shelf on which porters could rest their

loads without setting them on the ground, is illuminated by a number of cases recorded

in the Proceedings of the Old Bailey at this period. For example, on 22 February 1781

Josiah Townsend testified:

I am porter to Mess. Evans and Martin. I was going with a load into the Borough; I

pitched it on London Stone in Cannon-street; it contained ten pieces of check [cloth] and

one of sheeting. There came a man and pitched a hamper by it; he said he had three

halfpence if I would be a halfpenny to it we would have a pint of purl [ale infused with

herbs; mulled ale], and I might go over the way and order it. I went and ordered it; when

I came back the man was sitting down by my load. I went over again to the publick

house and told them to make it hot, and I paid for the purl and came away directly; I did

not stay for the purl; then my load and knot [shoulder pad] were gone. I enquired of the

two porters, who told me a man with a load had ran up Swithin’s-lane. (Old Bailey

Proceedings Online 2015, February 1781, trial of Levi Solomon (t17810222-27))

Then on 2 December 1795 John Grout was indicted for the theft of a canvas bag

containing 50 pounds of sugar and 21 pounds of soap. Robert Flynn, a porter for Messrs

Noton and Eades, testified that on 4 November he had been carrying this load to the

Talbot inn in the Borough. He continues:

I went up Cannon-street; I pitched my load to rest me, on the bulk [the porter’s block] at

the London Stone, and a man came up and asked me to direct him to the Swan with Two

Necks, in Lad-lane; after I had directed him, I turned round, and the goods were gone off

14 London Metropolitan Archives, Main Print Collection Pr.121/CAN

http://collage.cityoflondon.gov.uk/collage/app?service=external/Item&sp=Z2035&sp=1783&sp=X [accessed 2 June 2015].

15 An anonymous watercolour of 1801, London Metropolitan Archives, Main Print Collection Pr.121/CAN http://collage.cityoflondon.gov.uk/collage/app?service=external/Item&sp=Z2025&sp=1773&sp=X [accessed 2 June 2015].

11

the place; as soon as I missed them I ran up Swithin’s-lane; to the best of my knowledge

I saw the prisoner, Grout, run up the lane, and another man with him; he had the goods

on his shoulder. (Old Bailey Proceedings Online 2015, December 1795, trial of John Grout

(t17951202-35))

In 1829 Edward Brayley repeated his 1810 account of London Stone, including the

comment that it had in 1798 been placed in the situation ‘which it now occupies’

(Brayley 1829, 1: 21); this was, by the time his book Londiniana appeared, no longer

true. By 1828 it had been moved again, for Thomas Allen, writing in 1827–8, says that

the Stone was then ‘below the central window [contained in] a hollow pedestal’ (Allen

1827–8, 3: 765). Illustrations from this time onwards show it in what was to be its

location for more than a hundred years, set back into an alcove in the centre of the

church’s south wall, raised on a three-sided plinth. It was still protected by a canopy of

the same form as previously – perhaps the original casing reshaped to fit in front of an

alcove cut back into the thickness of the church wall (Clark 2007b, fig 7).16

Thereafter it was much visited by tourists and described in guide books. From the

nineteenth century come literary accounts of visits to London by two Americans who

seem to have been attracted to London Stone by the Jack Cade/Shakespeare connection.

The Shakespearean context is clear in an extract from the account by ‘Geoffrey Crayon’,

the pseudonymous narrator of Washington Irving’s The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon,

Gent., first published in 1819 and going through a number of editions and printings up

to the 1860s. Rereading the comic scenes in Shakespeare’s Henry IV in his London

lodgings, the narrator is inspired to go in search of the Boar’s Head Tavern in

Eastcheap:

I forbear to treat of the various adventures and wonders I encountered in my travels; of

the haunted regions of Cock-lane; of the faded glories of Little Britain, and the parts

adjacent; what perils I ran in Cateaton-street and old Jewry; of the renowned Guildhall

and its two stunted giants, the pride and wonder of the city, and the terror of all unlucky

urchins; and how I visited London Stone, and struck my staff upon it, in imitation of that

arch rebel, Jack Cade. (Irving 1820, 237–8)

Another American author, Nathaniel Hawthorne, has left us an account of his time in

London in the 1850s. We join him walking through the City in March 1856 (it was

Easter Monday), on the way to London Bridge station to catch a train to Greenwich:

[...] we set off for London Bridge, turning out of our direct course to see London Stone, in

Watling-street. This famous stone appears now to be built into the wall of St. Swithin's

Church, and is so encased that you can only see and touch the top of it through a circular

hole. There are one or two long cuts or indentations in the top, which are said to have

16 An engraving of about 1820: London Metropolitan Archives, Main Print Collection Pr.121/CAN

http://collage.cityoflondon.gov.uk/collage/app?service=external/Item&sp=Z2044&sp=1792&sp=X [accessed 2 June 2015]. J E Price assumed that it was the move of 1798 that brought the Stone to this location – ‘At the repair of the church in 1798 it was placed in its present position in the centre of the south side of the church’ (Price 1870, 63) – in spite of the fact that he cites the vestry minutes of June and August 1798 that confirmed the decision to place it in front of the blank doorway to the east (ibid 61–2).

12

been made by Jack Cade’s sword, when he struck it against the stone. If so, his sword

was of a redoubtable temper. Judging by what I saw, London Stone was a rudely shaped

and unhewn post. (Hawthorne 1941, 289)

The two ‘cuts or indentations in the top’ – still visible today – are clearly shown on the

drawing of about 1798. The concept that they were made by Cade’s sword seems

otherwise unrecorded, and may have been a short-lived piece of ‘tourist lore’ – the sort

of lively tale with which tour guides entertain their listeners.17

But some lamented how neglected and uncared for the Stone now was. In 1870 John

Edward Price (then Director of Evening Meetings of the London and Middlesex

Archaeological Society) included in a monograph on the Roman mosaic pavement

recently discovered in Bucklersbury, published by the Society, a discussion of the

course of the adjacent Walbrook, together with information on ‘that famous monument

of ancient London, “London Stone”’ (Price 1870, 55–65). He reported (ibid 64–5) that in

1869 the Council of the Society had discussed the better preservation of the Stone with

the Rector and Churchwardens of St Swithin’s. The Society’s own ‘Proceedings’ for May

1869 confirm the appointment of a ‘London Stone committee’ to undertake this

consultation (Anon 1870, 585). The improvements recommended and put into effect

involved the addition of a protective iron grille and the incorporation in the church wall

above it of a large stone panel (Clark 2007b, fig 8),18 with carved inscriptions in Latin

and English. The English text read as follows:

17 Hawthorne’s reference to Cade’s sword seems to indicate that he or his London friends were aware of

historical accounts of Cade’s rebellion other than Shakespeare’s play, since as we have seen (and as the quotation from ‘Geoffrey Crayon’ has just illustrated) a first reading of Henry VI, Part 2 would lead one to suppose that Cade struck the stone only with his staff.

18 News photograph, 29 March 1937: Hulton Archive/Getty Images 3271442 http://www.gettyimages.co.uk/detail/news-photo/the-london-stone-in-cannon-st-london-ec4-from-which-the-news-photo/3271442 [accessed 2 June 2015].

13

LONDON STONE

Commonly believed to be a Roman work long placed abovt xxxv feet hence towards the

Sovth West and afterwards bvilt into the wall of this Chvrch was for more carefvl

protection and transmission to fvtvre ages better secvred by the Chvrchwardens in the

year of ovr Lord MDCCCLXIX. (Harrison 1891)19

The Society’s efforts, however, do not seem to have promoted greater public

awareness of or interest in London Stone. Twenty years later, it was said to be ‘seldom

noticed, even by the most inquisitive of country cousins’ (Anon 1888, 241). The same

anonymous contributor to Chambers’s Journal continues: ‘During the greater part of the

year, a fruit-stall largely obscures it from public view. Hanks of twine are twisted round

the iron grating, and on the Stone itself rest piles of paper bags.’

Early twentieth-century guidebooks to London refer to it, but rarely devote much

space or attention to it. For example Arthur Mee (1937, 281) describes it, ‘a fragment of

its old self [...] said by some to have been a stone set up in Stone Age days’. He refers to

the belief that the Romans measured distances from it; he mentions Jack Cade. The

American archaeologist George Gordon, Director of the University Museum of

Philadelphia, was more expansive in the course of his Rambles in Old London (1924, 45–

7). London Stone is ‘the very oldest object in London streets.’ ‘The Mediaeval Kings after

their coronations used to strike London Stone with their swords in token of the City’s

submission’ (followed by the customary reference to Jack Cade). He concludes ‘It was an

object of great antiquity when the Romans arrived and their predecessors the ancient

Britons found it on their arrival more than two thousand years before. It was erected by

the people of the New Stone Age [...].’ We shall find other writers in the twentieth

century, and indeed the twenty-first century, sharing Gordon’s views of the Stone’s

great antiquity and making similar unsubstantiated claims for its ritual significance –

and we shall attempt to identify the origins of some of the more fanciful ideas.

Wren’s church was bombed and burnt out in the Blitz in the Second World War. It

was decided that no repair was possible and it was recommended that the site should

be sold (Bishop of London’s Commission 1946, 12), but the shell of the building, with

London Stone still behind its grille in the south wall, was left standing for many years.20

The parish was united with St Stephen Walbrook in 1954, and the site was sold in 1960.

When the surviving ruins of the church were finally demolished to make way for a

new building in 1961–2, London Stone itself, the rectangular lump of limestone that we

are now familiar with, was temporarily placed in the care of Guildhall Museum (Clark

19 The text printed by Harrison differs a little from that which, according to Price, the Council of the

London and Middlesex Archaeological Society had originally recommended (Price 1870, 64–5). In particular, the proposed text, published by Price, made no comment on the origin or age of the stone; the opening words ‘Commonly believed to be a Roman work’ seem to have been an addition.

20 As shown in a photograph of 1 April 1946, by Ian Smith.The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images, 50864671: http://www.gettyimages.co.uk/detail/news-photo/st-swithun-london-stone-church-built-by-sir-christopher-news-photo/50864671 [accessed 2 June 2015]. The caption describes the ‘roofless interior laid out as a garden, with city workers coming to eat lunch and read their newspapers’.

14

2007b, fig 9). There is apparently no record of the fate of the stone surround – perhaps,

as we have suggested, the cut-down face of the early eighteenth-century casing that had

protected the Stone in its original position in the roadway – or the iron grille.

During this period a sample of the stone was taken. It was identified as Lincolnshire

Limestone both by F G Dimes and later by F W Anderson of the Institute of Geological

Studies – the latter adding ‘your specimen, making allowances for its weathered

condition, resembles Clipsham Stone more clearly than it resembles the others’

(Merrifield 1965, 123; and correspondence in Museum of London archives, Guildhall

Museum file T10). However, re-examination of the same sample, now in the Natural

History Museum (Earth Sciences), by Kevin Hayward (pers comm) raised the possibility

that rather than Lincolnshire it is Bath Stone – the stone most used for monuments and

sculptures in early Roman London, and in use also in the late Saxon period (perhaps by

the reworking of stone salvaged from the Roman city).

In October 1962, following the completion of the new building on the site, now 111

Cannon Street, to house the Bank of China, the Stone was placed, apparently without

ceremony, in the specially constructed grilled and glazed alcove that it was to occupy

for more than fifty years (Clark 2007b, fig 1). Examination of photographs confirms that

the grille was not that originally erected in 1869, but a modern pastiche, as was the

stonework surround.21 A bronze plaque on the sloping top of the casing proclaimed:

LONDON STONE

This is a fragment of the original piece of limestone once

securely fixed in the ground now fronting Cannon Street Station.

Removed in 1742 to the north side of the street, in 1798

it was built into the south wall of the Church of St. Swithun London Stone

which stood here until demolished in 1962.

Its origin and purpose are unknown but in 1188 there was a

reference to Henry, son of Eylwin de Lundenstane, subsequently Lord Mayor

of London.22

The Stone was also accessible from inside the building (first the Bank of China,

latterly the Oversea-Chinese Banking Corporation, then a sportswear shop, which

closed in April 2007, and thereafter a temporary branch of W H Smith newsagents),

where it was protected by a glass case.23 The site was for a long time under threat of

redevelopment, and at various times proposals led to press and media interest in

London Stone and its fate – for example in the on-line BBC News Magazine (Coughlan

2006) and in the Daily Mail (Enoch 2012). The newsagents closed at the end of

February 2016, and plans were announced for the demolition and replacement of the

building; London Stone was to be placed in the care of the Museum of London and

21 However, the 1972 Listing (Historic England 2019) included both the grille and stonework, which it

described as ‘Surround of Portland stone and iron grille, probably C19’.

22 The text as printed here reflects the strange deeply indented format of the text on the plaque.

23 Interior and exterior photographs appear in a recent Daily Mail article (Enoch 2012): http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2091093/London-Stone-Fury-developers-plan-legendary-rock-historic-site.html#ixzz2NVW11vwD [accessed 4 June 2015].

15

displayed there until it could be returned to a prominent position in the frontage of the

new building (Higgins 2016). On 24 April 2016 the Stone was removed from its case

inside the old building and transported to the Museum for study and display. On 13 May

it went on display in the Museum’s ‘War, Plague & Fire’ gallery (Mann 2016).24

Following the completion of a new office building on the site, the Stone was returned,

with a new Portland stone surround, its design inspired by that of the alcove in which it

had stood for 150 years in the front wall of St Swithin’s church. On 4 October 2018, it

was unveiled in its new location by the Lord Mayor and the Master of the Worshipful

Company of Masons.25

24 See http://www.museumoflondon.org.uk/museum-london/whats-on/exhibitions/london-stone and

http://www.museumoflondon.org.uk/discover/london-stone-seven-strange-myths [accessed 13 October 2016]

25 See https://www.timeout.com/london/news/the-london-stone-has-been-put-back-in-its-rightful-place-100518 [accessed 21 June 2109]

16

3: Documentary Sources

3.1: John Stow and the earliest records

We have already referred to J E Price’s account of the history of London Stone (Price

1870, 55–65). He drew, he tells us, on ‘materials [...] collected by my esteemed friend

Mr. W. H. Overall, F.S.A.’ (the Guildhall Librarian) (ibid 55). The following amplifies and,

particularly for the earlier period, supplements or corrects this valuable (and almost

the sole reliable) contribution to the subject.

The first writer to attempt to elucidate the Stone’s history was the London historian

John Stow (1525–1605), writing in 1598 (Stow 1908, 1: 224–5). The earliest reference

to the Stone that he could find was, he says, ‘in the end of a fair written Gospel book

given to Christ’s church in Canterburie [Canterbury Cathedral], by Ethelstane, King of

the West Saxons’ (ibid). There he found ‘noted of lands or rents in London belonging to

the said church, whereof one parcel is described to lie near unto London stone.’ This

West Saxon king is presumably the Æthelstan who ruled from 924 to 939 (normally

considered king of England since he effectively ruled the whole land, including the

Danelaw and the Viking kingdom of York, from 927 until his death), rather than the

West Saxon prince of that name who ruled Kent as subking for his father King

Æthelwulf of Wessex between 839 and about 851.26

It is not clear whether Stow believed that the list of Canterbury properties belonged

to the time of Æthelstan, in the early tenth century – as has been assumed by more

recent writers such as Grant Allen (1891, 379) and (probably – his meaning is unclear)

Peter Ackroyd (2000, 18). Even without knowledge of the document Stow is referring

to, one could question whether a list of church properties might not be bound into the

back of a volume of considerably earlier date. Binding such a record into a volume

containing the scriptures might be thought to give it added authority and security.

It is possible that the list of Canterbury Cathedral properties in London that Stow

saw was either the same that was later published by B W Kissan (1940) and dated by

him between 1098 and 1108, or a lost copy of a very similar list. Kissan’s list appears to

be the earliest such list extant (Keene & Harding 1985, 71). And among the properties

listed is one given to Canterbury by ‘Eadwaker æt lundene stane’ (Kissan 1940, 58). If

this was the list that Stow saw, he must have interpreted the local cognomen of the man

who lived ‘at London Stone’ as the address of the property itself; however, as we shall

see, there is another possibility.

The list of Canterbury properties published by Kissan is included in a volume from

Sir Robert Cotton’s library, now in the British Library: Ms Cotton Faustina B vi (British

Museum 1802, 606–7). But although from its content this volume clearly has a

Canterbury provenance it is no ‘gospel book’ – it does not comprise or incorporate the

26 This earlier Æthelstan was also properly never ‘King of the West Saxons’, since he died before his

father and never succeeded to the West Saxon throne. The later Æthelstan appears in charters as ‘rex Saxonum et Anglorum’ or ‘rex Angul-Saxonum’ and even ‘monarchus totius Britanniae’ (examples in Birch 1887).

17

four gospels of the New Testament.

Kissan (1940, 68) notes ‘if our document were ever in a gospel book it, together

with some preceding folios, must have been extracted therefrom some time after Stow

saw it’. Kissan lists five early books ‘which answer more or less to the description given

by Stow’ (ibid 68 and 69 note 31). Of these the most promising would seem to be

another Cottonian manuscript, British Library Ms Cotton Tiberius A ii (British Museum

1802, 31). This was reputedly presented to Christ Church Canterbury by King

Æthelstan (of England) and thus matches Stow’s description. Together with the four

gospels, themselves apparently of ninth-century date, and other religious texts, bound

into it is (for example) an eleventh- or twelfth-century copy of a charter claimed to date

to 927, by which Æthelstan granted to Canterbury certain lands at Folkestone (Sawyer

1978, no 398) – the general consensus of the authorities quoted by Sawyer is that this

charter is spurious or contains spurious elements.

The presence of an eleventh- or twelfth-century copy (probably forged) of a

document alleged to be of the tenth century bound into a volume with material of ninth-

century origin demonstrates the danger of accepting Stow’s account of the ‘fair written

gospel book’ as evidence for a very early occurrence of the name ‘London Stone’ to

define a location.

But sadly this volume contains no list of Canterbury properties.

Did Stow simply misremember in which particular volume he had found the list of

Canterbury properties, or did he perhaps see these manuscripts when they were bound

in a different fashion? Kissan (1940, 68) concludes that since they differ in the size of

their folios, there can be no direct connection between the contents of the Faustina

volume and any of the gospel books he lists. Yet the pages of the property list have been

trimmed to fit in its present binding – Kissan notes the existence of a marginal note

‘[...]en stane’, truncated by the trimming, which draws attention to the reference to

Eadwaker at London Stone. It is, he suggests, ‘in a hand of about the seventeenth

century’ (ibid 59) – the document has clearly been trimmed and rebound after the time

when Stow might have seen it.27

However, by the mid twelfth century Canterbury Cathedral did indeed own property

described as ‘not far from London Stone’ (and it might be this property to which Stow

refers). In 1152/53 Cecilia, the widow of Wulfwin of London, granted to Walter de Meri,

the prior of Canterbury Cathedral Priory, the property in London she had inherited

from her father, comprising a stone house and other buildings near St Mary Bothaw

church to the north, not far from the stone that is called lundenestane (‘lapis qui dicitur

lundenestane’) (Canterbury Cathedral Archives, Dean and Chapter Archives, Chartae

27 Is the truncated note perhaps in ‘Stow’s characteristic script? It would certainly be typical of him to

annotate a medieval text in this way (Gillespie 2004).

18

Antiquae L/3: National Archives Discovery 2014, CCA-DCc-ChAnt/L/3).28 In return

Cecilia was granted a corrody (a lifetime ‘maintenance grant’ in the form of a daily

allowance of food and provisions for herself) and compensation of 8 marks to be paid to

her heirs, her son and daughter. The church and parish of St Mary Bothaw lay to the

south of Candlewick Street, in the area now occupied by Cannon Street Station. The

church was destroyed in the Great Fire and not rebuilt, the parish being amalgamated

with that of St Swithin (Harben 1918, 391). A further document, confirming the priory’s

lease of this property to one Ernisius a few years later indicates that the land lay

immediately adjacent to the church’s north aisle (Canterbury Cathedral Archives, Dean

and Chapter Archives, Chartae Antiquae L/19: National Archives Discovery 2014, CCA-

DCc-ChAnt/L/19), and thus did indeed lie close to Candlewick Street and not far from

London Stone.

Stow’s second reference is to a fire which in 1135, the first year of King Stephen,

started in ‘the house of one Ailward, near unto London stone’, and (he tells us) spread

east to consume Holy Trinity Priory at Aldgate and west as far as the shrine of St

Erkenwald in the new St Paul’s Cathedral (Stow 1908, 1: 224–5). His marginal note

attributes this information to ‘Liber Trinitatis’. This book can be identified as the

Cartulary of Holy Trinity Priory, now in the Hunterian Collection, Glasgow University

Library (Ms Hunter 215), which was compiled in about 1425 by Brother Thomas de

Axebrigge of the priory. Consideration of the printed edition of this manuscript suggests

that Stow had misread or misremembered his source.

For the original text alludes to two fires (Hodgett 1971, 5, with the Latin text in

extenso on 233). The first was one that occurred in the time of the first prior of Holy

Trinity, Norman, who died in 1147. It began at the house of Gilbert Becket (in West

Cheap) and spread both east and west, and destroyed the priory. Thomas de Axebrigge

himself dates it to 1132 (ibid 3), but it must be the same great fire that other accounts

date to 1133 or 1135 (Chew & Kellaway 1973, ix note 1). The other fire took place in

the time of the second prior, Ralph (elected in 1147, died in 1167). This latter is the fire

that spread from the house of Ailward by London Stone (‘a domo Ailwardi iuxta London

ston’) almost to Aldgate in one direction and far as Erkenwald’s shrine in St Paul’s in the

other. Stow seems to have conflated these two accounts. How far we can trust Thomas

de Axebrigge or his source as to the dates of the fires is questionable – as Chew and

Kellaway say, ‘The chronology of these fires presents difficulties’ (ibid). But Thomas’s

account apparently confirms the existence of an Ailward living ‘by London Stone’ in the

mid twelfth century, and thus another example of the use of ‘London Stone’ in this

locative sense.

28 I am most grateful to Hannes Kleineke for drawing my attention to this document. The phrase ‘lapis

qui dicitur lundenestane’ sufficiently disposes of an otherwise plausible hypothesis that ‘Lundene stane’ was originally like ‘Hwaetmundes stane’ (recorded in 889 in the vicinity of Queenhithe) not a standing stone but a stone building. The latter was described in 889 as ‘the ancient stone building (antiquum petrosum aedificium) called by the citizens ‘aet Hwaetmundes stane’ – presumably named after a previous owner (Sawyer 1968, no 346, grant by King Alfred to Wærferth, bishop of Worcester; Ekwall 1954, 37–8; Dyson 1978, 205–6, 209–10).

19

3.2: Henry Fitz Ailwin

The most famous Londoner to have dwelt ‘at London Stone’ is without doubt the first

mayor, Henry Fitz Ailwin – although the designation ‘at/of London Stone’ belongs first

to his father. The earliest London chronicle, included in the City volume known as Liber

de Antiquis Legibus (the Book of Ancient Laws) and probably compiled by the alderman

Arnald Fitz Thedmar between 1258 and 1272 (Gransden 1974, 509–12), says that in

the first year of the reign of Richard I (1189) ‘factus est Henricus filius Eylwini de

Londene-stane Maior Londoniarum’ – ‘Henry, son of Eylwin of London Stone, was made

mayor of London’ (Stapleton 1846, 1). The date that he became mayor may be disputed,

but the status and family origins of this Henry are less doubtful (although unproven). It

is assumed that his father ‘Eylwin’ or ‘Ailwin’ was Æthelwine son of Leofstan, in whose

house the husting court had met before 1130 (Keene 2004; Page 1923, 250), leading

one historian to remark of Henry Fitz Ailwin ‘Some obscure and archaic prestige may

even have attached to his house at London Stone, where the husting seems to have met

once in his father’s day’ (Reynolds 1972, 349).

The house ‘at London Stone’ in fact lay well to the north of London Stone itself, on

the north side of the churchyard of St Swithin’s and abutting on St Swithin’s Lane on the

east (Kingsford 1920, 44–8), the property marked as ‘Prior of Tortington’s Inn’ and

‘Drapers’ Hall’ on the British Historic Towns Atlas map of London in about 1520 (Lobel

1989; Harding & Barron 2018). It may, however, like the later Oxford Place that stood

on this site, have had a gate onto Candlewick Street – presumably facing London Stone

and leading to a passageway along the west side of St Swithin’s church (Kingsford 1920,

47).

Kingsford (ibid 44–8) traces the complex history of this property under its later

name ‘Tortington Inn’. Part of site belonged in the fifteenth century to the Drapers’

Company, and for a while became the site of their hall. However, the main building and

appurtenances had in 1286 been bequeathed by Henry Fitz Ailwin’s great-grandson

Robert Aguilon to the Priory of Tortington in Sussex. In 1539 this property was seized

by Henry VIII and granted to John de Vere, 15th Earl of Oxford, who renamed it Oxford

Place. The 17th Earl, Edward de Vere, sold the property in about 1580, and Lord Mayor

Sir Ambrose Nicholas occupied it during his mayoralty in 1579–80.29

In the 1880s Henry Coote argued that the reputation of London Stone depended

solely upon its connection with Henry, the first mayor – that it was no more the last

remaining stone of the great house in which Henry and his father had lived (Coote

1881, 291–2). Regrettably, Coote seems to have failed to take into account at least two

relevant facts: firstly that, as we have seen, London Stone is mentioned by name at the

very beginning of the twelfth century, long before Henry’s time; and secondly that the

house that Henry inherited from his father lay on the north side of St Swithin’s church,

separated from the site of London Stone by the church itself as well as by the width of

29 The old connection with London Stone may have been still remembered – or perhaps reinvented – in

1641 when the Salters’ Company bought ‘the great house called London Stone or Oxford Place’ and made it their hall (Kingsford 1920, 47).

20

Candlewick Street (Kingsford 1920, 44–8).

At the same time others, like Laurence Gomme and Grant Allen, turned Cootes’s

proposition on its head by claiming that Henry derived his authority as mayor from his

guardianship of London Stone, which was itself London’s foundation and fetish stone, as

we shall see (Gomme 1890a, 218–9; Allen 1891, 382–3). It is indeed an ‘obscure and

archaic prestige’, as Reynolds put it (1972, 349), when its nature is such that we are left

in doubt whether it was the prestige of London Stone that attached itself to a local

resident, or the prestige of the resident that attached itself to the Stone!

3.3: ‘Brut sett Londen ston’

So far, London Stone seems to have been no more than a familiar landmark, lending its

name to adjacent properties and their tenants. No early writer comments on its origin

or attempts to explain its significance. However, in the 1330s an anonymous scribe,

writing out a verse chronicle of England from the time of Brutus to the reign of Edward

II, made the startling claim that Brutus, the legendary Trojan founder of London as

‘New Troy’, had set up London Stone, and had thereupon prophesied that London

would be a greater city than Troy had ever been:

Brut sett Londen ston

& þis wordes he seyd anon,

‘Ȝif ich king þat after me come

Make þis cite wide & rome

As ichaue bi mi day,

Ȝete herafter men sigge may

Þat Troye nas neuer so fair cite

So þis cite schal be.’

Brutus set London Stone

And these words he said anon:

‘If each king that comes after me

Makes this city wide and roomy

As I have in my day,

It may be that hereafter men may say

That Troy was never so fair a city

As this city shall be.’

(Burnley & Wiggins 2003b, lines 457–64 (my modernisation))30

The poem is known, by a title that is perhaps more systematic than elegant, as the

Anonymous Short English Metrical Chronicle (or a variant of that title – see O’Farrell-

Tate 2002, 14–17). It survives in whole or part in a handful of manuscripts, from most

of which it has been separately edited and printed.31 The manuscript versions differ,

however. The couplets about Brutus and London Stone do not appear in the earliest

surviving manuscript text – also the first to be printed, by antiquary Joseph Ritson in a

30 Other manuscript versions of this text differ slightly, though they include Brutus’s responsibility for

‘setting’ London Stone and his prophecy of London’s greatness. Thus the15th-century text edited by Zettl (1935, 55, lines 115–20) (from MS F = Cambridge, University Library MS Ff V 48) reads:

Brut set London ston And þis worde he seid riȝt anon What kynge þat comes after my day Forsoþe he segge may Þat Troy was neuer so faire to se So London shall wax after me.

31 By Ritson (1802, 2: 270–313), Carroll & Tuve (1931), Zettl (1935), O’Farrell-Tate (2002) and Burnley & Wiggins (2003b). Most of these editors list the manuscripts and discuss their relationship – see for example Zettl (1935, xi–xlvi) and O’Farrell-Tate (2002, 18–21).

21

collection of ‘ancient English metrical romances’ (1802, 2: 270–313). This, in a

manuscript in the British Library (MS Royal 12 C. XII – usually cited as version R) tells

us only that Brutus built London and called it New Troy (lines 95–100), a belief that had

been traditional ever since it was first expounded by Geoffrey of Monmouth in the

1130s (Geoffrey of Monmouth 2007, 30–31; Clark 1981).

A more recent editor, Una O’Farrell-Tate (2002, 9), assigns version R of this English

Metrical Chronicle to a date around 1316. The dialect of the original is West Midlands,

and version R seems to have been written by a scribe based in Ludlow.

At first sight the poem is a rather pedestrian versification of memorable points from

the reign of each ‘British’ and English king – often no more than the length of their

reign, a conventional assessment of their ‘works’, and the place they were buried. Not

all is consistent with conventional historical accounts. King Harold II (Godwinson) is

confused with Harold I (Harefoot), son of King Cnut, and is himself said to have been

put to death by William the Conqueror rather than dying in battle (lines 898–909); King

Arthur survives the fatal battle with Mordred, recaptures the kingdom and reigns for a

further ten years (lines 290–304). O’Farrell-Tate (2002, 29) comments ‘some material

may have been imperfectly remembered or heard’, and the whole composition has the

appearance of something intended to be memorised and recited. Occasionally the text

broadens out to provide extended coverage of an episode – the petition by Hugh of

France for the hand in marriage of one of King Athelstan’s sisters, for example, and the

list of the fabulous gifts he sent (lines 596–647). The sources the poet draws on for such

elaborations are often obscure. His extended account of the fight between Brutus’s

companion Corineus and the giant Goemagog includes details not found in Geoffrey of

Monmouth – Brutus’s encouragement of Corineus in the name of Corineus’s lover

‘Erneburh’ (a maiden ‘whiter than the foam’ who is otherwise unknown to history or

legend!) (lines 65–80), for example. In this instance O’Farrell-Tate (2002, 37) suggests

‘the possibility that there was once a romance of Corineus which has been lost’.

The inclusion of such extended episodes and divergence from ‘history as we know it’

are even more noticeable in other manuscripts that include the poem. A much fuller

version (known as A) is included in the National Library of Scotland’s ‘Auchinleck’

manuscript (NLS Adv MS 19.2.1), one of that library’s treasures.32 The volume,

produced in London probably between 1331 and 1340, comprises a highy significant

compilation of over 40 poems in Middle English, including romances, saints’ legends

and religious verses, many of them otherwise unknown. Among them is a considerably

longer version of the metrical chronicle. It begins not with the arrival of Brutus but with

some 350 lines devoted to the story of Albina, a Greek princess who plotted with her

sisters to murder their husbands. Sent into exile they came to the island of Britain, and

named it ‘Albion’. Later they gave birth to a race of giants, who ruled the land until the

coming of Brutus and his Trojan followers. Thus anomalies ignored by Geoffrey of

Monmouth – for Geoffrey simply tells us ‘The island was at that time called Albion, it

32 For full details of the manuscript and its contents see the edition by Burnley & Wiggins (2003a),

available on line.

22

had no inhabitants save for a few giants’ (Geoffrey of Monmouth 2007, 26–7) – are

explained. This story of Albina and the origin of the giants was first popularised in a

13th-century Anglo-Norman poem Des grantz geanz, a surviving manuscript version of

which dates to around 1333–4 (Brereton 1937, xxxii – and see also Johnson 1995).

Later manuscripts containing the Short Metrical Chronicle omit the story of Albina

and her sisters, but otherwise are very similar to the Auchinleck version.33 Zettl (1935,

xxxiv–xlvi) attempted to relate these versions to each other by a detailed comparison of

the texts and by proposing the former existence of now lost intermediate versions.

However, if we admit the possibility that the texts represent an original that was

memorised and transmitted orally we may allow much more flexibility, not just the

changes a scribe might make in copying a written text. Auchinleck can thus stand as the

earliest exemplar of the text of – dare we call it? – the Anonymous Expanded Short

English Metrical Chronicle.

And some of these expansions are notable for their novelty. Thus Corineus, after

hurling the giant Goemagog into the sea, wades in after him, cuts of the giant’s head, and

hangs it from a chain in Cornwall (lines 435–40). Some episodes have every appearance

of being free-standing stories or romances, or possibly de novo fictions, slotted in at a

convenient point in the historical narrative, sometimes replacing the more conventional

chronology of kings and events. Thus whereas the ‘short’ version R provides a

conventional, if abbreviated, sequence of kings – Bladud, Leyr (Leir), Denewold

(Dunvallo), Belins and Brenne (Belinus and Brennius) and Cassabalon (Cassivelaunus)

in the order (although with many omissions) that they had appeared in Geoffrey of

Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain – the ‘expanded’ text of version A replaces

Leir with ‘Fortiger’, and interpolates, after the death of ‘Belin’, a long account (lines

655–876) of the life and achievements of a certain ‘Hingist’ or ‘Hengist’ – whose only

connection with the later Saxon invader of that name seems to be that he is likewise a

foreign conqueror. Hingist calls a parliament in London, he builds Stonehenge, and he

orders that London be renamed ‘Hingisthom’ (lines 731–8). He then (line 740) ‘conjures

up three hundred fiends of Hell’ to build a bridge across the sea to France, which brings

him into conflict with an otherwise unknown king of France called ‘Selmin’. After

threats on both sides, Selmin cedes Normandy and Gascony to Hingist. Hingist then

conquers Scotland, and after reigning for 150 years, founding many cities and having

thirty-five children by seven wives, he dies and is buried at Glastonbury. He is

succeeded by his ‘son’ Leir (lines 877–8), and a more conventional account of ‘British

history’ resumes. Zettl (1935, lviii–lx) could find no source for this Hingist or the

account of his activities.

Meanwhile the expected account of the ‘historical’ Hengist and his dealings with the

British King Vortigern, familiar to all readers of Geoffrey of Monmouth, is replaced by

33 Listed by O’Farrell-Tate (2002, 19–20): B: British Library Additional MS 18677, 1390–1400; D:

Cambridge University Library MS Dd 14 2, c 1432; F: Cambridge University Library MS Ff 5 48, c fifteenth century. Versions H and C are fragmentary, version G (Cambridge University Library MS Gg 1 1, first half of fourteenth century) is in Anglo-Norman French, probably a translation from the English original.

23

the tale of the ‘maiden Inge’, who, we are told, came to Britain in the time of King Seberd

(presumably King Sæberht of the East Saxons, who died c 616) ( lines 1263–1344).

Arriving with many followers fleeing famine in Spain,34 she undertook many exploits

normally attributed to Saxon Hengist and his daughter Rowenna – tricking the British

king into granting enough land on which to build a castle, greeting the king at a feast

with ‘wassail’, and slaughtering him and his followers. Finally, Inge, having won power

in Britain, decreed that the land should be called ‘Inglond’ (lines 1333–4). This seems to

be the only extensive account of Inge to survive, although that such a story was in

circulation is confirmed by the contemporary author Robert Mannyng of Brunne,

writing in 1338, who dismissed it as a popular oral tradition – ‘Bot þis [of Inge] lewed

men sey & synge’ – preferring to follow the clerkly written accounts of Hengist and

Rowenna – since ‘no clerk may kenne’ of Inge (Zettl 1935, lxix; Manning 1887, 264–5,

lines 7533–6).

Although, as noted above, the earliest known version of the Short Metrical Chronicle

has a West Midland provenance, the Auchinleck manuscript has a strong London

context. It was produced in a London workshop, and compiled probably for a wealthy

London client (Pearsall & Cunningham 1977, viii; Burnley & Wiggins 2003a). And a

number of ‘additions’ to the shorter version are of particular London interest and

sometimes reflect local knowledge (Zettl 1935, cxxxiii). As Hanna (2005, 105) says:

‘Originally a Western text, here it has been deliberately tailored for London use’. Alison

Wiggins (2010, 548–50) has discussed it in the context of ‘London literature’, drawing

attention to the many additions of London interest in the Auchinleck version of the

Short Metrical Chronicle.35

Thus one of the more extensive additions is an account of the (legendary)

foundation of Westminster Abbey (lines 1139–1262); one of the shortest, a couplet

reminding us that at the time Brutus was buried ‘near the Thames, on the land | Where

Westminster stands’, as the shorter version tell us,36 ‘Westminster was not begun then,

| Not for many and more years after’ (lines 485–6). And into the description of the

miraculous consecration of Westminster Abbey by St Peter, apparently drawn from

Matthew Paris’s Estoire de Seint Aedward le Rei (Fisher 2012, 152–3), our author

interpolates an (unlikely) explanation of the origin of the name of the obscure riverside

settlement of Charing (lines 1243–4). He then goes on to tell us that King Seberd (East

Saxon King Sæberht), the supposed founder of Westminster Abbey, was buried there

800 years ago, but his body remains ‘whole’ – ‘And if you will not believe me | Go to

34 Yet apparently her native language ws French, since ‘sche answerd in her language, | Trauaile somes

par mere sauage…’ (lines 1309–16). Given her similarities to Rowenna, daughter of Saxon Hengist, it is not surprising that other manuscripts assign her origins to ‘Saxons’ or ‘Saxony’.

35 Wiggins (2010, 550–1) also notes the interpolation of London episodes, with frequent references to London streets and localities, in the Auchinleck version of the romance Bevis of Hamtoun. These include a battle in the streets ‘Betwene Bowe and Londen ston’ (line 4319) – presumably ‘Bowe’ is the church of St Mary-le-Bow, rather than suburban Stratford-atte-Bow.

36 Itself an expansion on Geoffrey of Monmouth, who simply tells us that Brutus was buried in New Troy (Geoffrey of Monmouth 2007, 30–1).

24

Westminster and you may see’ (lines 1255–62).37

The writer displays a special interest in the names by which London has been

known. Brutus founds it and calls it ‘New Troy’ (lines 453–6); in honour of King Lud it is

renamed ‘Luddesburth’ (‘Lud’s-borough’)38 (line 736); Hingist demands it be called

‘Hingisthom’ (lines 737–8); and finally Julius Caesar (!) names it ‘Londen’ (lines 959–

62). Of these the names ‘Luddesburth’ (in place of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s ‘Kaerlud’)

and ‘Hingisthom’ and the role of Julius Caesar seem to be innovations – Geoffrey of

Monmouth merely attributed the development of ‘Kaerlud’ into ‘Lundene’ and then

‘Lundres’ to linguistic changes (Reeve & Wright 2007, 66–7). In the Auchinleck text

Julius Caesar goes on to build a tower in London, as well as castles in Bristol and

Rochester (lines 964–6). This appears to be the earliest reference in English to what

was, or was to become, a persistent London tradition that the Tower of London (or at

least the White Tower) had been built by Julius Caesar (Nearing 1948).

And the burial places of kings, already a concern of the originator of the Short

Metrical Chronicle, acquire more of a London resonance. King Bladud is buried

alongside his ‘father’ Lud at Ludgate (lines 531–4)39; King Alfred is buried in St Paul’s

cathedral (lines 1333–5) – rather than in Winchester; and ‘Arod’ (Harold I ‘Harefoot’,

son of Cnut) is buried at St Clement’s church ‘without Temple Bar’ (lines 1931–2).40

Local interest and knowledge is evident in the location of St Clement Danes church

outside Temple Bar and perhaps in the identification of this as the site of Harold’s

grave. That the place where the body of Harold Harefoot found its final resting place

was St Clement Danes church was cited by John Stow many years later as the (or a

possible) reason for the church’s name (Stow 1908, 2: 96). Whether or not Harold was

in truth buried there, that belief may thus already have been in circulation at the

beginning of the 14th century.

The local interest is also evident in a much more extraordinary claim about king

‘Fortiger’. Although Fortiger’s name is clearly that of the later King Vortigern who in

Geoffrey of Monmouth’s conventional chronology was so disastrously to welcome

Hengist and the Saxons into Britain, he seems in the Auchinleck Chronicle to usurp the

place of King Leir as Bladud’s son. Fortiger, we are told, died ‘in the tower of Eldwerk’

and was buried ‘in lead’ (presumably in a lead coffin) in the wall, ‘That stands upon

Houndsditch | Between Aldgate and the Tower’ (lines 605–8). There is an ambiguity:

37 The supposed remains of Sæberht were moved by Henry III during the construction of his new abbey

church, and then again by Edward II. On this second occasion, in 1307, the right arm was said to be still undecayed, with the skin clinging to the bone – presumably the origin of the poet’s claim that the king’s body was ‘whole’ (Stanley 1886, 9).

38 Could this be a reminiscence of the name ‘Lundenburh’ by which the city was indeed known in the 10th and early 11th centuries?

39 Our author or his source has apparently confused Rud Hud Hudibras (9th king of Britain and father of Bladud, according to Geoffrey of Monmouth) with Lud (80th king, builder of Ludgate and eponymous refounder of London)!

40 Harold I was originally buried at Westminster. His corpse was later exhumed and thrown into the River Thames, then recovered (according to the chronicle of John of Worcester) and buried in a ‘Danish cemetery’ in London, which may have been that of St Clement Danes church (Lawson 2004).

25

was he buried in the wall of a tower called Eldwerk that stands upon Houndsditch (as

concluded by Wiggins (2010, 549)), or was the ‘wall’ itself the City Wall on the east side

of the city, between Aldgate and the Tower of London? There were indeed towers in

this vicinity, facing onto Houndsditch – the ‘bastions’ added to the Roman city wall in

the 4th century (Merrifield 1965, 68–72); Bastions 2 to 5 in Merrifield’s numbering lie

‘between Aldgate and the Tower’ (ibid 320–1). There were also at least two smaller

Roman internal turrets on the same stretch of wall (ibid 299–301). Had one of these

bastions or turrets attracted the name ‘old-work’, in recognition of its perceived

antiquity? The ‘burial in lead’ cannot easily be explained – although there is room for

suspicion that the words ‘in lead’ are there simply to supply the rhyme with ‘dead’.41

However, the Roman bastions were built in haste, reusing in their foundations

monumental stones from cemeteries outside the wall – the most notable examples

being the material found in the foundations of Bastion 2 (Trinity Place) between 1852

and 1935 (ibid 320). Could similar finds from one of the other bastions, perhaps

revealed during building works in the early 14th century, have been recognised as

funerary monuments and so have inspired tales of a royal burial ‘in’ the tower?

It is in this context of legendary, misidentified and perhaps even simply fictitious

characters and events that we find the account of Brutus setting up London Stone and

prophesying the future greatness of New Troy. But to which category – legend,

misinterpretation, or inspired invention – should we assign it? In the case of the

‘maiden Inge’ we have the witness of a contemporary that a story of some sort was

circulating among ‘lewed men’. The belief that Julius Caesar built the Tower of London

was already current when the author/editor/scribe of the Auchinleck manuscript set to

work, for Homer Nearing (1949, 224 note 37), not aware of its appearance here,

identified the earliest occurrence of the story as that in an Anglo-Norman French

chronicle written in the 1330s by Nicholas Trevet (a London Dominican friar who died c

1334) (Gransden 1974, 501-7; Dean & Boulton 1999, 47-8).

Yet, what are we to make of the saga of King Hingist, and the extraordinary

perversions of the name of London, or the interment of the otherwise unknown

Fortiger, apparently in a lead coffin, in the City Wall on Houndsditch?42 Was our author

recording, or elaborating upon, stories or anecdotes well known in London at the time,

or did he, in a context of writing that is surely closer to ‘romance’ than ‘history’, feel free

to interpolate his own imaginative fancies to entertain a London audience?

Of Brutus at London Stone, Zettl (1935, li) noted ‘This incident is not mentioned in

any of the known chronicles’. That Brutus, legendary founder of London, should have

set up the stone that, as we have seen, was already in the twelfth century known as

41 Similarly, the poet, in describing other royal burials, makes great use of formulae involving rhymes of

‘bone’ with ‘stone’: thus, of King Leir, ‘Þo he was ded men leyd his bon | At Leicestre in a marble ston’ (lines 935–6).

42 Although it may be a cause for suspicion that the words ‘in lead’ supply the rhyme with ‘dead’! Similarly, the poet, in describing other royal burials, makes great use of formulae involving rhymes of ‘bone’ with ‘stone’: thus for example, of King Leir, ‘Þo he was ded men leyd his bon | At Leicestre in a marble ston’ (lines 935–6).

26

‘London Stone’, and, indeed, should have prophesied that the city would be greater than

Troy itself, would be ideas that could have occurred to any patriotic Londoner. We must

remain uncertain whether the idea occurred first to that anonymous body known as

‘tradition’ or to the equally anonymous ‘author’ of the ‘expanded’ version of the Short

Metrical Chronicle – and can we identify the latter with the person known

conventionally as ‘Scribe 1’, who was responsible for the writing of most of the

Auchinleck volume (Burnley & Wiggins 2003a)? Was he a copyist or an amanuensis, or

a creative (and perhaps mischievous) poet/author in his own right? 43

Whether or not it was original, the idea seems not have had wide or long-lived

circulation – at least not among those who might put it into writing. When the

antiquaries of the sixteenth century were debating the origins and significance of

London Stone they appear to have been unaware of this particular claim – indeed, as we

shall see, by then there was instead a suggestion that the Stone had been erected not by

Brutus but by equally legendary King Lud when he rebuilt the city. And yet, more than

500 years after the production of the Auchinleck manuscript, we shall find London

Stone once more identified as the stone set up by Brutus, and the occasion of a

prophecy. Was this the result of the transmission, or indeed rediscovery, of a medieval

belief, or an independent and coincidental invention? (See below, ‘The Welsh

connection’ and following, particularly ‘Richard Williams Morgan and the Short English

Metrical Chronicle’.)

3.4: Thomas Walsingham and ‘London Lickpenny’

From the eccentricities of the Short Metrical Chronicle it is something of a relief to turn

to the writings of a more orthodox chronicler – although one who refers London Stone’s

existence to a date earlier than the documentary records we have so far quoted. This

was Thomas Walsingham, monk of St Albans, who in his Gesta Abbatum, written in the

late fourteenth century, recorded that William the Conqueror had deprived St Albans

Abbey of most of its domains from Barnet as far as London, to ‘the place commonly

called Londoneston’ (‘a Barneto usque Londonias, ad locum vocatum vulgariter

Londoneston’ (Walsingham 1867–9, 1: 50).

Unfortunately, it is not clear how much reliance can be placed on this reference. The

passage is apparently not found in the Liber Additamentorum of the better-known St

Albans historian of the thirteenth century, Matthew Paris (British Library Ms Nero D i:

printed in volume 6 of Paris 1872–84) which formed the basis of most of Walsingham’s

account of the early abbots of St Albans (Walsingham 1867–9, xi). But whatever the

origins of the reference, it hints that by the time Walsingham was writing, ‘the place

called London Stone’ had status as a landmark, and perhaps a reputation for centrality,

a point from or to which distances might be measured.44

43 Scribal practice and the potential role of ‘Auchinleck Scribe 1’ as author are discussed by Fisher (2012,

157–78).

44 Is it possible that this London Stone was another then similarly named location on the route from Barnet to London? – something that a study of Middlesex records might throw light on. Moreover, Walsingham’s reference to a place called Londoneston is puzzling – one might expect him to refer as others did to a stone called Londoneston.

27

We next meet London Stone in an oft-reprinted poem from the early fifteenth

century, ‘London Lickpenny’. Once attributed to John Lydgate, this poem is a narrative

of the misadventures of a countryman from Kent who has come to London to seek

justice, is fobbed off by lawyers in Westminster and finds himself lost, harangued and

bewildered in the streets of the city:

Then went I forth by London Stone

Thrwgheout all Canywike Strete;

Drapers to me they called anon,

Grete chepe of clothe they gan me hete;

Then come there one, and cried, ‘Hot shepes fete!’ (Dean 1996, 224)

Our hero’s brush with the cloth merchants and fast food sellers comes in the course of a

peregrination that apparently takes him from Westminster to Cheapside, down to

Candlewick Street (Cannon Street), to Eastcheap, thence up to Cornhill, and finally to

Billingsgate.45 Although we can trace his wanderings street by street, London Stone is

the only landmark that is mentioned, apart from Westminster Hall and Westminster

Gate. It is clearly thought of as a familiar sight – and one whose name might be known

to a visitor from Kent.

3.5: Jack Cade at London Stone

We now come to what is probably the most significant historical episode in which

London Stone was involved, and by chance it also concerns a visitor to the city from

Kent. It was in 1450 that (reputedly) Jack Cade, the Kentish rebel, struck the Stone with

his sword or staff to seal his claim to be ‘Lord of London’.46

This incident is most familiar in its dramatic rendition by William Shakespeare in

Henry VI Part 2, which we have already referred to above. Perhaps written in

collaboration with others, the play was first performed in 1591 or 1592, and first

printed in 1594 under the title The First Part of the Contention Betwixt the Two Famous

Houses of Yorke and Lancaster. We quote the London Stone scene here in full, as it was

printed in 1619 in the ‘Third Quarto’ edition. This was the first edition to attribute the

play to Shakespeare. The scene is slightly shorter than in the First Folio edition of 1623,

the text of which is followed by most modern editions.

Enter Iacke Cade, and the rest, and strikys his sword vpon

London stone

Cade. Now is Mortemer Lord of this City,

And now sitting vpon London stone, We command,

That the first yeare of ovr reigne,

45 Medieval Candlewick Street was much shorter than modern Cannon Street, being only that part of the

modern street that lies to the east of Walbrook (Ekwall 1954, 79). Thus our traveller going ‘by’ London Stone and ‘throughout’ Candlewick Street was walking eastwards from the Walbrook stream, and would naturally come next to Eastcheap; his subsequent diversion up to Cornhill before returning to Billingsgate is less logical!

46 This and the following sections were originally published in Clark 2007b.

28

The pissing Cundit run nothing but red wine.47

And now henceforward, it shall bee treason

For any that calles me any otherwise then

Lord Mortemer.

Enter a souldier.

Soul. Iacke Cade, Iacke Cade.

Cade. Zounds knocke him downe. They kil him

Dicke. My Lord,

Ther’s an Army gathered together into Smithfield.

Cade. Come then, let’s go fight with them,

But first go on and set London-bridge a fire,

And if you can, burn downe the Tower too.

Come, let’s away. Exit omnes (Shakespeare 1619, sig G1 verso – G2 recto)

The scene is a drastic piece of compression by Shakespeare of the events of 1450.48

As we shall see, Cade, who had taken the name of John Mortimer (hinting at kinship

with the Duke of York (Harvey 2004)), did indeed strike London Stone with his sword,

and claim to be Lord of London; he did on his first arrival in the city make regal-

sounding proclamations (‘in the Kinges name & in his name’ according to one

chronicler) – not at London Stone, but rather at St Magnus church and at Leadenhall,

and not to order the conduits to flow with wine but to restrain his followers from

plundering the city. Moreover it was rumoured that he had old companions killed

because they might reveal his real name and lowly origins. Thus Shakespeare’s

probable source, Edward Hall (Halle 1548, fol clx recto), describes him in Southwark

ordering the killing of various men ‘of his olde acquaintance, lest they shoulde blase &

declare his base byrthe, and lowsy lynage, disparagyng him from his usurped surname

of Mortymer’. Meanwhile the New Chronicles attributed to Robert Fabyan (1811, 624)

record the death of a man called Bayley, at Mile End, and suggest that ‘as I have herde

some men reporte’ Cade contrived his death for fear ‘that he wolde dyscouer his

lyuynge & olde maners and shewe of his vyle kynne and lynage’. But the ‘seat of

judgement’ role, which London Stone plays in this scene, appears to be Shakespeare’s

own contribution to the story.

His immediate inspiration for the scene was apparently a very brief passage in

Edward Hall’s account of the Wars of the Roses, printed in 1548 under the title The

Union of the Two Noble and Illustrate Famelies of Lancaster and York – although Hall had

47 The ‘Pissing Conduit’ by the Stocks Market (Stow 1908, 1: 183) was presumably so called because it

provided only a thin and intermittent stream of water. That the conduits should run with wine seems to have been an established feature, first recorded in 1399, of the pageants surrounding the formal reception of royal visitors to London (Withington 1918–20, 1: 132 and footnote 2), and Shakespeare’s audience would have recognised Cade’s demand (like his references to ‘our reign’ and to ‘treason’) as a presumptuous claim to royal privilege.

48 Although the ‘army gathered together into Smithfield’ clearly belongs not in the context of Cade’s rebellion but rather in that of the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381!

29

completed it a few years earlier, in about 1532 (Gransden 1982, 470–1): ‘he entred into

Londo’, and cut the ropes of the draw bridge, stryking his sworde on london stone,

saiyng: now is Mortymer lorde of this citie, and rode in euery street lyke a lordly

Capitayn’ (Halle 1548, fol clix verso – clx recto). A very similar passage occurs in

Raphael Holinshed’s Chronicles, published in 1577 with an extended edition in 1587,

and the source of much of Shakespeare’s historical knowledge: ‘[Cade] entered into

London, cut the ropes of the draw bridge, & strooke his sword on London stone; saieng:

‘Now is Mortimer lord of this citie!’ (Holinshed 1587, 3: 634). However, the similarity of

the play’s title in the First Quarto edition The First Part of the Contention Betwixt the

Two Famous Houses of Yorke and Lancaster to that of Hall’s book The Union of the Two

Noble and Illustrate Famelies of Lancaster and York may indicate that it was Hall rather

than Holinshed who was the primary inspiration in this case. Indeed, Kenneth Muir

(1977, 29) concluded that the play was based almost wholly on Hall’s work.

The Quarto edition of the play follows its sources in making Cade strike the Stone

with his sword – although in the First Folio of 1623 (a fuller and apparently a more

authoritative text) and in modern editions, he does so with a staff. Why the playwright

(if he did), or perhaps an editor, made this change to the historical narrative is not

clear.49 The relationship between the Quarto (a ‘bad quarto’) and Folio editions of this

play has been much discussed. Wells and Taylor, in the Oxford Textual Companion to

Shakespeare (1987, 175–8), conclude that the three Quarto editions probably derive

from a ‘memorial reconstruction’ of actual performances of the play by one or more of

those involved, and the Folio from ‘foul papers’ (manuscript drafts) with later

amendments. Thus it is likely that in actual performance the actor playing Cade struck

the Stone with his sword, as readers of the chronicles might expect (ibid 177 and 189).

3.6: The rebellion of 145050

After years of heavy taxation to fund the war with France, complaints at the corruption

and mismanagement of Henry VI’s government reached a peak in 1450, in mass

petitions to the king, naming those thought to be most corrupt, who included the Duke

of Suffolk and the royal Treasurer, Lord Saye and Sele. There was an armed uprising in

Kent, supported in Essex and the other home counties. In a rerun of events in 1381, the

Kentish rebels gathered at Blackheath in early June. But this was no Peasants’ Revolt.

The rebels included yeoman farmers, prosperous villagers and townsfolk, and even

some of the lesser gentry. The fighting men were the well-equipped and trained troops

of the county militia. Their leader was John Cade, known as ‘the Captain of Kent’, a man

of obscure origins. Cade took the name ‘John Mortimer’, connoting kinship with Richard

49 Ronald Knowles, in his edition of the play, suggests that ‘staff carries great visual irony’ given its

function elsewhere in the play as a symbol of power or of a pilgrim’s piety (Shakespeare 1999, 317 note).

50 This brief summary is derived largely from Griffiths’ narrative (1981, 610–17 – see also Harvey 1991 and 2004). It makes no claim to be definitive or necessarily accurate in detail. Contemporary chroniclers differ in their accounts of the sequence of events as well as the absolute chronology. For example, the New Chronicles attributed to Robert Fabyan claim that Cade first entered London not on Friday 3 July but on Thursday 2 July (Fabyan 1811, 624).

30

Mortimer, Duke of York, currently out of favour at court and not seen to be implicated

in the corrupt government.

Henry VI, adjourning parliament at Leicester, hastened back to London and marched

on Blackheath with an armed force. Cade’s followers, perhaps unwilling to meet their

king in open warfare, dispersed – but after rebels had defeated royal troops in a

skirmish near Sevenoaks the main rebel force reassembled with even greater support

at Blackheath on 29 June, joined by men from Surrey and Sussex. At about this same

time rebels from Essex headed towards London and gathered at Mile End. Meanwhile

the king and most of his court and officials had left London for Kenilworth, leaving the

defence of the city in the hands of the mayor and a small royal garrison at the Tower.

On 1 or 2 July Cade led the rebels from Blackheath into Southwark, where he made

his headquarters at the White Hart inn. On the late afternoon of Friday 3 July Cade and

his followers crossed London Bridge into the City. There may have been some

resistance at the Bridge, but Cade’s men cut the ropes of the drawbridge so that it could

not be raised against them, and according to one account Cade was handed the keys of

the city. Many Londoners, including wealthy and influential ones, clearly supported the

rebels’ campaign against the corruptions of royal government. Cade made

proclamations against looting and violence, and at first his followers seem to have

obeyed. The rebels returned to Southwark for the night.

The next day, Saturday 4 July, things turned more ugly, and accounts of what

followed are confused and inconsistent. The king, apparently swayed by popular

feeling, had already ordered a commission to meet at London’s Guildhall to try some of

the most hated of the royal ministers and officials, among them the Treasurer, Lord

Saye and Sele. The rebels demanded he be handed over to them for justice. He was led

to the Standard in Cheapside and beheaded. His head and those of other victims were

mounted on spears and paraded through the streets, finally set up over the gate on

London Bridge; his naked body was dragged behind Cade’s horse around the city and

across the Bridge into Southwark.

Perhaps fuelled by this act of rough justice, there was an outbreak of looting and

killing. Even Cade seems to have taken part in the looting.

Late on Sunday 5 July, the City authorities decided to make a stand. London Bridge

must be held to prevent further incursions from the rebel base in Southwark. A mixed

force of Londoners and king’s men from the Tower faced the rebels on the Bridge. A

fierce battle lasted through the night. There were many casualties on both sides, and

houses on the Bridge were set on fire, but by the morning of 6 July the Londoners held

the Bridge and were able to barricade the gate against the rebels.

A truce was called. Later that day a deputation led by the Archbishop of Canterbury

met Cade in Southwark, received the rebels’ petitions and offered free pardons. The

rebels soon dispersed, satisfied. As far as London was concerned, the rebellion was over

– until the body of John Cade, who was declared a traitor on 10 July and captured and

killed a few days later, was returned to London. The corpse was beheaded and

quartered at Newgate, and the head placed on London Bridge.

The three days of turmoil were long remembered in London. London chroniclers

give accounts, often incoherent and inconsistent, presumably reflecting the

31

recollections of eyewitnesses. And several mention one particular incident: ‘He rode

thorough dyvers stretes of the cytie, and as he came by London stone, he strake it with

his sworde, and sayd, “Nowe is Mortymer lorde of this cytie”’ (Fabyan 1811, 624).

3.7: Jake Cade in the chronicles

It is evident from fuller chronicle accounts that the incident described in the sources

drawn on by Shakespeare did indeed occur, although its context – let alone its

significance – is less certain. Thus, in the chronicle known as the Brut, in a version that

extends to 1461 and was written, almost certainly by a London-based chronicler, soon

after that date (Gransden 1982, 222–3):

And the third day of Iuyl he come & entred into London with al his peple, & did make A

cry ther in the Kinges name & in his name, that no man shold robb ne take no mannes

gode bot if he payd for it; and come ryding thrugh the Cite in gret pride, & smote his

swerde vpon London stone in Canwykstrete. (Brie 1908, 518)

There is a very similar account in an anonymous London chronicle that ends in 1509

(British Library Ms Cotton Vitellius A xvi), published by Kingsford in 1905:

[...] and in his entre at the Brigge he hewe the Ropys of the drawe brigge asunder; and

whan he came to Saynt Magnus he made a proclamacion vpon payne of deth, that no

man of his Ost shuld Robbe ne depoile no man wt in the Cite. And in like wise at

ledynhall and so thurgh the Cite wt grete pride. And at London Stone he strak vpon it

like a Conquerour. (Kingsford 1905, 160).

The same account is found in the so-called Great Chronicle of London (Thomas &

Thornley 1938, 183–4).

But the fullest version of the event appears in The New Chronicles of England and

France, which extended up to the year 1485, with a later continuation to the year 1509.

These New Chronicles were printed by Richard Pynson in 1516 and later attributed to

Robert Fabyan, London alderman and sheriff. Whether or not that attribution is correct

(McLaren 2002, 264–5; 2004) it is clear that the authors of this and of a number of

other anonymous chronicles were London-based, and if not eyewitnesses themselves of

the events of 1450 were clearly drawing on the recollections of some who were

eyewitnesses – and the inconsistencies and differences in emphasis are just what one

might expect of witness statements, or rather of witnesses’ much later recollections of

what happened.

Since the New Chronicles are the earliest account to mention the cry of ‘Now is

Mortimer lord of this city’, they were presumably, in printed form, the source from

which Hall and Holinshed both made abstracts.

And the same afternoone, aboute .v. of ye clok, the capitayne with his people entred by

the brydge; and whan he came vpon the drawe brydge, he hewe the ropys that drewe

the bridge, in sonder with his sworde, and so passed into the cytie, and made in sondry

places therof proclamacions in the kynges name, that no man, payne of dethe, sholde

robbe or take any thynge parforce without payinge therefore. By reason wherof he

wanne many hertes of the comons of the cytie; but all was done to begyle wt the people,

as after shall euydently appere. He rode thorough dyvers stretes of the cytie, and as he

32

came by London stone, he strake it with his sworde, and sayd, “Nowe is Mortymer lorde

of this cytie.” (Fabyan 1811, 624)

Most of these accounts, of course, were written long after the events by people who

were not eyewitnesses. For example, Robert Fabyan, if indeed he was one of our

authors, was probably not yet born at the time of Cade’s rebellion (he became

apprenticed, as a draper, only in about 1470 (McLaren 2004)). But they may well, with

their different wording and emphasis, reflect independent oral traditions of an episode

that struck Londoners of the time as worthy of note.

Another account written within a few years of the events also places Cade at London

Stone, but in a notably different context. John Benet was vicar of Harlington, in

Bedfordshire, from 1443 until 1471, and compiled a chronicle in Latin extending to the

year 1462 (Gransden 1982, 250, 254–7). Benet (or possibly an unknown original author

whose work he used) seems to have had personal knowledge of or sources of

information in both Oxford and London (ibid 255). He mentions no incident at London

Stone when Cade first entered London; instead he tells us that following the execution

by beheading of Lord Saye and Sele at the Standard in Cheapside on Saturday 4 July –

the day after Cade’s first arrival – Cade set the dead man’s head, with those of two other

victims, on spears, and tied Saye’s body behind his horse:

[...] he dragged him naked from the Standard out of Newgate and so through the Old

Bailey and through Ludgate, into Watling Street and so through Candlewick Street as far

as the Bridge, and there he went around a great stone striking it with his sword, and

there he set the three heads on a tower, and dragged the body as far as the hospital of St

Thomas in Southwark. (Benet 1972, 201; my translation)

The ‘great stone’ near the Bridge is obviously London Stone, not far from the head of

London Bridge. The topographical detail of this account suggests it is based on an

eyewitness report – the route can readily be identified on a map of medieval London

(Clark 2007b, fig 11). No other account goes into such detail, although several others

describe the rebels carrying around the heads of Saye and others on spears, and setting

them up on the gate tower of London Bridge.

Benet or his informant may have misremembered the sequence of events – unless

we are to suppose that Cade repeated his actions on London Stone on the second day.

The very fact that the context of the incident could be remembered in two different

ways seems to show that Cade’s action struck onlookers as memorable in its own right,

regardless of its context.51

Yet not all contemporaries seem to have thought of the London Stone episode as

important. Whether or not the chronicle attributed to William Gregory, long serving

alderman of Cordwainer ward and mayor in 1451–2, was in fact written by him,

personal touches and comments suggest that it is a first-hand account by a local author

51 In her authoritative account of Cade’s rebellion, I M W Harvey does not mention – let alone attempt to

explain – the London Stone episode (Harvey 1991, 90–98). Contrariwise, it provided the title Lord of London for Eric Simons’s more popular book on Cade, and the excuse for a long disquisition on the presumed traditional ‘magical qualities’ of the Stone (Simons 1963, 81–3).

33

with very strong opinions about the significance of the events of July 1450 (Gransden

1982, 230–1):

And a-pon the morowe, that was the Fryday, a gayn evyn, they smote a sondyr the ropys

of the draught brygge and faught sore a manly, and many a man was mortheryde and

kylde in the conflycte, I wot not what name hyt for the multytude of ryffe raffe. And

thenne they enteryde in to the cytte of London as men that hadde ben halfe be-syde hyr

wytte; and in that furynys thye wente, as they sayde, for the comyn wele of the realme of

Ingelonde, evyn strayght unto a marchaunte ys place i-namyd Phylyppe Malpas of

London. (Gairdner 1876, 191)

So this account stresses otherwise unrecorded violence that took place at the time

the drawbridge ropes were cut, omits Cade’s proclamations against looting and the

London Stone episode, and takes us straight to a subsequent event, the sacking of the

house of the alderman Philip Malpas in Lime Street – which other commentators tell us

did not take place until the following day, after the killing of Lord Saye and Sele in

Cheapside (Halle 1548, fol clx recto; Fabyan 1811, 624). Other chronicle accounts of

Cade’s attack on London, while mentioning one or more incidents (the cutting of the

drawbridge ropes, the proclamation at St Magnus church, the attack on Philip Malpas’s

house), also omit the scene at London Stone (for example, Flenley 1911, 132–3 and 155;

Gairdner 1880, 67–8; Nichols 1852, 19).

Thus not all our sources record the London Stone episode; none attempt to explain

it. Yet those who include it treat it as a matter of some consequence – and the variations

in their accounts imply that the story had been passed down independently by a

number of routes, presumably from original eyewitness reports. The episode occurs

while Cade is riding through London ‘in great pride’; he makes proclamations ‘in the

king’s name’ at St Magnus church and Leadenhall; he rides through the streets ‘like a

lordly captain’; he strikes London Stone with his sword ‘like a conqueror’; according to

Benet, he circles the Stone while striking it; he cries ‘Now is Mortimer lord of this city’.

All this suggests an event treated by Cade himself as of ceremonial importance, and

recognised as such by onlookers. It is not surprising that modern writers have regarded

it as proof that in the fifteenth century Londoners and others considered that London

Stone had a special meaning – that by asserting authority over the Stone, Cade claimed

possession of the city.

3.8: Jack Cade: what did he mean?

Yet what was the real significance of the incident? What was Cade’s intent? Was he

aware of an existing belief that possession of London Stone symbolised possession of

London (as many modern authors have assumed)? So far we have found nothing to

indicate that there was ever such a belief in medieval times, and those who treat the

Cade episode as proof of its existence are surely employing a circular argument. Too

often they seem to be influenced by Shakespeare’s interpretation of the event, in which

Cade not only strikes the Stone, but commandeers it as a throne from which to issue his

first edicts as ruler, and then to deliver judgement on the first man to offend against

34

them.52 This is great theatre. It is also fiction.

William Shakespeare was a dramatist, not a historian. But perhaps the episode was

theatre from the start – a piece of dramatic improvisation by the rebel leader.

With his claim of the name of Mortimer, and thus an implied royal descent through

kinship to the Duke of York (Harvey 2004), Cade reveals himself to be well aware of the

importance of what we would today call his ‘image’. Edward Hall described him as of

‘pregnaunt wit’ (Halle 1548, fol clix recto) and ‘sober in communicacion, wyse in

disputyng, arrogant in hart, and styfe in his opinion’ (ibid fol clix verso). The chronicles

concur that his progress through London was in the nature of a triumphal procession –

in some chronicles the details are spelt out. He is described as riding in a blue velvet

gown with sable trimmings, with gilded spurs and helmet, holding a naked sword in his

hand and ‘a swerde broghte befor hym pretendyng the state of a lorde, and yet wasse he

nozt but a lurdeyne [rascal]’ (Marx 2003, 69).

Cade knew what was expected of a regal procession, whether he was imitating one,

or, as Mary-Rose McLaren (2002, 68) proposes, parodying one. Alexander Kaufman

(2007) has contended that, rather than royalty, Cade was inspired by and imitating

London’s annual Midsummer Watch, when mayor and aldermen led a thousand or more

armed men in uniform, accompanied by ‘pageants’, musicians and morris dancers, in a

torchlight procession through the city, on the eves of St John the Baptist (24 June) and

of SS Peter and Paul (29 June). And certainly John Stow’s description of the mayor on

such an occasion – ‘the Mayor himselfe well mounted on horseback, the sword bearer

before him in fayre Armour well mounted’ (Stow 1908, 1: 102–3) is reminiscent of the

earlier description of Cade riding with ‘a swerde broghte befor hym pretendyng the

state of a lorde’ (above).

However, Kaufman’s claim (2007, 161) that ‘the procession route that Cade took

through London mimics and parodies the civic route that the London officials followed

during the fifteenth-century Midsummer Watch’ seems to be belied by Kaufman’s own

quotation of John Stow’s description of the route taken by the Watch (ibid 148).53

Instead, Cade’s peregrinations around the city seem rather to reflect knowledge of royal

practice. His original entry by way of London Bridge, stopping at St Magnus church and

at Leadenhall (Kingsford 1905, 160), mirrors a number of royal entries (for example,

that of Margaret of Anjou in 1445 (Withington 1918-20, 1: 148)). Later he followed the

customary royal route through Cheapside to St Paul’s (Flenley 1911, 133); we may

compare Henry V’s progress described by Withington (1918–20, 1: 134–5) and others.

However, the route along which, according to John Benet (1972, 201), he dragged the

52 Thus Grant Allen (1891, 383) writes ‘To sit upon [London Stone] was to enthrone himself on the

collective city’, and Adrian Gilbert (2003, 60) ‘[Shakespeare] knew all about the London Stone and the idea about its being the omphalos or navel-stone of England. As such it functions as Cade’s throne, the seat of his authority. Such allusions would not have been wasted on a Tudor audience...’.

53 ‘…a marching watch, that passed through the principal streets thereof, to wit, from the little Conduit by Paules gate, through west Cheape, by ye Stocks, through Cornhill, by Leaden hall to Aldgate, then backe downe Fenchurch streete, by Grasse church, aboute Grasse church Conduite, and vp Grasse church streete into Cornhill, and through it into west Cheape againe’ (Stow 1908, 1: 102).

35

dead body of Lord Saye and Sele (see above) was a novel one – not all Cade’s actions

were simple imitations of customary practice.

But whether in the context of royal or of civic ceremony, what could be a more

triumphant action than this? ‘They call this London Stone? Then at a single stroke I can

make myself Lord of London.’ Sadly, none of our sources enlightens us; we do not know

Cade’s thinking, nor how his followers or the Londoners who witnessed the event

interpreted it. And some contemporaries seem not to have regarded it as worth

recording at all.

There may be a clue in Shakespeare’s dramatic treatment, 140 years later – for it

seems that Shakespeare did not expect his audience to take the episode seriously. And

we have to assume there was no prior knowledge among Shakespeare’s audience of a

custom of striking London Stone with a sword to claim the mastery of London –

otherwise Shakespeare or the editor of the Folio edition could not so readily have

changed the incident to involve Cade’s staff rather than his sword.

In fact, the whole scene is played for laughs. The ironic comment by one of the

rebels (in the fuller First Folio text) on the fate of the soldier who had dared to call the

rebel leader ‘Jack Cade’ instead of Lord Mortimer, ‘If this fellow be wise, he’ll never call

you Jack Cade more; I think he hath a very fair warning’ – the ‘fair warning’ was his

murder; or Cade’s desire that the Pissing Conduit (that most inadequate of all London’s

conduits) should run with wine for a year, and his expectation (in the Folio version)

that this will be at the City’s expense; or even his parting instruction to his followers ‘if

you can’ to burn down the Tower of London, surely the most fireproof building in the

whole city. Kenneth Muir (1977, 30) comments that Shakespeare converts the Cade

depicted by Edward Hall into a ‘sinister buffoon’.

Shakespeare’s account of the London Stone episode cannot be read as history; nor

can we trust his interpretation of Cade’s motives. Sadly the sketchy accounts provided

by our only near-contemporary sources give us even less basis for interpretation.

Certainly we should not assume that Cade was carrying out a ‘traditional’ practice by

striking London Stone. In the absence of corroborative evidence, we cannot use his

apparently unprecedented act as proof of a pre-existing custom, or of a pre-existing

reverence for London Stone as a symbol of authority. Of all the events in the long

history of London Stone, its treatment by Jack Cade remains – apart from its origin – the

most mysterious!

3.9: Lud’s Stone

As we have seen, in the early fourteenth century the anonymous writer of a chronicle in

verse had claimed that Trojan Brutus had ‘set London Stone’ when he founded London

as New Troy. Whether this concept was ever current in London in medieval times is

unclear – no other medieval writer seems to have taken it up. However, by the sixteenth

century, the Stone became attributed to another of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s mythical

British kings – King Lud.

In 1457, soon after Cade’s rebellion, John Hardyng (1378–1465) presented to Henry

VI the first version of a history of England in verse from the settlement by Brutus and

the Trojans to 1437; he later extended it to 1464, amending some of the pro-

36

Lancastrian sentiments to suit the new Yorkist monarchy (Gransden 1982, 274–87). As

might be expected, the earlier part of his chronicle is based closely on the traditional

‘British History’ derived from Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniae

(History of the Kings of Britain). However, he elaborates on Geoffrey’s account of King

Lud, who rebuilt and fortified the city of New Troy/Trinovantum, renaming it Kaer Lud

(Lud’s Town) – the name which in course of time became ‘London’ (Geoffrey of

Monmouth 2007, 66–7; Clark 1981, 145–6). He adds a novel topographical detail to the

narrative, subtitling his chapter 41 ‘Lud, Kyng of Brytain, buylded from London Stone to

Ludgate, and called that parte, Lud’s towne.’

With walles faire, and towres freshe about.

His citee great of Troynouaunt, full fayre,

Full well he made, and batelled throughout;

....

From London stone to his palays royall,

That now Ludgate is knowen ouer all.

Betwene Londonstone & Ludgate forth right,

That called was then, for his name Ludstone,

He made men buyld, that London so then hight. (Hardyng 1812, 75–6)

Hardyng may intend us to understand ‘Ludstone’ as ‘Lud’s Town’, but the close

proximity of the reference to ‘Londonstone’ leads readily to a conclusion that London

Stone was once ‘Lud’s Stone’, and the possible implication that Lud himself had set it up

‘for his name’.

This may reflect a popular notion, and seems to lie behind what the French visitor

Grenade was told in the 1570s, or perhaps concluded himself on the basis of his

reading. As he tells us:

It is an incontestable fact, that King Lud, (of whom we have spoken twice above, and

whose nation was Saxon) caused this stone to be planted for several reasons. (Grenade

2014, 103, 224).

He then details Lud’s reasons. Firstly, to perpetuate his own name; secondly to

perpetuate the name of his race, the Saxons, by setting up a great ‘saxum’ (stone);54 and

thirdly ‘he had the stone placed there as a signpost and marker, for several have written

that he extended the city from this stone up to the gate called Ludgate’ – as Hardyng had

indeed stated (ibid 103–4, 224).

Grenade may have derived the information that Lud ‘buylded London from London

stone to Ludgate and called it Ludston’ (and the date 69 BC) from John Stow’s Summarie

of Englyshe Chronicles (1565, fol 18, marginal note), a text he used (Grenade 2014, 165

note 106), although as we have seen it was already present in the writings of John

54 No author other than Grenade attributes Saxon nationality to Lud (Grenade 2014, 165 note 106)! The

confusion between ‘British’ and ‘English’ nationality seems to be a persistent one.

37

Hardyng – presumably John Stow’s own source.55

The concept that the early city lay west of the Walbrook was a persistent one – it

was shared by William Stukeley. On Stukeley’s map of Roman ‘Londinium Augusta’,

dated 1722, a rectangular area in the western half of the city is bordered by double

dotted lines (Stukeley 1724, Plate 57; Clark 2008, 9, fig 1.1.3). He explains the

significance of this inner area, and its pre-Roman date (‘as we must suppose it in the

time of Immanuence, father to Cæsar’s ally Mandubrace’), in an essay written in 1758

and included in the second edition of his Itinerarium Curiosum:

[...] we discern, the original ground-plot of the oldest city is comprehended, in length,

from Ludgate to the present Walbrook; in breadth, from Maiden-lane, Lad-lane,

Cateaton-street [now united as Gresham Street], to the Thames. (Stukeley 1776, 2: 12)

3.10: ‘So sure a stone’

The second book of the New Chronicles of England and France attributed to the

alderman Robert Fabyan (died c 1513) opens with verses in praise of London:

This [city] so oldly foundyd

Is so surely groundyd

That no man may confounde it;

It is so sure a stone,

That it is vpon sette:

For thoughe some haue it thrette

With manassys grym and grete,

Yet hurt had it none. (Fabyan 1811, 294)

Some have taken this to be a direct reference to London Stone. Thus John Strype

wrote in 1720:

Methinks, some of our Forefathers had a Conceit, that London Stone was set up in

Signification of the City’s Devotion towards Christ and his Care and Protection of the

City; under the Notion of a Stone, on which it was founded, and by his Favour so long

preserved. For that Way these Rhimes of Fabian in the Praise of London, seem to look.

(Stow 1720, book 2: 193-4)

Lambert (1806, 2: 490–1) said the same 80 years later, and in largely the same words,

without acknowledging Strype as his source. And nearly 200 years after that Ackroyd

commented (2000, 18):

Yet it [London Stone] has been granted a charmed life. There is a verse by the fifteenth-

century poet, Fabyan, which celebrates the religious significance of a stone so pure that

‘though some have it thrette ... Yet hurte had [it] none’.

Yet the ‘poet’ (Fabyan himself dismissed his verses as ‘doggerel’) had made his meaning

clear in his next four lines:

55 For Stow’s use of Hardyng, particularly for details of the legendary British kings, see Hiatt (2004, 49–

51).

38

Cryste is the very stoon

That the cytie is sette vpon;

Which from all his foon [foes]

Hath euer preseruyd it. (Fabyan 1811, 294)

The stone referred to is Christ. London survives because it is founded upon the solid

rock of Christian faith. Strype’s ‘Conceit of our Forefathers’ was no more than his

supposition about the beliefs that early Londoners may have held concerning London

Stone – beliefs for whose existence there is, as we have seen, no evidence.

3.11: A marriage is announced...

In about 1522 Wynkyn de Worde printed a little book (Anon [c 1522]; Anon 1860) that

included a short poem entitled ‘The Maryage of the Fayre Pusell, the Bosse of

Byllyngesgate unto London Stone’. The poem, which is anonymous, occupies only two

pages of the original booklet, and consists of seven verses, each of eight lines, with a

slightly irregular rhyme scheme. It takes the form of an invitation to a wedding:

Of this lytell prosses that after doth appere.

Of .ii. that haue dwelte in London many a yere.

And nowe is dysposed to be man and wyfe.

Helpe them with your charyte to bye theyr weddynge gere

For they be bothe naked and not worth an halfpeny knyfe. (Anon 1860, 26)

The couple are introduced:

The one is the bosse of Byllyngesgate of beaute so fayre

And the other London Stone curtes and gente. (ibid 26–7)

The bride, the ‘fair pucelle’ of the title, is the spring of fresh water at Billingsgate that

was enclosed as one of the civic improvements funded from money bequeathed by

Richard Whittington (Stow 1908, 1: 208). An eighteenth-century reference, Nathan

Bailey’s Etymological English Dictionary, seems to indicate that it was at that time

ornamented with a sculpture – ‘a Gor-bellied Figure’, presumably female (Bailey 1726,

sv ‘boss’: ‘a Water Conduit, running out of a Gor-bellied Figure’).

It seems that London Stone has declared his love for the Bosse of Billingsgate.

Moreover, he wishes to marry her to protect her reputation, for she has been accused

by some ‘euyll tunges’ of having had a child by ‘the well with two buckettes in bysshop

gate strete’ (Anon 1860, 27).56 The term ‘pusell/pucelle’ that is applied to her in the title

is perhaps ambiguous. Originally, as in the case of Joan of Arc (‘la Pucelle d'Orléans’), it

meant no more than a ‘girl’ or ‘maid’, but by the late sixteenth century it was being used

sarcastically of a ‘slut’. The Oxford English Dictionary quotes this poem as the earliest

occurrence of this latter meaning (OED 1989, sv ‘pucelle’). Yet there seems nothing in

the poem to warrant this slander, and the OED also quotes contemporary Thomas More

in 1534 ‘This Girle is a metely good pussel in a house, neuer idle, but euer occupied and

busy’ as an example of the continuing use of the word in a neutral or even positive

56 If the definition of ‘boss’ as ‘a Gor-bellied Figure’ given by Nathan Bailey applied specifically to the

Bosse of Billingsgate, then the source of the rumour of illicit pregnancy is clear!

39

sense.

We are invited to watch the couple dancing – ‘It wolde do you good to see them

daunce and playe’ (Anon 1860, 27) and ‘Let us be merye and thynke howe they daunce’

(ibid 29). Indeed this is not the only contemporary occasion on which the Bosse of

Billingsgate might be seen dancing. The Oxford English Dictionary (OED 1989, s v ‘boss’)

quotes from the ballad ‘A godlye sayng’ (against priests’ wives) of about 1539:

When the bosse of byllyngate wa[x]ythe so merye

To daunce with a bagpipe at scala celi,57

& the crose of chepeside dothe kepe a scole of fence,

then put in prystes wyffes your trust & confydens. (Furnivall 1868–72, 315)

This later poem presents a catalogue of impossibilities (such as ‘When [...] Cattes vnto

myse do swere obedyence’), and we must conclude that, rather than their dancing it is

their steadfastness and constancy that makes London Stone and the Bosse of

Billingsgate an ideal couple.

For it is a goodly couple of them two.

For in theyr behauoure was neuer founde varyaunce. (Anon 1860, 29)

Presumably the Bosse of Billingsgate never gained the reputation as an unreliable

supplier of water that seems to have given the Pissing Conduit its name. And of London

Stone we remember John Stow’s description ‘so strongly set, that if carts do run against

it through negligence, the wheels be broken, and the stone itself unshaken’ (Stow 1908,

1: 224).

The poem tells us little about either the Bosse of Billingsgate or London Stone,

except that they were equally well-known London landmarks – and possibly, we

venture, equally symbols of solidity and trustworthiness. Once again, there is nothing to

suggest that London Stone was revered as an embodiment of the city and its well-being,

as later writers lead us to expect.

3.12: Pasquill’s Protestation upon London Stone58

In 1888 an anonymous contributor to Chambers’s Journal (whom we have noted earlier

and who was to have a surprising influence on later writers on London Stone) was to

claim that London Stone ‘had come to be one of the recognised places for the

promulgation of edicts at the latter end of the sixteenth century’ (Anon 1888, 242). The

only evidence the author cites for this claim is a publication that appeared in 1589,

whose long and elaborate title may be abbreviated to Pasquill and Marforius (as it

57 ‘Scala celi’: ‘ladder of heaven’. ‘The name of a chapel in the Tre Fontane, outside Rome, in which St

Bernard is related to have had a vision of souls for whom he was saying mass ascending by a ladder into heaven, and to which an indulgence is attached; hence, applied to chapels or altars in England and the masses said there to which the same indulgence was attached’ (OED 1989, sv Scala Cæli). From 1476 there was an altar with this privilege in St Stephen’s Chapel, Westminster; in London in the early sixteenth century the Friars of the Holy Cross (Crutched Friars) and the hospital of St Thomas of Acre in Cheapside also offered the same indulgence (Swanson 2007, 55).

58 This section has been published in revised form as ‘Pasquill’s Protestation: religious controversy at London Stone in the 16th century’ (Clark 2015).

40

appears in the running heads on the pages of the original book as printed) or The

Return of Pasquill (Anon 1589; Nashe 1958, 1: 65–103).59 Thus Chambers’s Journal tells

us:

‘Set up this bill at London Stone. Let it be doone solemnly, with drom and trumpet; and

looke you advance my cullour on the top of the steeple right over against it’ – runs a

passage in Pasquil and Marforius. And again we read: ‘If it please them these dark winter

nights to sticke uppe their papers uppon London Stone’ – from all of which it appears

that in those days it fulfilled functions which were a little later discharged in most

places, as they still are in some, by the town pump. (Anon 1888, 242)

It is clear from the wording that the unnamed Chambers’s Journal took the reference to

this rather obscure sixteenth-century source from the account of London Stone in John

Brand’s Observations on Popular Antiquities – perhaps from the most recent edition of

the same year 1888 (Brand 1888, 740). There the quotations are taken out of context,

however, referenced only to ‘Pasquill and Marforius, 4to, Lond. 1589’, and no

conclusions are drawn about London Stone’s function as a ‘place for the promulgation

of edicts’.60

It is not clear whether the Chambers’s Journal author was aware of the true nature of

the publication known as Pasquill and Marforius, and it has certainly since been

described wrongly as ‘a now forgotten play of 1589’ or ‘an Elizabethan play’ (Ackroyd

2000, 18; Westwood & Simpson 2005, 475). Pasquill and Marforius was not a play,

although it certainly takes the form of a dialogue. It was a pamphlet published as a

contribution to a major religious controversy that divided the England of Elizabeth I –

the ‘Martin Marprelate Controversy’.

England in the late sixteenth century was riven by religious conflict. It faced not only

the ever present threat of a resurgence of the suppressed Roman Catholic faith, but

disputes within the established Church of England. Puritans and Presbyterians saw

many of the practices of the Church of England, with its authoritarian hierarchy of

priests, bishops and archbishops, as little better than Papist, and sought its reformation

openly or subversively. In October 1588 the first of a series of seven satirical pamphlets

was published, their target the established Church of England and its prelates – and

they appeared under the name of ‘Martin Marprelate’. Issued from nomadic pirate

presses operating outside the law, they have been described as ‘among the liveliest

prose satires to appear in the sixteenth century’ (Ruoff 1975, 270). The bishops, led by

59 In full: The Returne of the renowned Caualiero Pasquill of England, from the other side the Seas, and his

meeting with Marforius at London vpon the Royall Exchange. Where they encounter with a little houshold talke of Martin and Martinisme, discovering the scabbe that is bredde in England; and conferring together about the speedie dispersing of the golden Legende of the lives of the Saints.

60 Brand’s discussion of London Stone, with the quotation from Pasquill and Marforius, first appeared (as a long footnote) in the revised and expanded version of his work, published after his death under the editorship of Sir Henry Ellis (Brand 1813, 2: 593).

41

John Whitgift, Archbishop of Canterbury, recruited writers to respond in kind.61 Thus

was born the Martin Marprelate Controversy, and ‘Martinists’ and ‘Anti-Martinists’

exchanged shot-for-shot in print (ibid 270–2). The last Martin Marprelate pamphlet was

published in September 1589, but the furore was slow to die down. There were arrests.

One supposed Martinist ringleader was hanged, another probably died in prison.

Three of the ‘Anti-Martinist’ pamphlets appeared under the name ‘Pasquill’. These

were once traditionally attributed to Thomas Nashe (1567–c.1601), playwright, poet

and pamphleteer, although they were almost certainly not by him (Nashe 1958, 5: 49–

58), and there has been much debate about their authorship.62

Pasquill and Marforius, which is dated 20 October 1589, was the second of these

Pasquill pamphlets. The reference to London Stone needs to be read in this context – it

is not a description of an actual event or even a realistically proposed course of action.

The pamphlet takes the form of a dialogue between Pasquill and his old friend

Marforius, who have met at the Royal Exchange, with satirical comment on ‘Martin’ and

his opinions. At the end of it Pasquill declares his intention of setting out his own views

publicly, in a bill to be stuck up on London Stone, inviting others to do the same:

In the meane season Marforius, I take my leaue of thee, charging thee vpon all our old

acquaintance, and vppon my blessing, to set vp this bill at London stone. Let it be doone

sollemnly with Drom and Trumpet, and looke you aduance my collours on the top of the

steeple right ouer against it [presumably the tower of St Swithin’s church], that euery

one of my Souldiers may keepe his quarter. (Anon 1589, sig Diii verso; Nashe 1958, 1:

100)

In a subsequent tract in the ‘Pasquill’ series, The First Parte of Pasquils Apologie, it

seems that Pasquill has made London Stone his headquarters, since it is addressed

‘From my Castell and Collours at London stone the 2. of Iuly. Anno. 1590’, thus

maintaining the military context for his activities (Nashe 1958, 1: 136).63

However, Pasquill and Marforius continues with a transcript of Pasquill’s proposed

proclamation:

PASQVILS PROTESTATION VPPON LONDON STONE

I Caualiero Pasquill, the writer of this simple hand, a young man, of the age of some few

hundred yeeres, lately knighted in Englande, with a beetle and a bucking tub, to beat a

little reason about Martins head, doe make this my Protestation vnto the world, that if

61 Editor of the Marprelate tracts Joseph Black concludes ‘…there seems little doubt that major elements

of the campaign were officially organized and sanctioned. More than twenty explicitly anti-Martinist works survive... Not all were part of the official response... many... those that deploy a recognizably Martinist style, were published with some measure of official encouragement’ (Black 2008, lxii).

62 The identification of Pasquill as Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, proposed by Elizabeth Appleton (2001), has been described by the recent editor of the Martin Marprelate texts as ‘implausible’ (Black 2008, xcviii note 58).

63 Appleton (2001, 283–8) notes the prevalence of military terms and images throughout the three Pasquill texts. However, it should be considered that Londoners would also have been familiar with companies of actors parading through the streets ‘with drum and trumpet’ to advertise their next production, so that the presence of these accompaniments does not in itself confirm that the image is a military one (Stern 2006, 58)!

42

any man, woman, or childe, haue any thing to say against Martin the great, or any of his

abettors, of what state or calling soeuer they be, noble or ignoble, from the very Court-

gates to the Coblers stall, if it please them these dark Winter-nights, to sticke vppe their

papers vppon London-stone, I will there giue my attendance to receiue them, from the

day of the date hereof, to the full terme and reuolution of seven yeeres ensuing. Dated

20. Octobris. Anno Millimo, Quillimo, Trillimo, per me venturous Pasquill the Caualiero.

(Anon 1589, sig Diii verso; Nashe 1958, 1: 101)

That Pasquill should, with the aid of Marforius, set up a bill in this way, and invite

others to do the same, is appropriate. His name, in its Italian form Pasquino, was first

applied to a statue in Rome, near the Piazza Navona, on which it became traditional to

stick up lampoons and political satires in prose or verse – ‘pasquinades’ (Room 1999,

885; Rendina 1991). On the other side of Rome was an ancient statue of a river god

where the same custom prevailed – it was known as Marforio. Our ‘Pasquill’ adopts the

Latin form of the name, Pasquillus, as it appears for example in the title of a collection of

the verses published in 1510, the first of many such anthologies: Carmina ad Pasquillum

posita (Rendina 1991, 20). On the other side of Rome, near the Forum, was an ancient

statue of a sea or river god where the same custom prevailed – it was (and is) known as

Marforio (ibid 58–62). Pasquino and Marforio are the two best known of Rome’s

‘talking statues’.

3.13: Bills, libels and ‘siquises’

But the practice of posting up provocative bills of this sort had in any case long been

known in London. Already in the 14th and 15th centuries there are references to official

proclamations, political tracts and partisan letters being posted up around London – at

the Cross in Cheap, at the door of St Paul’s, around the Palace of Westminster, in Fleet

Street and Cheapside and at London Bridge, on the doors and windows or private

houses, or simply in ‘divers places in the city’ (Gransden 1982, 238 and 251–2; Scase

1998).64 By the late sixteenth century, the availability of cheap printing facilitated the

plastering of London buildings, walls and structures with printed as well as

handwritten posters – official notices, playbills, title-pages of new books, and ‘siquises’

(advertisements, so called from their customary opening words in Latin or in English ‘si

quis..’, ‘if anyone...’), not to mention ‘libels’ (that is, declarations of political or religious

belief, or personal attacks on individuals, usually anonymous and scurrilous) (Stern

2006, 76–80; and see also Stern 2009, 53–6).

In her paper on playbills and advertising in Early Modern London, Tiffany Stern

notes some ‘publick places’ that were then notorious for the posting of bills, for example

‘Pauls Church dore’ and even the internal columns of the cathedral, the Old and New

Exchanges, and Cheapside (Stern 2006, 73 and 76 footnote 54). She draws attention to

Benjamin Rudyerd’s Le Prince d’Amour, an account of the Christmas Revels held at the

Middle Temple in 1599, where we read ‘[...] there was a Libel set up against him in all

64 The subject was also discussed by Professor Caroline Barron in her inaugural lecture ‘The writing on

the wall: the uses of literacy in Medieval London’ at Royal Holloway, University of London, 21 October 2002, and I am grateful to her for kindly providing me with a copy of her text.

43

famous places of the City, as Queen-Hithe, Newgate, the Stocks, Pillory, Pissing Conduit;

and (but that the Provost Marshall was his inward friend) it should not have missed

Bridewell’ (ibid 73; Rudyerd 1660, 80).65 Apparently none of these sources mentions

London Stone specifically.

Stern (2006, 77–8) also suggests that ‘legal’ space, for the display of official bills,

was distinct from that used for the random posting of siquises, libels and such unofficial

and private notices. She cites Adam Fox’s study of Oral and Literate Culture (2000, 45)

for the posting of public proclamations ‘where they might best be seen and redd of all

men’, usually in marketplaces and churches. Fox (ibid 313) identifies typical places for

the posting of libellous verses as the parish pump, the pillory, the maypole or the

market cross. Stern suggests that in London official notices were more likely to be

found at parish churches, ward courts, company halls and possibly the city gates (2006,

78).

In that case, can we, from the evidence of Pasquill and Marforius, define the nature of

bill-posting at London Stone? Was it ‘official’? The contributor to Chambers’s Journal,

who (as we shall see) was to have a great influence on later thinking, concluded solely

on the basis of Pasquill and Marforius that London Stone ‘had come to be one of the

recognised places for the promulgation of edicts at the latter end of the sixteenth

century’ (Anon 1888, 242); this conclusion was subsequently repeated (although, as we

shall see, with different emphasis) by the eminent folklorist Lewis Spence (Spence

1937, 171).66

Stern, however, simply notes that, on the basis of its appearance in Pasquill and

Marforius, London Stone should be added to the tally of ‘famous places of the City’ for

setting up bills and advertisements (Stern 2006, 73) – and surely rightly. For as the text

clearly shows, Pasquill’s ‘Protestation upon London Stone’ is not a public proclamation

or edict. It is an advertisement, literally a ‘siquis’. We may compare it with a ‘siquis’ that

Stern quotes from Barten Holyday’s play Technogamia of 1618: ‘If there be any

Gentleman, that, for the accomplishing of his natural indowments, intertaynes a desire

of learning the languages [...] he shall, to his abundant satisfaction, be made happy in his

expectations and successe, if he please to repaire to the signe of the Globe’ (ibid 76). The

tenor and style are those of Pasquill’s ‘Protestation’: ‘if any man, woman, or childe, haue

any thing to say against Martin the great [...] if it please them these dark Winter-nights,

to sticke vppe their papers vppon London-stone, I will there give my attendance [...]’

(my italics in each case).

In spite of Pasquill’s drums and trumpets, his bill seems simply to be one

65 ‘...the Stocks, Pillory,...’: There were a number of sets of stocks around the city ‘to punish vagabonds’

(Stow 1908, 2: 176), and there were also both a pillory and stocks on Cornhill attached to a prison cell known as the Tun (ibid 1: 190–1).. However, ‘the Stocks’ might refer otherwise to the Stocks Market, which stood on the site now occupied by the Mansion House (Harben 1918, 554–5). In an earlier manuscript version of this text (Manning 1841, 11) the reading ‘...the Stocks’ Pillory...’ is found, and the reference might be to a pillory by the Stocks Market rather than to two separate structures.

66 Ackroyd (2000, 18) also quotes Pasquill and Marforius (describing it as ‘a now forgotten play of 1589’) in support of a contention that London Stone had a ‘judicial role’.

44

advertisement among many. But it is an advertisement that effectively invites others to

post up libels, ‘any thing [...] against Martin the great’, and to do so, as was customary,

under cover of darkness – ‘these dark Winter-nights’ (Anon 1589, sig Diii verso; Nashe

1958, 1: 101).67

At the end of the sixteenth century, London Stone may well have been awash with

bills, libels and siquises – just like the Pissing Conduit or the Stocks. There is nothing,

either among the references to late Tudor advertising practice or in Pasquill and

Marforius, to support the contention that the Stone had any special significance at this

time setting it apart from these other informal advertisement hoardings.

3.14: ‘Sights most strange’

London Stone retained its status as a well-known landmark. This is demonstrated by its

appearance on the earliest printed maps of London, to which we have already referred,

and among the Singularitez de Londres described by L Grenade. Contemporary

references in literature confirm its familiarity. We have already noted the introduction

into Thomas Dekker’s The Shoemaker’s Holiday in 1600 of a joke, ‘Am I sure that Paul’s

Steeple is a handful higher than London Stone?’, which assumed an audience equally

well acquainted with London Stone as they were with St Paul’s Cathedral (Dekker 1979,

170–1).

And in 1598, two years before Dekker’s play was first performed, London Stone was

brought to the stage of the Rose theatre in William Haughton’s play Englishmen for my

Money. In a paper on ‘Stow’s Survey and the London playwrights’ Angela Stock has

discussed the detailed familiarity with the streets and landmarks of Elizabethan London

demonstrated in this play, described as the ‘first London comedy’, in which ‘London no

longer plays a cameo role... – it is put centre-stage’ (Stock 2004, 93–8). In the course of

it, three foreigners, lost and bewildered in the night-time streets of London, are led

about in the dark by the clown. They bump into landmarks that would have been

immediately recognisable to the London audience. And one of these is London Stone: ‘I

have the scent of London-stone as full in my nose as Abchurch-lane of mother Walles

Pasties; Sirrs feele about, I smell London-stone’ (ibid 95; Haughton 1616, sig G1 verso).

Are we perhaps to conclude that London Stone was immediately identifiable by its

smell? Was it commonly used like the ‘pissing posts’ that were a feature of London

streets at this time (Stern 2006, 72–3)?

In the sixteenth century London Stone was a commonplace, like the Pissing Conduit

or the Bosse at Billingsgate, or the various London locations from ‘the May-pole on Ivie-

bridge going to Westminster’ to Mother Walle’s pasty shop in Abchurch Lane – that

Haughton mentions (Stock 2004, 95–6). These immediately set the scene in a London

context familiar to the theatre audience.

In a collection of poetry published in 1608 under the title Humors Looking Glasse,

Samuel Rowlands included a short poem ‘A straunge sighted Traueller’, recounting a

67 Thus the Oxford English Dictionary (OED 1989, sv ‘libel’) quotes from a letter of Bishop Longland in

1532: ‘Suche famous lybells and bills as be sett uppe in night tymes upon Chirche doores.’

45

sight-seeing visit to London made by ‘an honest Country foole’ (Rowlands 1608, sig D3

recto). A servant shows him the sights, including London Stone – along with our old

friend the Bosse of Billingsgate, and others:

He shew’d his Maister sights to him most strange,

Great tall Pauls Steeple and the royall-Exchange;

The Bosse at Billingsgate and London stone,

And at White-Hall the monstrous great Whalesbone,

Brought him to the banck-side where Beares do dwell

And vnto Shor-ditch where the whores keepe hell,

Shew’d him the Lyons, Gyants in Guild-Hall,

King Lud at Lud-gate the Babounes and all.

But there is nothing here to suggest that London Stone has a special reputation, an

individual function or status that sets it apart from all these other sights.

As well as being one of the sights of London, in the seventeenth century London

Stone continued the role as a location marker that it had in the days of Eadwaker and

Æthelwine. London Stone is mentioned in the imprints of a number of books as the

location of the bookseller. Thus, for example, we find that Thomas Heywood’s

biography of Queen Elizabeth I, Englands Elizabeth (1631), was ‘printed by Iohn Beale,

for Phillip Waterhouse; and are to be sold at his shop at St. Pauls head, neere London

stone’, and The Upright Protestant by Herbert Palmer (1643), ‘printed for George

Lindsey, and are to be sold at his shop over against the London-Stone’. The English

Short Title Catalogue lists over 30 books published between 1630 and the 1670s with

similar ‘addresses’ in the imprint. And in 1667, William Burges, a cooper, issued a token

for a halfpenny, inscribed ‘WILLIAM .BVRGES .AT / LONDON .STONE’ (Boyne 1889, 550 no 461)

After the Great Fire the Chamberlain’s Posting Book, recording payments made for

the surveying and marking out of foundations in the destroyed area, lists in February

and March 1667 the names of four occupiers of presumably neighbouring properties:

‘Henry Edwards neer London stone’, ‘Francis Heath, below London stone’, ‘Daniell

Palmer at London stone’ and ‘Nicholas Bell neare London stone’ (Mills & Oliver 1967,

20).

We have already noted the occasion in 1671 when the officers of the Spectacle

Makers’ Company seized a batch of badly-made spectacles – they had been offered for

sale by Elizabeth Bagnall, a haberdasher in Cannon Street – and smashed them to pieces

on London Stone (Law 1977, 11). It has been claimed that this represents a traditional

use of London Stone on ceremonial occasions (for example by ‘coelacanth’ 2002). Sadly

– once again – there is no evidence that this was customary practice. Of the occasions

recorded by Law 1977, 11–13) when the Spectacle Makers carried out such

confiscations in the 1660s and 1670s, it is only this once, when the offender’s shop was

close by, that a public ceremony took place at London Stone.68

Thus, in the seventeenth century, London Stone was a landmark and a sight for

68 I am grateful to my colleague Hazel Forsyth for confirmation of this from her own study of the

Spectacle Makers’ records.

46

tourists, a mysterious object of unknown antiquity – but not, it seems, an object of

veneration, sanctity or special civic significance.

47

4: Reading London Stone

4.1: Early interpretations

We have traced the history of London Stone to the Great Fire and beyond. We have

noted possible popular attributions of London Stone to Brutus of Troy or to British King

Lud. But more serious antiquarian speculation about it started at least as early as the

days of Elizabeth I. John Stow, who as we have seen provides our first historical account

of London Stone, confessed in 1598 that ‘The cause why this stone was set there, the

time when, or other memory hereof, is none’, and like most later writers he records a

number of what can be no more than guesses as to its original function (Stow 1908, 1:

224). Some said that it was set up to mark the centre of the city – although ‘in truth’,

Stow writes, ‘it standeth far nearer unto the river of Thames than to the wall of the city’;

others that it was ‘set for the tendering and making of payment by debtors’, as ‘now

most commonly at the Royal Exchange’; others that it was set up ‘by one John or

Thomas Londonstone dwelling there against.’

Stow’s contemporary and friend, the antiquary William Camden (1551–1623)

ignores such ‘popular’ explanations in favour of an antiquarian hypothesis that was to

be extremely influential, and indeed the most commonly propounded even today. In the

original Latin of his Britannia, his celebrated and influential account of the topography

and antiquities of Britain first published in 1586, he says:

Tunc concidisse produnt Annales nostri L. Gallum ad amniculum, qui vrbem ferè

mediam interluebat, & ab eo Nantgall Britannicè, Walbroke anglicè dictum, quod nomen

manet in platea, sub qua cloacam esse subterraneam ad expurgandam sordium

colluuiem accepimus, haud procul à saxo illo Londonstone, quod Miliarium fuisse,

cuiusmodi Romæ in foro erat, à quo omnium itinerum sumebatur dimensio,

existimamus, cum in media vrbe sit, quà in longum procurrit. (Camden 1607, 304)

...or in the first English translation by Philemon Holland:

And then it was, as our Chronicles record, that Lucius Gallus was slaine by a little

brookes side; which ran though the middle almost of the City, and of him was in British

called Nant-Gall, in English Walbrooke: which name remaineth still in a street, under

which there is a sewer within the ground to ridde away filth; not farre from London-

stone, which I take to have beene a Milliarie, or Milemarke, such as was in the mercat

place of Rome: From which was taken the dimension of all journeys every way,

considering it is in the very mids of the City, as it lieth in length. (Camden 1610, 423)

Thus Stow’s view that London Stone was too close to the river to mark the centre of the

city had already been countered by Camden, in identifying its location as in the middle

of the city’s longest (that is, its east–west) axis.

Yet Camden’s identification of the Stone as a Roman milliarium, similar to the

milliarium aureum in the Forum in Rome, a column of gilded bronze (or marble

sheathed in bronze) erected by Augustus in 20 BC (Richardson 1992, 254), from which,

it is believed, measurements of distances throughout the Roman Empire were taken,

was (and remains) very influential. As Edward Brayley says (1810, 99–100) ‘Most

antiquaries of the last two centuries, seem, with Camden, to consider this Stone as a

48

Roman Milliary, or, more properly, as the Milliarium Aureum, of Britain, from which the

Romans began the admeasurement of their roads as from a centre’.

However, the discoveries made during rebuilding works after the Great Fire, to

which we have already referred, led some at least to revise this identification: ‘by

Reason of the large Foundation, it was rather some more considerable Monument in the

Forum (Wren 1750, 265–6). To this is added a footnote (it is unclear whether the

conjecture is Wren’s own, or interpolated by his son in this biography of his father):

Probably this might in some degree, have imitated the Milliarium Aureum at

Constantinople, which was not in the Form of a Pillar as at Rome, but an eminent

Building; for under its Roof (according to Cedrenus and Suidas) stood the Statues of

Constantine and Helena; Trajan; an equestrian Statue of Hadrian; a Statue of Fortune;

and many other Figures and Decorations.

The Milion erected in Constantinople by Constantine in the early fourth century to

serve the same function as Rome’s milliarium aureum was an elaborate structure

comprising a quadrangle of four massive arches supporting a dome (Müller-Wiener

1977, 216–8; Guilland 1958–59, 91–4). Thus, while disputing the form of the structure

represented by London Stone, Christopher Wren (at least as reported by his son) seems

to have accepted its identification as a central point from which distances along Roman

roads were measured.

On the other hand Robert Hooke, as we have seen from the notes by John Aubrey

and William Stukeley discussed above, appears to have concluded that ‘London-stone

was not a lapis milliaris, as was supposed. […] It was a kind of Obelisque’ (Aubrey 1980,

508–9); and ‘It seems to have been an Obelisk’ (Stukeley 1717– , fol 25 recto).

Stukeley himself, however, continued to favour the ‘milliarium’ identification. He

includes London Stone on two maps that he compiled, usually taken both to be

reconstructions of Roman London (Clark 2008). In the first of these, drawn in his

Commonplace book (Stukeley 1717– , fol 40), he incorporates Roman buildings, such as

a Forum, in what seems to be, since it includes features taken from the writings of

Geoffrey of Monmouth, an attempt to imagine a pre-Roman London or Trinovantum

under the rule of the ‘British kings’ (Clark 2008, 4–6, fig 1.1.2). Between the Praetorium

(on the site of the massive foundations reported by Hooke and Wren south of Cannon

Street) and the Forum (north of Cannon Street) is a dot labelled Milliare (Stukeley

1717– , fol 40). Similarly, his map of ‘Londinium Augusta’, drawn in 1722 and published

two years later, which presents his vision of a fully developed Roman city, shows near

the centre of the town at a crossroads, between the Forum (in more or less the same

location as on his earlier map)69 and the river, a tall pyramid-shaped obelisk (perhaps

Stukeley was here influenced by the Hooke/Aubrey identification of the ‘Obelisque’)

labelled Milliare London Stone (Stukeley 1724, plate 57; Clark 2008, 8, fig 1.1.3).

69 The Forum, shown as an open square or ‘plaza’ on the east side of the Walbrook stream, is labelled

‘Forum Stocks Mercat’. Presumably the central location within the city of the medieval Stocks Market (on the site now occupied by the Mansion House (Harben 1918, 554–5)) suggested this identification with a suitable site for a Roman Forum.

49

Stukeley refers to it in the accompanying text: ‘London-stone, the lapis milliaris from

which distances are reckon’d’ (Stukeley 1724, 112).

Thus the consensus, reinforced by the authority and reputation of both William

Camden and William Stukeley, was that London Stone was a Roman central milestone

or milliarium. Yet in the eighteenth century other opinions were to be voiced.

In 1720 John Strype seems, in his revised and extended edition of John Stow’s

Survey, to have been the first to propose that London Stone might be pre-Roman, ‘an

Object, or Monument, of Heathen Worship’, since it was well known ‘[...] that the

Britains erected Stones for religious Worship, and that the Druids had Pillars of Stone in

Veneration’ (Stow 1720, book 2: 194). Knowledge of the druids and their beliefs he

attributes to ‘an exquisite British Antiquarian [...] Mr. Owen of Shrewsbury’. However, as

we have seen, he also surmises that it may once have been thought to represent Christ’s

protection of the City, referring to Fabyan’s poem. He continues ‘this Londonstone

seems to have been the Place (and likely enough upon this Stone) whence

Proclamations and publick Notices of Things were given to the Citizens’ – this in

explanation of the Jack Cade episode, which he claims took place in the presence of ‘a

great Confluence of People, and the Lord Mayor among the rest’ (ibid 193–4).

Towards the end of the eighteenth century Thomas Pennant gives a brief account of

London Stone, bringing together a number of surmises:

[...] some have supposed [it] to have been British; a stone, which might have been part of

a Druidical circle, or some such other object of the ancient religion [...]. Others have

conjectured it to be a milliary stone [...]. It seems preserved like the Palladium of the

city... Certainly superstitious respect has been paid to it [...] (Pennant 1793, 4)

The ‘superstitious respect’ Pennant illustrates (solely) by the episode of Jack Cade. He

seems to have developed the druidical connection proposed by Strype and to be the

first to suggest it was the only remaining part of a lost circle of stones – a view

expounded also by an anonymous reviewer of Edward Brayley’s Londiniana of 1829

(‘perhaps the Sun, or central stone of a Druidical circle’ (Anon 1829, 518)) and revived

by Elizabeth Oke Gordon in the twentieth century.

In a four volume study of ancient monuments, Roman fortifications and early

castles, Munimenta Antiqua, published between 1799 and 1805, Edward King (1735–

1807), President of the Society of Antiquaries of London, confirmed this new

antiquarian view of London Stone by discussing it in the first volume devoted to ‘works

of the antient Britons’ – and in the chapter on what he called ‘Stones of Memorial’ – that

is, stones set up ‘to record events, and facts of high importance’ (King 1799–1805, 1:

113–14). He comments that it has been ‘preserved with such reverential care through

so many ages’ and ‘was plainly deemed a Record of the highest antiquity’ (ibid 1: 117–

18). This, he concludes, ‘seems to prove its having had some more ancient and peculiar

designation than that of having been a Roman Milliary; even if ever were used for that

purpose afterwards.’ He admits, however, that ‘we are at present unacquainted with the

original intent and purport for which it was placed.’

50

4.2: The London Palladium

At the end of the eighteenth century the general opinion among academic writers was

that the Stone was mysterious and of great antiquity, either Roman or pre-Roman – but

there is little to indicate that at that time they or anyone believed it to have been

attributed with any special powers. That Pennant could use the word ‘Palladium’,

however, suggests a growing sense that there must have been, at one time, superstitious

regard for it not merely as a symbol of London but as its talisman, the embodiment of

its wellbeing. Similarly Malcolm (1802–7, 4: 621) writes, of the verses of Fabyan that

we have already quoted:

These lines seem to have been suggested by a superstitious tradition that the stone,

dedicated to Christ, had served as a sort of Palladium to London.

And we have already noted Strype’s view, repeated by Lambert, that tended towards

this argument. The identification as a palladium was reaffirmed by Edward Brayley in

1810:

In former ages a sort of superstitious veneration was paid to this monument, and, like

the Palladium of Troy, it was supposed to be connected with the safety of the City.

(Brayley 1810, 98)70

The original Palladium was an image of Pallas Athene that stood in the citadel of

Troy, thought to embody the security of the city. Its theft was a crucial event, setting the

stage for the eventual Greek capture and destruction of the city. The term has thus

come to be used of any talismanic object or monument believed to be essential to the

survival of a nation, institution or family (Room 1999, 872–3; Beard [1934], 2–4). One

such palladium celebrated in English tradition is the ‘Luck of Edenhall’, a thirteenth-

century Islamic enamelled glass beaker, now in the Victoria and Albert Museum, which

had belonged to the Musgrave family of Edenhall, in Cumberland, since some time in the

Middle Ages (Beard [1934], 98–114; Tyson 2000, 96; Westwood & Simpson 2005, 131–

2). Around it grew the legend that it was a ‘fairy cup’ and embodied the ‘Luck’ of the

family and house, with an accompanying warning verse:

If this cup should break or fall

Farewell the luck of Edenhall.

But both Beard and Westwood and Simpson point out that the tradition and the verse

cannot be traced back before the eighteenth century and have undergone much

romantic embellishment – and indeed the use of the word ‘luck’ in this sense of a

physical talisman may have originated with Edenhall’s famous cup.

Equally dubious in its antiquity is the belief that upon the continued presence of

ravens in the Tower of London depends the survival of Britain, of the monarchy, or of

the Tower itself, which seems to be a twentieth-century invention – the ravens

themselves not being resident in the Tower until the latter years of the nineteenth

century (Kennedy 2004, quoting research by Geoffrey Parnell; Parnell 2007).

70 A view he repeated in slightly different words in his later book Londiniana (1829, 1: 17).

51

The existence of a tradition is no guarantee that it is one of great age – a warning

that we should heed when considering the myths surrounding London Stone.

So far the identification of the Stone as a palladium has only been made in the form

of a surmise that such a belief had ‘once’ existed. But there is a hint in a letter printed in

The Gentleman’s Magazine in September 1798 that the ‘palladian’ role of London Stone

might be thought of a current as well as ancient. It is one of the earliest of a long-

running series of letters signed by ‘An Architect’ on the dangers and dire results of

‘architectural innovation’ and the reckless destruction of Gothic buildings and

monuments. The author is revealed in an annotated set of The Gentleman’s Magazine

kept by its publishers, and now in the Folger Library, to be the draughtsman and

antiquary John Carter (1748–1817) (Kuist 1982, 45).

It was his series of articles (signed, anonymous and pseudonymous) in The

Gentleman’s Magazine, campaigning for the preservation of medieval buildings and

monuments, and running to some 380 over 20 years, that confirmed Carter’s place in

the history of the Gothic revival (Crook 2004). In his contribution of 13 September

1798, just the second letter he wrote under the nom de plume ‘An Architect’, Carter

laments the destruction of medieval buildings in the close of Peterborough Cathedral,

and of an oriel window in Grocers’ Hall, London. He concludes:

Under what innovating name can we term the cause that has removed the London-stone,

in Cannon-street, the awful informant of the antiquity of this town, some yards more to

the East of the church? It has been often called the symbol of this great City’s quiet state,

from its being always believed to be “fixed to its everlasting seat”. (‘An Architect’ 1798,

765) 71

The allusion in the last few words is presumably to the libretto, by Newburgh Hamilton,

for Handel’s oratorio Samson (first performed in London in 1743), in which Israelites

and Philistines sing contrariwise in praise of their opposing deities: ‘Fix’d in his

everlasting seat | Jehovah (or Great Dagon) rules the world in state’ (Händel 1999).

Carter confessed in another contribution to The Gentleman’s Magazine ‘I am a man lost

in two extremes, one for the Antiquities of England, and the other for the Divine

Melodies of the immortal Handel’ (Crook 2004). A direct equation of London Stone with

the gods of Israel and the Philistines may not be intended – but is a striking comparison.

Not uncommon in English folklore are stones that cannot be moved (Grinsell 1976,

60–1, 142 and 144; Westwood & Simpson 2005, 443, 784 and 785), can only be moved

if certain ceremonies are carried out (‘You will never move this stone till you get an old

man with a white beard, and two white oxen’ (Brown 1964, 153)), will automatically

return to their original locations (Grinsell 1976, 60–1 and 93), or will bring ill-luck if

they are moved or destroyed (ibid 64–5; Westwood & Simpson 2005, 422–3, 443, 446

and 571–2). In spite of John Carter’s concern at the moving of London Stone ‘some

yards more’, no such popular folklore seems ever to have developed about it – until

perhaps at the end of the twentieth century, when Iain Sinclair declared that London

71 It is possible that Carter himself was responsible for some sketches of London Stone that seem to have

been made at the time of the 1798 removal, now in Guildhall Library (Clark 2007b, fig 3).

52

Stone had been moved ‘not by much, by just enough to do damage; to call up petty

whirlwinds, small vortices of bad faith’ (Atkins & Sinclair 1999, 168–9).

4.3: William Blake: to hear Jerusalem’s voice

Contemporary with John Carter, and with this first hint that the Stone had some

symbolic or even esoteric significance to Londoners, was William Blake (1757–1827),

whose writings were to imbue it with much greater significance and mystery.

In Blake’s visionary writings London Stone plays an important but not always

consistent role. Most straightforward is his identification of it as a druidic sacrificial

altar. Thus in Jerusalem, his long poem on engraved plates begun in 1804, we read in

the verses titled ‘To the Jews’:

What are those golden Builders doing

Near mournful ever-weeping Paddington,

Standing above that mighty Ruin

Where Satan the first victory won,

Where Albion slept beneath the Fatal Tree,

And the Druids’ golden Knife

Rioted in human gore,

In Offerings of Human Life?

They groan’d aloud on London Stone,

They groan’d aloud on Tyburn’s Brook

Albion gave his deadly groan,

And all the Atlantic Mountains shook.

(Jerusalem, plate 27 ‘To the Jews’, lines 25–36; Blake 1966, 250)

In view of its implied proximity to ‘mournful ever-weeping Paddington’ and ‘the

Fatal Tree’ (the gallows) by ‘Tyburn’s Brook’, David Erdman, a noted Blake scholar,

identified ‘London Stone’ here with a ‘Stone where Soldiers are shot’ that he claims is

marked at the northeast corner of Hyde Park, close to the Tyburn gallows, on John

Rocque’s 1746 map of London ‘and the Country near ten miles round’ – but seems to

find no difficulty in seeing it simultaneously as ‘the relic called “London Stone” [...]

preserved at St Swithin’s Church’ (Erdman 1977, 464–5).

In fact, the ‘Stone where Soldiers are shot’ is a chimera. Its existence may first have

been mooted by W H Black (an early proponent of the theory that ancient monumental

stones were aligned in meaningful patterns), who identified the stone on Rocque’s map

as the ‘Ossulstone’ that gave its name to one of the hundreds into which the medieval

county of Middlesex was divided (Black 1871, 62). Like Erdman he read the words that

appear on the map as ‘Stone where soldiers are shot’. However, it is fairly obvious on

examination of the map that the word ‘Stone’ does not form part of the same phrase as

‘Where Soldiers are Shot’, being on a separate line above it and to the right (Rocque

1971, plate 11). And comparison with the larger scale map of London, Westminster and

Southwark that Rocque completed in the same year as his ‘ten miles round’ map

53

confirms our interpretation. This map72 also marks the location (not identified as a

stone) ‘Where Soldiers are Shot’. It lies inside the park wall, at the north end of an

avenue of trees. Just outside the wall and further east is a small dot by the roadside

clearly labelled ‘Mile Stone’ (ibid plate A2). It is this, presumably, that is marked as

‘Stone’ on the smaller scale map and so confused both Black and Erdman.

But given Blake’s visionary geography, London Stone remains London Stone,

wherever it may be, and other writers on Blake, surely correctly, take for granted the

identification of his London Stone with the familiar Cannon Street stone (Damon 1973,

245).

Later in Blake’s Jerusalem, ‘England, who is Brittannia’ awakes from a dream of

killing Albion:

[...] I have Murdered Albion! Ah!

In Stone-henge & on London Stone & in the Oak Groves of Malden

I have Slain him in my Sleep with the Knife of the Druid, O England!

(Jerusalem, plate 94, lines 23–5; Blake 1966, 742)

The association with Stonehenge – which like most of his contemporaries Blake

regarded as a monument of the druids – is confirmed elsewhere:

And the Great Voice of the Atlantic howled over the Druid Altars,

Weeping over his Children in Stone-henge, in Malden & Colchester,

Round the Rocky Peak of Derbyshire, London Stone & Rosamond’s Bower:

(Jerusalem, plate 57, lines 5–7; Blake 1966, 689)

Such is the Ancient World of Urizen in the Satanic Void,

Created from the Valley of Middlesex by London’s River,

From Stone-henge and from London Stone, from Cornwall to Cathnes.

(Jerusalem, plate 58, lines 44–6; Blake 1966, 690)

In awful pomp & gold, in all the precious unhewn stones of Eden

They build a stupendous Building on the Plain of Salisbury, with chains

Of rocks round London Stone, of Reasonings, of unhewn Demonstrations

In labyrinthine arches (Mighty Urizen the Architect) thro’ which

The Heavens might revolve & Eternity be bound in their chain.

(Jerusalem, plate 66, lines 1–5; Blake 1966, 701–2)

They look forth from Stone-henge: from the Cove73 round London Stone

They look on one another: the mountain calls out to the mountain.

(Jerusalem, plate 66, lines 57–8; Blake 1966, 703)

In these lines London Stone seems to be envisaged as a physical part of a notional

Stonehenge, perhaps its central stone.

72 Accessible on line at http://www.motco.com/map/81002/ [accessed 3 June 2015].

73 Piggott (1985, 157) points out the influence of the writings of William Stukeley in these lines: ‘for “Cove” is the peculiar word invented by Stukeley as a name for the settings of three stones such as those within the northern of the two extant inner circles at Avebury, and is otherwise meaningless.’

54

And for Blake’s visionary city of London, Golgonooza, London Stone has a literally

central role, between Hounslow and Blackheath, Finchley and Norwood, as described in

his poem Milton, begun like Jerusalem in 1804.

From Golgonooza the spiritual Four-fold London eternal,

In immense labours & sorrows, ever building, ever falling,

Thro’ Albion’s four Forests which overspread all the Earth

From London Stone to Blackheath east: to Hounslow west:

To Finchley north: to Norwood south:

(Milton, plate 4, lines 1–5; Blake 1966, 485)

And this centrality is also clearly embodied in London Stone’s role in Jerusalem as a

place of judgement:

Albion replied: “Go, Hand & Hyle! sieze the abhorred friend

...

“Bring him to justice before heaven here upon London stone,

“Between Blackheath & Hounslow, between Norwood & Finchley.”

(Jerusalem, plate 42, lines 47–51; Blake 1966, 670)

Earlier, it is Los who stands in judgement upon London Stone:

While Los spoke, the terrible Spectre fell shudd’ring before him.

...

Groaning he kneel’d before Los’s iron-shod feet on London Stone,

(Jerusalem, plate 8, lines 21–7; Blake 1966, 627)

Later, Los returns to London Stone:

At length he sat on London Stone, & heard Jerusalem’s voice.

Jerusalem, plate 31 [45], line 43; Blake 1966, 657)

Los was all astonishment & terror, he trembled sitting on the Stone

Of London:

Jerusalem, plate 32 [46], lines 3–4; Blake 1966, 658)

Elsewhere Blake appears to associate London Stone with a Biblical stone, the Stone

of Bohan (Bohan being the son of Reuben in the Old Testament), which marked the

boundary between the tribes of Benjamin and Judah (Joshua 15: 6 and 18: 17):

Reuben slept in Bashan like one dead in the valley

Cut off from Albion’s mountains & from all the Earth’s summits

Between Succoth & Zaretan beside the Stone of Bohan.

...

Reuben return'd to Bashan; in despair he slept on the Stone.

Jerusalem, plate 34 [30], lines 43–5 and 51; Blake 1966, 661)

But later:

[...] I tell how Reuben slept

On London Stone & the Daughters of Albion ran around admiring

His awful beauty.

Jerusalem, plate 74, lines 33–5; Blake 1966, 715)

55

Amid such a complex of poetic and artistic imagery, and Blake’s extraordinary

personal vision, one cannot define a simple ‘Blakean’ concept of London Stone.

However, the sources of Blake’s inspiration can perhaps be recognised.

To Blake Druids were the priests of Urizen, carrying out bloodthirsty rites of

sacrifice at Stonehenge and other stone monuments (Owen 1962, 227–31). As we have

seen, John Strype had already linked London Stone to the Druids when he commented

on it that ‘the Druids had Pillars of Stone in Veneration’ (Stow 1720, book 2: 194), while

Pennant had recorded the hypothesis that it ‘might have formed part of a Druidical

circle’ (Pennant 1793, 4).

The ‘centrality’ of London Stone in Golgonooza reflects both John Stow’s report that

according to some people it was set up to mark the centre of the city (Stow 1908, 1:

224), and the antiquarian identification of it as the milliarium, ‘a Milemarke, such as was

in the mercat place of Rome: From which was taken the dimension of all journeys every

way, considering it is in the very mids of the City, as it lieth in length’ (Camden 1610,

423).

Los and Albion standing or sitting on London Stone to dispense justice mirror Jack

Cade – not the Cade of the chroniclers but the Cade of William Shakespeare. And the

sacred stone on which Reuben slept is reminiscent of the biblical stone on which Jacob

dreamed, and then erected as a pillar, saying ‘this stone, which I have set up for a pillar,

shall be God’s house’ (Genesis 28: 11–22) – and Jacob’s Pillow or Pillar was itself

(according to tradition) identical with the Scottish Stone of Destiny, then to be seen

beneath the Coronation Chair in Westminster Abbey! The earliest reference to this

tradition is apparently in the account of the coronation of the Scottish king John Balliol

in 1292 by the St Albans monk William Rishanger – although it does not appear in any

Scottish source, and seems to be essentially an English tradition (Binski 2003, 217–8;

Rodwell 2013, 23–4). William Camden transcribed a tablet with Latin verses to this

effect hanging beside the Coronation Chair ([Camden] 1600, sig C4 recto). Edward King

in his Munimenta Antiqua (1799–1805, 1: 118) dismissed it as a ‘Monkish tradition’.74

At first sight, Blake’s view of London Stone may seem irrelevant to a study of the

development of our modern understanding of it. No later writer cites him or admits to

being influenced by him in their interpretation of the Stone. But so many of these same

themes and concepts reappear in later works – London Stone as Druid altar, as part of a

stone circle, as central marker, as seat of justice, as sacred stone of destiny – that we

must allow the possibility that, even without reading his poems or being fully aware of

their content, many modern writers have unconsciously adopted Blake’s visions as part

of their personal world view.

74 However, the identity of Jacob’s Pillow/Pillar with the Stone of Destiny appears to remain a tenet of

the British-Israelite movement (Michell 1985, 174; Glover 1861, 57–70), already foreshadowed in 1816 by Joseph Ben Jacob (alias Barnaby Murphy?) who argued that the Stone of Destiny had first been brought to Ireland by a group of Ephraimite settlers about the time of the Exodus (Grimaldi 1919, 6).

56

4.4: The Welsh connection

On 21 April 1888 the popular weekly Chambers’s Journal published on its front and

second pages an article on London Stone (Anon 1888). The anonymous author, as we

have noted before, comments on the sorry state of the Stone and the general ignorance

of it – ‘Few people, probably, have ever seen London Stone...’. He or she has clearly done

some not unworthy research – although most of the historical information is

unattributed, we can recognise the sources in Stow and elsewhere and a quotation from

Pasquill and Marforius. The author (as we have noted above) takes the latter as evidence

that ‘it had come to be one of the recognised places for the promulgation of edicts at the

latter end of the sixteenth century’ (ibid 242).

But apparently novel is a reference to ‘an old saying to the effect, that “so long as the

stone of Brutus is safe, so long shall London flourish”’ (ibid 241), the ‘proverb’ with

which we began our own research. The author further comments ‘we may perhaps look

askance at’ traditions that it was brought by Brutus from Troy, that it was laid on the

altar of the Temple of Diana, and that British kings took their oath of office upon it.

These are ‘traditions’ we have not met so far. However, this Chambers’s Journal article

seems to be the source that has been drawn upon, directly or indirectly and usually

without acknowledgement, by the many more recent writers who have quoted or

expounded upon these traditions – Lewis Spence is unusual in both being aware of the

original article and identifying it as his authority (Spence 1937, 171).

Its content, however, is not original, and its own source is, after some effort,

identifiable. The ‘saying’ and the Trojan ‘traditions’ had been aired in an article,

deceptively headed ‘Stonehenge’, that had appeared in Notes and Queries just over 25

years earlier (Mor Merrion 1862).75 The author, who signs himself ‘Mor Merrion’ (at

least, the name is so spelt by the Notes and Queries printer), begins with an innocuous

query ‘Can Sir Roger Murchison [sic, for Sir Roderick Murchison (1792–1871), the

noted Scottish geologist], or any other authority, favour the Antiquarian Republic with

the proper geological term for the stones of which Stonehenge is composed?’ He then

proceeds, after claiming as fact that the ‘altar stone’ of Stonehenge is porphyry, and that

this is the same material as ‘the famous London stone, now enclosed in another stone

with a circular aperture, on the north side of Cannon Street, city’, to what is clearly the

meat of his article – the supposed traditions surrounding London Stone. ‘It was [...] the

altar of the Temple of Diana, on which the old British Kings took the oaths on their

accession’; ‘it was brought from Troy by Brutus, and laid down by his own hand as the

altar-stone of the Diana Temple, the foundation stone of London and its palladium’.

The author implies that these are beliefs that have been handed down from

generation to generation over many years. Yet we have not found any reference to them

75 I first drew attention to this Notes and Queries article and the identity of its author in a brief note in

the newsletter of the Folklore Society (Clark 2007a) and discussed it more fully (as here) in my paper ‘London Stone: Stone of Brutus or fetish stone – making the myth’ (Clark 2010). My own discovery of it was by way of a passing reference in a paper on the ‘Brutus Stone’ of Totnes, in Devon (Windeatt 1920, 53); realisation of the significance of the misprint in Notes and Queries came only as a result of a holiday in North Wales!

57

in the course of our sequential search through the earlier sources. Pennant (1793, 4)

and Malcolm (1802–7, 4: 621), who interpreted London Stone as a palladium, clearly

had no knowledge of a tradition that linked it to Troy or to the original Trojan

Palladium, nor of the supporting saying; otherwise they would surely have both cited

the tradition and quoted the saying.

In any case as popular beliefs these are literally incoherent – they belong to three

different traditions that had never existed concurrently in the same milieu. Brutus, the

Trojan settlers and the foundation of London as ‘New Troy’ – and indeed the Trojans’

devotion to the goddess Diana – form part of the pseudo-history of Britain developed by

Geoffrey of Monmouth in the twelfth century (Geoffrey of Monmouth 2007, 28–31;

Clark 1981). Although long credited by medieval Londoners (Federico 2003, 1–28), the

Brutus myth was already seriously challenged by the time of such antiquarian writers

as John Stow and William Camden in the sixteenth century (Kendrick 1950, 104–33;

Ferguson 1993, 84–105). The Temple of Diana, on the other hand, was an

archaeological hypothesis that originated among the same antiquarians who disputed

the story of Brutus – and who, in any case, envisaged a Roman temple built on the site

later occupied by St Paul’s Cathedral, not a Trojan establishment (Camden 1607, 306–7;

Camden 1610, 426; Clark 1996). It had nothing to do with Brutus or New Troy, and in

no way was it a medieval concept. Meanwhile, the stone ‘on which the old British Kings

took the oaths on their accession’ seems to reflect nothing so much as the Irish/Scottish

‘Stone of Destiny’, and the tradition that only a ceremony at or round a sacred stone

conferred the authority of Celtic kingship (Mackillop 1998, 285 and 298, sv ‘Lia Fáil’).

Most important, the author presents for the first time the now familiar ‘Stone of

Brutus’ saying. However, in this context we find it quoted not as a saying in its own

right. Mor Merrion gives precedence to two lines in Welsh that by implication are the

original of which our ‘Stone of Brutus’ proverb is no more than a translation:

Tra maen Prydain

Tra lled Llyndain.

Allowing for rather strange spelling, perhaps deliberately archaic, we may interpret this

as (more or less) ‘As long as the Stone of Prydain [exists], so long will London

expand/spread’. The identification of Welsh ‘Stone of Prydain’ and English ‘Stone of

Brutus’ requires some explanation, as we shall see.

But who was ‘Mor Merrion’, and was there any basis for his claim that there were

traditions of a Trojan origin of London Stone and a Welsh verse identifying it as the

Stone of Prydain – and who or what was Prydain?

A clue to Mor Merrion’s identity had appeared in another contribution to Notes and

Queries rather earlier, in May 1858. Headed ‘London Stone, Cannon Street’, it follows

very similar lines to the 1862 contribution, but is much shorter – it reads, in full:

Can any of your scientific correspondents supply me with the geological character of the

above stone, by far the most ancient monument in the city of London, and held by

tradition to be its foundation stone? Is there any quarry in the vicinity of the metropolis

58

of the same material?76 (R W M 1858)

It is signed only with initials, ‘R. W. M.’, but as we shall see, it is more than supposition

that R. W. M. and Mor Merrion were one and the same.

4.5: A turbulent priest

Welsh readers may already suspect the presence of a misprint in Notes and Queries

1862. The name should be read as ‘Mor Meirion’ – or more correctly ‘Môr Meirion’ with

an accent on the ‘o’. And this was the bardic name ‘Morgan of Merioneth’ adopted by the

Revd Richard Williams Morgan (c 1815–1889), Welsh patriot and writer, Anglican

clergyman, co-organiser of the great Llangollen eisteddfod of 1858, and later the first

Bishop of the revived ‘Ancient British Church’ – and evidently the ‘R. W. M.’ who wrote

to Notes and Queries on the subject of London Stone in 1858.

No full scale biography has yet been published to do justice to Morgan’s

extraordinary life. He does not appear in the Dictionary of National Biography or the

Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, although he warranted a brief and incomplete

entry in the Dictionary of Welsh Biography to 1940 (Lloyd, Jenkins et al 1959, 650–1).

However, a number of biographical sketches have appeared more recently (Freeman

2000; Thomann 2001; Brown 2002) from which the following account is largely

derived.

Born into a Welsh clerical family – his uncle John Williams was Archdeacon of

Cardigan – Richard Williams Morgan was educated in Edinburgh and Lampeter and

ordained priest in October 1842, when he was appointed perpetual curate in Tregynon,

Montgomeryshire.77 He campaigned vigorously for the use of the Welsh language in

schools and in churches, but perhaps went too far in written attacks on those English-

born bishops, appointed to sees in the Welsh church, who could not speak Welsh. It was

apparently his obduracy over this issue that in 1857 led to him being refused the

communion wine in the parish church at Rhosymedre, Ruabon, where he was staying as

a guest, on the grounds that Morgan was not ‘in charity with all his neighbours’.78

Although Morgan did not formally resign his curacy until 1862, he never again held an

ecclesiastical post within Wales.

Like many Welsh clergymen of his generation, he was also active in the growing

‘Celtic revival’ movement. As the bard ‘Môr Meirion’ he was one of the chief organisers,

with his better-known cousin the Revd John Williams ‘ab Ithel’, of the Llangollen

eisteddfod of 1858, although his participation, while the controversy over his attitude

76 No ‘scientific correspondent’ ever seems to have responded to this query.

77 The term ‘perpetual curate’ does not reflect a junior or assistant role (as does ‘curate’). A perpetual curate was the incumbent parish priest in a parish – often one that had been raised from a former chapel status – where that role was supported by a cash stipend and had no income from tithes.

78 The Catechism of the Church of England requires those wishing to partake of Communion ‘To examine themselves, whether they repent them truly of their former sins, steadfastly purposing to lead a new life; have a lively faith in God's mercy through Christ, with a thankful remembrance of his death; and be in charity with all men.’ The incident and the controversy that followed are described at length in Morgan [1858b], reprinted in Thomann 2001, 24–42.

59

to the English bishops in Wales was at its height, imperilled the plans (Roberts 1959,

135–6; 139–40). Morris Williams (the bard ‘Nicander’), invited to judge one of the

competitions, publicly expressed the fear that ‘the Eisteddfod may be converted into a

party affair, in connection with Mr. Morgan’s most mischievous and antrinational [sic?]

agitation about Welsh and English bishops’ (Williams 1858).

The Llangollen eisteddfod was particularly lavish. It was the first eisteddfod at

which the participants wore specially-designed bardic robes. Morgan was granted the

honour of reciting the introductory ‘Gorsedd prayer’, and was described as ‘one of the

most fiery and gifted of the throng’ (Kenward 1871, 133). However, the same witness

commented on the later speeches that were delivered at Llangollen: ‘Mor Meirion

launched his energetic but somewhat too unqualified Cymricism’ (ibid 143). His views

(bitterly anti-Anglo-Saxon in some of his writings) and his manner of expressing them

may have been too extreme for some of his contemporaries, even within the Celtic

revival community.

In the late 1850s and 1860s Morgan seems to have spent most of his time in

London; in 1860 he gave his permanent address as 13 Seymour Crescent, Euston

Square. In 1861 he published his book St Paul in Britain: or, the Origin of British as

Opposed to Papal Christianity, the title of which is a concise statement of its thesis.

Morgan argued that St Paul himself had evangelised Britain, converting the druids, who

already held proto-Christian beliefs. Thus the ancient Church of Britain, before the

coming of St Augustine in the sixth century, was coeval with that established by St Peter

in Rome, and represented an independent apostolic succession.

It was this conviction that led Morgan to seek to re-establish that original British

Church. In 1874 (or possibly earlier) he was consecrated by Jules (Julius) Ferrete or

Ferrette (nominally the Syrian Orthodox Bishop of Iona) as the first Bishop and

Hierarch of what was to be identified as ‘the Primitive Apostolic Patriarchal Church of

the British Isles’ or ‘the Ancient British Church’, taking the episcopal name ‘Pelagius’

with Caerleon-on-Usk as his see. Ferrete had himself been consecrated by the Orthodox

Bishop of Emesa (who was later to become Patriarch of the Syrian Orthodox Church in

Antioch with the title Mar Ignatios Peter III).79 Morgan thus established a legitimacy

and an apostolic succession for his Church that was independent of both Rome and the

Anglican communion. He published a liturgy and order of service in 1878, but little is

heard thereafter of this Ancient British Church. It later merged with other breakaway

sects (Thomann 2001, 9–11; Brandreth 1961, 70–89), and apostolic succession through

Morgan is claimed today by the Anglican Free Communion (formerly the Free

Protestant Episcopal Church) (Anglican Free Communion 2016).

In spite of his episcopal duties in the Ancient British Church, Morgan was to serve as

a curate in the Church of England at least three more times, in Northamptonshire in

1870–4, in Shropshire in 1882–3 and Huntingdonshire in 1886–8, before he died in

79 For more on Julius Ferrete and the history of the church he founded see Brandreth’s chapter ‘The

Ferrete Succession’ (Brandreth 1961, 70–89). Brandreth’s dismissal of Morgan as ‘a fanatic obsessed with the vision of a British Church which should restore the doctrine and discipline of the days before St Augustine’ (ibid 78 footnote 1) reflects only one aspect of Morgan’s character.

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Pevensey, Sussex, in 1889.

A fulsome obituary tribute to John Williams ab Ithel published by the Cambrian

Journal in 1863 is less generous in describing his cousin Richard Williams Morgan:

...the Rev. R. W. Morgan (Mor Meirion), a man of genius, ability and learning, the

energetic champion of all Cymric interests, and the uncompromising scourge of all

ecclesiastical abusers. If only he would chasten his imagination, and moderate his

patriotic impulses, in dealing with Welsh history, he would be also entitled to

unqualified praise as one of the most eloquent and vigorous writers of the day. (Anon

1863, 32 footnote 1)

Morgan’s approach to British history in The British Kymry and in St. Paul in Britain

seems to have proved too eccentric for most of his contemporaries, even within Celtic

revival circles.

4.6: The Stone of Brutus revealed

This then was the man who first brought the supposed extraordinary significance of

‘the Stone of Brutus’ to public attention. Although he was living in London at the time,

and one must allow the possibility that he had heard local traditions that are otherwise

totally unrecorded, in the circumstances it is more than tempting to regard it as another

example of ‘his energetic but somewhat too unqualified Cymricism’ and to dismiss it out

of hand. But if we cannot identify direct precursors for Morgan’s claims, we may detect

influences on his work that illuminate how he came to such unusual conclusions about

the nature of London Stone – to see the concept in the course of development.

Morgan first set out his views on the Trojan origin and significance of London Stone

shortly before his first contribution to Notes and Queries. It was in 1857 that he placed

them in their proper historical context, in his book The British Kymry, or Britons of

Cambria, a comprehensive, if eccentric, history of the Welsh people from the time of the

Flood to the nineteenth century. In the introduction, he explains his subtitle, Outlines of

their History and Institutions from the Earliest to the Present Times. These Outlines were

intended as a summary of a more substantial work ‘which will in due course be

committed to the press’ (1857, iii) – it was never to appear. The ‘historical views’ that

he presents he claims to be, for the most part, ‘as old as the eras to which they refer’;

the ‘version of these transactions, of British history in general’ that is preserved among

the native Welsh (ibid iv–v). He invites the reader ‘whenever such version comes into

collision with the hostile or foreign one – as British and Continental accounts of the

same action always have and always will conflict – to decide between them’ (ibid v). He

confirms that:

The Trojan descent of the Britons has been assigned the place to which it is

substantially entitled in this history. It solves the numerous and very peculiar

agreements in the social and military systems of pre-historic Britain and Asia which

would otherwise remain inexplicable. (ibid)

Other than a list of ‘Authorities consulted’ at the beginning of his book, Morgan gives

no references for the source of any of his historical ‘facts’, and we are left to conjecture

as to their genesis. Yet the book provides rather more clues than his 1858 and 1862

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contributions to Notes and Queries.

The early part of the book proves to be an extensive reworking of the familiar

‘British History’ as promulgated by Geoffrey of Monmouth 700 years earlier, into which

Morgan has woven his account of London Stone. He identifies the Stone as the plinth on

which had once stood the original Palladium of Troy. It was brought to Britain from

Greece by the Trojan fleet, in the care of Geryon the Augur (Morgan 1857, 26).80 Brutus

thereupon placed the Stone ‘in the court of the Temple of Diana’; and ‘on it the British

Kings were sworn to observe the Usages of Britain’ (ibid 31–2).

Morgan mentions ‘the belief in old times’ that as long as the Stone survived, London

‘would continue to increase in wealth and power’; with its disappearance the city

‘would decrease and finally disappear’. But here Morgan quotes no traditional saying

either in Welsh or in English, and it is tempting to ask whether this could be because he

had not yet composed either of them! Yet he may already have had the Welsh version in

mind, since the claim that London ‘would continue to increase in wealth and power’ is

rather closer to the meaning of Welsh ‘lled Llyndain’ than is the less specific ‘So long

will London flourish’ of his English verse.

There is, I believe, nothing to suggest that the verse itself was traditional in Wales.

However, its form mirrors a well-known saying that Morgan was familiar with; indeed

he quotes it later (ibid 19): ‘Tra môr, tra Brython’: ‘As long as there is a sea there will be

Britons’ or perhaps ‘Wherever there is sea there will be Britons’. This line occurred as

part of a druidic prophecy in the poem ‘Gwawt Lud y Mawr’ (‘Praise of Lludd the Great’

or (more correctly) ‘The great song concerning Lludd’) (Taliesin 1910, 76, line 9;

Haycock 2013, 131, line 107), one of the longest prophetic poems in the volume known

as the Llyvyr Taliessin or Book of Taliesin, a manuscript (National Library of Wales,

Penarth MS 2) dated to the early fourteenth century (Haycock 2013, 1). The poem

(printed in full, in Welsh and English, ibid 123–50) was known to Morgan and his

contemporaries from its inclusion in the first printed corpus of Welsh medieval

literature, The Myvyrian Archaiology of Wales, originally published in three volumes

between 1801 and 1807 (Jones, Williams and Pughe 1870, 62–3). ‘Tra môr, tra Brython’

was also quoted by Morgan’s cousin John Williams ab Ithel in an influential work on

bardism that began as a prize essay for the Llangollen eisteddfod of 1858 (Williams

1874, 16 footnote). It became something of a patriotic slogan in nineteenth-century

Wales; for example, it was emblazoned alongside other mottoes on the walls of the

pavilion at the Carmarthen eisteddfod in 1867 (Baker-Jones 1972, 48–9). However, as

Marged Haycock’s recent edition and translation make clear, these usages, including

Morgan’s ‘transmutation’ of it, have taken the phrase out of context, and have

apparently misconstrued it. Haycock provides a corrective translation:

The druids foretell

as long as there’s a sea, as long as there are Britons,

80 Geryon, Geron or Gero the Augur does appear briefly in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History, assisting

Brutus to elicit a prophecy from the goddess Diana (Geoffrey of Monmouth 2007, 18–19). There is nothing in Geoffrey’s work to suggest that Geron had a more prominent role as guardian of some sacred stone.

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there’ll not be fine weather in the summer... (Haycock 2013, 131, lines 106–8)

Rather than confirming the optimistic tone of Morgan’s verse, we now see this phrase in

the context of a poem that among other disasters prophesies the failure of the sun to

give warmth (lines 30–1) and subsequent famine that will thus last as long as the sea

does, and as long as the British people do!

In its turn, ‘maen Prydain’ reflects a traditional Welsh phrase, ‘Ynys Prydein’, which

was used to refer to the whole realm of Britain, and is usually rendered in English as

‘the Island [or Isle] of Britain’ (Bromwich 2006, passim).81 ‘Maen Prydain’ or ‘Maen

Prydein’ (for which I believe there is no independent evidence in Welsh tradition)

might be expected to mean ‘Stone of Britain’. Why then does Morgan equate it with

‘Stone of Brutus’? Was there an eponymous Prydein, after whom the ‘Island’ was

named? If so, is there any precedent for identifying him with the Brutus of Geoffrey of

Monmouth? – for that is what Morgan does, in The British Kymry.

Most obviously, the fold-out table in the front of the book is titled ‘genealogy of the

Britanidae, or royal line of Britain, from Gomer and Brutus, or Prydain, to Queen

Victoria’, and the first in the numbered series of British monarchs listed there is

‘Prydain Mawr (Brutus, founder of the Britannic Dynasty)’ (Morgan 1857, fold-out).82

Elsewhere Morgan tells us that ‘Brutus is also celebrated in the Triads as one of the

three Kings Revolutionists of Britain’ (ibid 28). But Brutus does not appear in the

recorded Welsh triads – Prydein, as we shall see, does (even if a triad of ‘Kings

Revolutionists’ is not readily identifiable!).

Morgan also claims (ibid 22) that one of the ancient names of Britain was ‘the Island

of Brutus’ – which makes no sense unless he is referring to the Welsh ‘Ynys Prydein’. A

year after the publication of Morgan’s The British Kymry, an edition of it appeared in

Welsh. The translator Thomas Hughes apparently did not recognise (or ignored) the

significance of Morgan’s equation of Brutus and Prydein, and translated his ‘Island of

Brutus’ literally as ‘Ynys Brut’, thus attributing to his author a clearly fallacious claim

that ‘Ynys Brut’ was an ancient Welsh name for Britain (Morgan 1858a, 23). This

misleading translation, tacitly accepted by the editor, Morgan’s cousin John Williams,

the bard ab Ithel, may indicate that Morgan’s view of the identity of Brutus and Prydein

was not one that was widely accepted or understood among his Welsh contemporaries.

But who was this Prydein, and what might have led Morgan to identify him with the

Trojan Brutus?

4.7: Prydein son of Aedd the Great

Prominent among the sources of our knowledge of early Welsh tradition are the ‘Triads

of the Island of Britain’, ‘Trioedd Ynys Prydein’, the prime example of the Celtic use of

triplets of people, institutions or objects to catalogue and organise information in an

81 Prydein and Prydain: both spellings occur, and while preferring ‘Prydein’, I shall use ‘Prydain’

whenever that is in my immediate source.

82 Prydain Mawr: ‘Prydein the Great’. As we shall see, Morgan has transferred the title ‘the Great’ to Prydein from his father Aedd Mawr.

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easily memorised form (Bromwich 2006, liii). Of nearly 100 Triads of the Island of

Britain included in Bromwich’s authoritative edition, all cite ‘Ynys Prydein’ in their first

line – thus for example ‘Three Generous Men of the Island of Britain’ – but none

mentions Prydein as a person, nor explains why the Island of Prydein is so called.

However, Richard Williams Morgan would have known these triads as they had

appeared in The Myvyrian Archaiology of Wales of 1801–7 (Jones, Williams and Pughe

1870). This contained three series of triads. Two of these, originating respectively in a

collection made by Robert Vaughan of Hengwrt (1592–1666) and in the Red Book of

Hergest (compiled during the period 1382–1410 (see Bromwich, Jarman and Roberts

1991, 10–12)), comprised triads also included by Rachel Bromwich in her own edition

(2006, xii).

The first triad in Robert Vaughan's collection (Jones, Williams and Pughe 1870, 400)

indeed mentions Prydein. It was included by Bromwich only in an appendix, in a series

of nine geographical triads, headed ‘Enweu Ynys Brydein yv hynn’ [‘These are the

names of the Island of Britain’] (Bromwich 2006, 246–55). In Bromwich's translation:

The first Name that this Island bore, before it was taken or settled: Myrddin’s Precinct.

And after it was taken and settled, the Island of Honey. And after it was conquered by

Prydein son of Aedd the Great it was called the Island of Prydein (Britain). (ibid 247)

Bromwich considers that this may represent the survival of a tradition older than the

account of the Trojan settlement of Britain which was first set out in the early historical

compilation, the Historia Brittonum, attributed to ‘Nennius’, embodied in written form

in the 9th and 10th centuries, and later elaborated in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of

the Kings of Britain. She proposes that the reference to ‘Prydein son of Aedd the Great’

(Prydein ab Aedd Mawr) may be ‘an allusion to an eponymous conqueror of Britain

whose name and story Geoffrey intentionally suppressed’ in favour of Brutus (ibid ciii).

Even on its own this triad could have suggested a simple equation of Prydein and

Brutus. But there are other references, accessible to Richard Williams Morgan, that

provide much more substantial reasons for associating the two, and almost certainly

inspired Morgan to identify them and thus to feel free to construe ‘maen Prydain’ as

‘Stone of Brutus’ – or vice versa, since we do not know which came first! These

references appear in the papers and publications of Iolo Morganwg, otherwise Edward

Williams (1747–1826), whom the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography describes

succinctly as ‘Welsh-language poet and literary forger’ (Morgan 2004).

Edward Williams was born at Pennon, Llancarfan, Glamorgan. He was a self-

educated itinerant stonemason, failed farmer and failed businessman. He read widely,

particularly antiquarian works, and (although Welsh was his second language) he

composed Welsh verse in imitation of archaic forms. He transcribed ancient Welsh texts

that he tracked down in the libraries of old Welsh families – and seems soon to have

begun amending and supplementing the texts he transcribed. During the 1780s he

became obsessed by the ancient Celtic druids and bards. He claimed that the succession

of Welsh bards could be traced back to pre-Christian druidic times, but that only in his

home county of Glamorgan did that succession remain unbroken – and that there now

remained just two bards of the true tradition, himself and Edward Evans of Aberdare.

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As a traditional bard he adopted the bardic name Iolo Morganwg (‘Iorwerth [Edward]

of Glamorgan’). And as a bard, it would seem totally proper for him to write in

traditional style and to improve upon the traditional texts he passed on.

He was in London in the 1770s and again in the 1790s, where he mixed with literary

figures and with the expatriate Welsh elite that was to be the centre of the revival of

Welsh culture. In 1792 he organised a ‘Gorsedd’ (his own invention) of Welsh bards on

Primrose Hill. Back in Wales in the later 1790s he continued his work of copying

ancient manuscripts and composing his own ancient texts. He joined Owen Jones and

William Owen Pughe in editing the first printed corpus of Welsh medieval literature,

The Myvyrian Archaiology of Wales, published in three volumes between 1801 and 1807

– of which the third volume reputedly contains much that is pure Iolo Morganwg

(Morgan 2004). He died in 1826, leaving a mass of papers, correspondence and

notebooks, some of which his son Taliesin was to edit and publish, while others were

drawn on by John Williams ab Ithel, cousin of Richard Williams Morgan, for his work on

bardic lore. The Iolo Morganwg archive finally passed into the National Library of Wales

in 1916.

Not all of Williams’s contemporaries or successors were convinced by the historical

truth of his claims or the authenticity of his texts. However, John Williams ab Ithel was

one who was so convinced, commenting that he could ‘unhesitatingly pronounce him

[Iolo] to be incapable of perpetrating literary deceit or forgery’ (Morgan 1975, 67). It

was ab Ithel’s two volumes on bardism (Williams 1862 and 1874 – the second,

unfinished, volume was published after his death), based almost entirely on Iolo

Morganwg, that laid the groundwork for the reinvention of the bardic tradition in Wales

– and elsewhere in the world. A project based at the University of Wales Centre for

Advanced Welsh & Celtic Studies from 2001 to 2008 has attempted to disentangle the

Iolo Morganwg archive and to assess the influence his work had on Wales and on the

Romantic movement. The project’s website claims that ‘Edward Williams, better known

as Iolo Morganwg [...] was a prime mover behind the cultural revival that saw the birth

of modern Wales. [...] Iolo’s vision of the past altered perceptions of Wales and

Welshness in ways that continue to echo well into our own century.’ (University of

Wales 2008).

Like his cousin ab Ithel, Môr Meirion accepted the validity of Iolo Morganwg’s

documents – although he used them to prove a case that, ironically, Iolo himself would

not have accepted. For Iolo objected to the story of Brutus and his Trojans – ‘he rejected

the way in which the Welsh took pride in the Brutus myth of Welsh history made

famous by Geoffrey of Monmouth, on the grounds that it made Welsh history

subservient to a foreign myth, to the Virgilian vision of ancient Roman history’ (Morgan

1975, 71).

The Myvyrian Archaiology of Wales, to which Iolo Morganwg contributed largely,

contained three series of ‘Triads of the Island of Britain’. Two of these, originating in a

collection made by Robert Vaughan (1592–1666) and in the Red Book of Hergest, were

accepted by Rachel Bromwich for inclusion in her definitive edition (Bromwich 2006).

The third series (Jones et al 1870, 400–11) she omitted, commenting ‘[it] is the work of

Iolo Morganwg, who in the late eighteenth century rewrote many of the older triads in

65

an expanded form, with the introduction of some fresh material’ (Bromwich 2006, xii).

And it is in this suspect ‘third series’ that we find Prydein son of Aedd the Great playing

a prominent and eminently Brutus-like role.

When editing Iolo Morganwg’s own manuscript English translations of the 126

Third Series triads, Bromwich (1968, 300–1) noted that 84 of them were adaptations of

triads that had appeared in the First Series, from Robert Vaughan’s manuscript, while

42 were entirely novel. And Prydein appears no less than ten times, in new triads and

interpolated into adapted ones. Bromwich (ibid 322) comments: ‘... Iolo erected an

elaborate fiction which depicted the eponymous Prydain fab Aedd as the original

legislator and administrator of the Welsh nation.’

Prydein was, she concludes, ‘the prime hero of the Third Series’.

The first of the Third Series triads (Jones et al 1870, 400; Bromwich 1968, 302) is an

amended and extended version of that published by Bromwich from ‘Enweu Ynys

Brydein’, which introduces Prydein son of Aedd the Great as conqueror and eponym of

the Island of Britain (Bromwich 2006, 246–7). The second triad lists the three ‘primary

Divisions of the Island of Britain’ – Cymmru, Lloegr and Alban – ‘according to the

Institution of Prydain son of Aedd the Great’ (Bromwich 1968, 302). Prydein appears

again in Triads 3, 4, 34, 36, 54, 55, 58 and 59, the last of which sums him up as one of

the three ‘Great [or Beneficent] Sovereigns’ (Jones et al 1870, 407; Bromwich 1969,

131).

Prydein, this first ruler and legislator of Britain, is clearly a counterpart of Geoffrey

of Monmouth’s Brutus; and the three ‘primary Divisions’ in Triad 2 are those which

Geoffrey’s Brutus had assigned to his three sons: Loegria, Kambria, and Albania

(Geoffrey of Monmouth 2007, 30–1). Unsurprisingly, Iolo gives primacy to

Kambria/Cymmru (Wales), rather than to Loegria/Lloegr (England) as Geoffrey had!

In spite of this apparent dependence on Geoffrey and the Trojan myth, Iolo’s triads

avoid any overt identification of Prydein with Brutus of Troy. In his expanded Triad 1

we find (in his own English version) ‘and to [the Isle of Prydain] none but the nation of

the Cymmry have any just claim, for it was first occupied by them, before which time it

was not inhabited by men...’ (Bromwich 1968, 300). The equivalent in ‘The Names of

the Island of Britain’ is ‘And no one has a right to the Island except only the nation of

Cymry, the remnant of the Britons, who came here in former days from Troy’ (Bromwich

2006, 247, from the fifteenth-century manuscript Peniarth 50 – my italics). Troy seems

to have been silently elided from Iolo Morganwg’s version.

4.8: Prydein and Brutus

But it was not only these Triads that Morgan could draw on for his picture of

Prydein/Brutus. At the beginning of his The British Kymry (1857, viii) he provides a long

list of ‘Authorities consulted’. The list includes ‘Iolo M.S.S.’. It seems likely that the

reference is not to unpublished manuscripts left by Iolo Morganwg, but to the volume of

Iolo’s papers collected, edited and translated by his son Taliesin after his death, and

published by the Society for the Publication of Ancient Welsh Manuscripts under that

same title Iolo Manuscripts (Williams 1848). The volume comprises a selection of Welsh

texts followed by English translations with notes – and there are several references to

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Prydein

Closest perhaps to the heart of Iolo Morganwg was the role he envisaged for

Prydein in establishing the first order of bards and their formal meeting, the Gorsedd,

which is set out in Iolo Manuscripts as ‘an account of the rights and usages of the bards

of the Island of Britain, as exercised in the times of the primitive bards and princes of

the Cimbri’ (Williams 1848, 430–48). According to Iolo, it was Prydein who took the

initiative to seek out bards who ‘preserved in memory the primitive knowledge of the

Cimbri’ and under Prydein’s patronage that the Gorsedd first met and the regulations of

the bardic order were formulated (ibid 430–1). The ‘rights and usages of the bards’

were further elaborated from Iolo’s work by John Williams ab Ithel in his prize essay on

Barddas (Williams 1862 and 1874), and became the basis of modern bardic and druidic

practice. They seem, alas, to be largely Iolo’s own invention (Morgan 2004).

The first text in Iolo Manuscripts is titled in the English version ‘The genealogy of

Iestyn, the son of Gwrgan, prince of Glamorgan’ (Williams 1848, 3–11, 331–56). This

genealogy of Iestyn, the last Welsh ruler of the kingdom of Morgannwg, deposed by the

Normans in 1091, traces his lineage back to ‘Annyn of Troy, the son of Prydain, the son

of Aedd the Great’, and then summarises the feats of each ancestor in sequence for the

first 62 generations from Annyn, at which point it breaks off. The four generations

immediately after Prydain are surprisingly familiar:

Annyn Dro (= Aeneas of Troy?)83

Selys the Aged (= Silvius?)

Brwth (= Brutus?)

Cymryw (= Kamber?)

This ancestry of Brutus and his son Kamber (Williams 1848, 3–4, 332–5) is not quite

that proposed by Geoffrey of Monmouth since it omits Ascanius, son of Aeneas and

(according to Geoffrey) grandfather of Brutus (Geoffrey of Monmouth 2007, 6–7).

However, Geoffrey’s straightforward sequence of generations is a rationalisation of a

much more confused picture provided by ‘Nennius’, in which the relationship of

Ascanius and Silvius is unclear – they may be half-brothers (Morris 1980, 19–20 and

60–1; Faral 1929, 1: 192–8). In his notes on the Iestyn genealogy, Taliesin Williams

(1848, 333–6) comments on the difficulty of relating this part of it to the familiar Trojan

descent. It makes Prydain the first ruler of Britain rather than Brutus; it is Prydain, not

Brutus, who divides the land between three sons; and it is Annyn Dro, not Kamber, who

inherits Wales as his share (ibid 332–4).

The genealogy of Iestyn is claimed (ibid 331, footnote 1) to be a copy from a

manuscript that had belonged to ‘the late Mr. Thomas Truman, of Pantlliwyd, in the

parish of Llansannor, Glamorgan’. However, just as Bromwich excluded Iolo’s Triads, P

C Bartrum excluded this genealogy from his publication of Early Welsh Genealogical

Tracts, preferring instead a genealogy of Iestyn’s son Cariadoc found in three sixteenth-

83 Perhaps this is the same figure who appears in more trustworthy sources as ‘Annun ddu’, ‘Annun the

Black’, identified as ‘brenin Groec’ or ‘rex Graecorum’ (king of Greece) – although this Annun appears to be a grandson of Kamber rather than his great grandfather (Bartrum 1966, 18 and 122)!

67

century manuscripts, which overlaps largely with this, but lacks the historical

summaries (Bartrum 1966, 122) – noting also that ‘in the Iolo MSS, p 3–6, another

seventeen generations are added between Albanius (Alafon) and Kamber (Cymryw)’

(ibid 158, note 3).

It is interesting to compare the earliest generations in these two genealogies. In the

Cariadoc genealogy we find ‘Kamber son of Brutus son of Silius son of Ysganes’ (ibid

122) – all Latinate forms except the last (the earliest ancestor, who is presumably

Ascanius), and ‘modified to agree with Historia Regum Britanniae’ according to Bartrum

(ibid 158, note 3). Appearing as this Cariadoc genealogy does in three sixteenth-century

manuscripts, there is no difficulty in accepting that its compiler was directly influenced

by Geoffrey’s work. The Iestyn genealogy is more problematical: outright forgery or

improved and expanded original?

Whichever it is, and whether Iolo or an anonymous earlier compiler is responsible,

it seems to have been designed to assimilate the Brutus and Prydein ancestries not by

equating Brutus and Prydein but by joining the generations end to end – a different

approach to that adopted by Richard Williams Morgan, who seems to be willing to use

Iolo Morganwg’s work but to adapt it to his own ends.

The role of Prydein ab Aedd Mawr as Brutus-like nation-founder and lawgiver

cannot be extrapolated from the scanty mentions cited by Bromwich (2006, 484–5). It

is dependent upon the work of Iolo Morganwg in either bringing this patriarchal figure

to light from the obscurity of lost documents – or inventing the documentation that

established him as a patriotically more acceptable Welsh ancestor than Trojan Brutus.

Iolo Morganwg does not seem to have intended Prydein to be equated with Brutus –

rather to replace him. Indeed, if Bromwich was right in identifying Prydein as ‘an

eponymous conqueror of Britain whose name and story Geoffrey intentionally

suppressed’ (ibid ciii), Iolo was doing no more than restoring Prydein to his rightful

place in tradition.

Once the reputation of Prydein was established in the public consciousness, the way

was open for others to assimilate him to the more widely accepted figure of Brutus. I

would argue that it was Richard Williams Morgan who most effectively did this – and

who surely himself gave the identification substance by the composition of a Welsh

verse and an English proverb that equated ‘the Stone of Brutus’ with ‘Maen Prydein’.

This fiery speaker, whose closest colleagues distrusted ‘his energetic but somewhat too

unqualified Cymricism’, seems to have been the sort of person who would not be

reluctant to twist a tradition or tamper with a legend to support his ‘somewhat too

unqualified’ glorification of Welsh history. The fact that some of the legends he was

reworking were themselves (apparently) forgeries by Iolo Morganwg was an irony of

which he was (presumably) unaware.

4.9: Richard Williams Morgan and the Short English Metrical Chronicle

There can be little doubt that we owe the ‘proverb’ about the Stone of Brutus, and its

Welsh equivalent, together with the elaborate story that Brutus brought the Stone from

Troy, that it stood as an altar in the Temple of Diana, and that British kings swore oaths

upon it, to the ‘somewhat too unqualified Cymricism’ of Richard Williams Morgan. Yet

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was there a core of traditional ‘truth’ in his inventions? We have already noted that in

the early fourteenth century an anonymous author of the Short English Metrical

Chronicle had claimed that when Brutus established London as ‘New Troy’ he had not

only ‘sett Londen ston’ but had immediately prophesied a great future for the city:

Þat Troye nas neuer so fair cite

So þis cite schal be. (Burnley & Wiggins 2003b, lines 463–4)

Although Brutus’s prophecy of London’s future greatness and superiority to Troy

was not contingent upon the preservation of London Stone, but rather upon the

commitment of his successors to making the city ‘wide & rome’, the contiguity of the

lines may seem to imply a linkage between the Stone and the prophecy:

Brut sett Londen ston

& þis wordes he seyd anon… (ibid lines 457–8)

We have no evidence that the anonymous fourteenth-century author was recording

a ‘real’ tradition about London Stone that might have survived independently; we have

(as yet!) found no other occurrence of the concept in medieval or later literature to

confirm that it had any wider circulation or long survival – but we then see Morgan, in

his The British Kymry (1857), asserting that Brutus set up London Stone, and

subsequently, in his contribution to Notes and Queries (1862), that there existed a

prophecy of London’s greatness, associated with the Stone.

Is this a coincidence, or was Morgan aware of the medieval verse or a ‘tradition’ it

embodied? One version of the chronicle poem had indeed appeared in print, and was

available in Morgan’s time. This was the version included by Joseph Ritson in his

collection of Ancient Engleish Metrical Romanceës [spelling sic], published in three

volumes in 1802 (Ritson 1802, 2: 270–313). It was taken from the manuscript now in

the British Library (MS Royal 12 C. XII) – and this is the only surviving version of the

poem that does not credit Brutus with setting up London Stone and prophesying

London’s future greatness; it tells us only that Brutus built London and called it New

Troy, and omits the couplets about London Stone and Brutus’s prophecy (Ritson 1802,

2: 274, lines 95–100; cf O’Farrell-Tate 2002, 69). Was Morgan aware of one of the other,

fuller manuscripts, or a printed extract or reference? There is nothing to suggest that

Morgan was a habitual student of medieval English manuscripts, and as yet I have not

come across any reference in print that predates Morgan. As usual, Morgan’s failure to

credit his sources and his careless, indeed extravagant, misuse of them must make the

reader suspicious. In his (admittedly) wide reading Morgan may have come across a

reference to this medieval verse that links London Stone, Brutus and a prophecy of

London’s greatness. If so, he has elaborated wildly upon his source.

Part of that elaboration was surely to relate the prophecy directly to the safety of

London Stone and to supply a saying in Welsh and in English that embodied it. And

Morgan’s invention of the Stone of Brutus proverb was, in the long term, to have a

disastrous impact on popular and pseudo-academic attitudes to London Stone.

4.10: The Stone of Brutus: first reactions

But the influence of Morgan’s claims was not immediate. In spite of their appearance in

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the widely-read Notes and Queries, Môr Meirion’s confident assertions about the Stone

of Brutus seem to have attracted no attention at first. No subsequent correspondent to

Notes and Queries commented on them, although there were replies to his query about

the nature of the stone of which Stonehenge was built (Allport 1862; F P 1862). J E

Price, writing his historical account of London Stone in 1870, and drawing on the

researches of the Guildhall Librarian W H Overall, makes no mention of Môr Meirion’s

thesis – not even to dismiss it as fantasy – although both Price and Overall were

frequent contributors to, and thus no doubt regular readers of, Notes and Queries.84

In 1881, Henry Charles Coote (1815–1885) published an article, part of it devoted to

London Stone, in the Transactions of the London and Middlesex Archaeological Society.

Coote was a distinguished lawyer, as well as Vice-President of the Folklore Society, to

whose journal he contributed papers on the origins of fairy tales, on Irish, Greek and

Italian folklore, and similar matters (Anon 2004). But in his 1881 paper on London

Stone he ignored all the tempting folkloric possibilities, while confirming that ‘between

the stone and the lordship of the city was a close, if vague, relation’ (Coote 1881, 291).

Instead, as we have already noted, he concluded that its reputation derived from the

fact that it was a relic, the last stone to remain, of a great stone house once belonging to

Henry Fitz Ailwin, the first mayor of London (ibid 292).

Other late Victorian folklorists, whose own views on London Stone’s significance we

must next consider, were rather more ready than Henry Coote to draw into their

arguments any obscure piece of tradition, and to come to much less mundane

conclusions than he had. Yet they too ignore the Stone of Brutus. If aware of Môr

Meirion, by their silence they condemn his ‘traditions’ as in their opinion unauthentic.

In fact, Morgan’s chief influence seems to have been on the anonymous contributor

to Chambers’s Journal whose work we have already noted. And it seems likely that it

was this anonymous article that first brought the Stone of Brutus and its mythology to

the attention of a wider and perhaps less discerning audience. From there, as we shall

see, it came to the notice of the Scottish folklorist Lewis Spence, and has since been

catapulted into the awareness of modern writers and the media, where any mention of

London Stone has to be accompanied by a quotation of the Stone of Brutus ‘proverb’.

84 According to the indexes to Notes and Queries, W H Overall contributed some 18 notes on a variety of

topics between 1860 and 1883, and John E Price the same number between 1868 and 1888.

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5: Anthropology, archaeology, mythology

5.1: The fetish stone

In parallel with Môr Meirion’s flights of fancy, harmless apart from their influence on

unwary modern authors, we find reputable Victorian and Edwardian scholars prepared

to see London Stone as of greater than Roman antiquity, and of more esoteric

significance than a Roman milliarium. In a book on the primitive origins of religion, first

published in 1897 but reprinted in the popular Thinker’s Library series as late as the

1930s, the prolific Victorian author Grant Allen argued (1931, 181) that ‘To the present

day London preserves her foundation-god in the shape of London Stone’.85 In an earlier

contribution to Longman’s Magazine he had emphasised this identification of London

Stone as ‘probably the very oldest and most sacred relic of ancient London. It is, in point

of fact, the City fetish’ (Allen 1891, 378).

To support this hypothesis he cites in his 1897 book two notable London historians,

G L Gomme and W J Loftie. Indeed, in 1891, when he first discussed London Stone in his

Longman’s Magazine article, Grant claimed he had long had his own views about its

origins, and regretted that ‘Mr Laurence Gomme has, to some extent, taken the words

out of my mouth, and anticipated some part of my perilous conclusions’ (1891, 378).

George Laurence Gomme (1853–1916) combined extensive research into folklore

and the development of myths with his role as clerk to the fledgling London County

Council and with the writing of London history (Gomme 2004). In an early work on the

origins of the English ‘village community’ (Gomme 1890a, 218–9), the source first cited

by Allen, he had noted the significance for modern London of the practices of primitive

villagers, and he reasserted this view (in identical words) in his later influential work

The Governance of London (1907, 149–50):

In early days, when a village was first established, a stone was set up. To this stone the

head man of the village made an offering once a year. Of the many traces of this custom

in England I will not speak here, but of its survival in London municipal custom there

exists some curious evidence accidentally preserved, and it relates to London Stone.86

As was common practice among folklorists of the time, Gomme cites anthropological

sources for practices ‘in early days’ (more specifically ‘in early Aryan days’ in an earlier

version of this same text (1890b, 544)). He refers us to two works on India and one on

Early Races of Scotland. As a parallel in recent times he quotes practice at Bovey Tracey

in Devon, where ‘on the mayor’s day [...] the mayor used to ride around the stone cross

85 Canadian-born Grant Allen (1848–1899) was the author of many popular scientific works on topics

including evolution, anthropology and botany, and of novels and short stories, including early science fiction and detective stories first published in magazines such as the Strand Magazine (Cotton 2004). His novel The Woman Who Did (1895) was notorious at the time for its attacks on contemporary social and sexual mores; one of his short stories The Thames Valley Catastrophe (1897) envisaged the destruction of London by a massive volcanic eruption.

86 This was clearly a favourite subject with Gomme, who had dealt with it in much the same words in a lecture to the London and Middlesex Archaeological Society ‘On the early municipal history of London’ delivered in November 1884 (printed as Gomme 1890b, 544–7).

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and strike it with a stick. This significant action proclaimed the authority of the mayor

at Bovey.’87 For ‘municipal custom’ surrounding London Stone itself he alludes firstly to

the Jack Cade episode and then quotes the jurist Woodthorpe Brandon’s account of the

customary practice of the Lord Mayor’s Court in cases of ‘foreign attachment’ for debt:

The summons or calling of the defendant was orally made [by the serjeant], and in early

times was, without doubt, a substantial summons and bidding of the debtor to appear in

court, and by some supposed to have been at London Stone. (Brandon 1861, 5–6 – my

italics)

Sadly, Brandon cites no source for this otherwise important piece of evidence, and does

not attempt to identify the ‘some’ who ‘suppose’ the summons to have been made at

London Stone. Indeed, Brandon particularly notes how little of the details of the court

procedure are recorded (ibid 4). An earlier legal treatise on the same subject says

nothing of a summons at London Stone or elsewhere (Locke 1853). Is it perhaps a

reminiscence of one of the suggestions noted (but dismissed) by John Stow (1908, 1:

224), that the Stone had been set up ‘for the tendering and making of payment by

debtors’? In view of the apparent lack of supporting evidence, we see no reason to treat

this ‘supposition’ as of any worth. Less cautious, Grant Allen cites the same account and

not only accepts its accuracy but interprets it thus: ‘as though the stone itself spoke to

the wrong-doer with the united voice of the assembled citizens’ (Allen 1931, 181).

Allen cites an equally well-known London writer William John Loftie (but gives no

reference that I can trace in Loftie’s copious writings) in support of his conclusion that

the first mayor Henry Fitz Ailwin took his soubriquet ‘of Londonstone’ from his role as

‘the hereditary keeper of this urban fetish’. ‘In short’, says Grant Allen, ‘the

representative of the village headman’ (ibid).

In considering the comments of such late Victorian and Edwardian authorities, we

must put their learning into its context – the style of anthropological scholarship that

was to culminate in J G Frazer’s The Golden Bough. Sir Laurence Gomme (he was

knighted in 1911) was one of the so-called ‘Great Team’ of British folklorists of the late

nineteenth century, along with Andrew Lang, Edwin Hartland, Alfred Nutt and Edward

Clodd.

Meeting regularly in the friendly atmosphere of The Folk-Lore Society, founded in 1878,

where each served in turn as president, they moved forward on a common front to

advance the serious study of folklore along anthropological lines... [to] ferret out every

surviving scrap of folklore from village green and county chronicle, and reconstruct

collectively the biography of primitive man. (Dorson 1968b, 217)

Dorson argues that they adhered to a shared ‘doctrine of survival’ that allowed them

first to take note of aspects of human activity reported by missionaries or

anthropologists as prevalent among so-called ‘primitive’ peoples, then to identify these

87 For the Bovey Tracey ‘Mayor’s Riding’ and the ceremony that took place at the ‘Bovey Stone’ – which

seems to have been part of a ceremony of beating the bounds and had nothing to do with proclaiming the authority of the mayor – see Ormerod (1874, 395) and Pearce Chope (1938, 369–70). It is irrelevant to the function of London Stone.

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as practices once universal at a certain point in human development, and to compare

them with ‘survivals’ in modern society. And the existence of the latter would serve to

confirm the validity of the argument. Although Jacqueline Simpson (1999, 101) has

questioned the existence of a ‘Great Team’ of folklorists,88 Gomme himself was clearly

an adherent to this ‘doctrine’.

In that context it is not surprising to find London Stone identified a village fetish-

stone, and the mayor as its hereditary keeper.89

Although this methodology was long ago abandoned by academic anthropologists

and folklorists it remains a popular one. It is, for example, the sort of approach that has

led to the growth of the modern myth of the ‘Green Man’.90 A mythical London Stone

that equally transcends the historical reality has become the staple of many recent

works on the psychogeography of the city – a subject we shall need to return to. For the

twentieth century saw new developments in the field of speculative archaeology and

esoteric interpretations of London Stone and its function.

5.2: ‘Mighty unhewn monoliths’?

In 1914 Elizabeth Oke Gordon (1837–1919, the daughter of, and author of a biography

of, the eminent geologist William Buckland (Gordon 1894)) 91 published a volume on

prehistoric London which was an early exposition of esoteric ‘patterns in the

landscape’. Her Prehistoric London: Its Mounds and Circles (1914) went through four

editions up to 1946 and was reprinted as recently as 1985.

Gordon proposed that there had existed in the London area a ‘druidic’ landscape of

prehistoric mounds and (long lost) megalithic monuments that comes as a surprise to

more conventional prehistoric archaeologists. An example of her approach is the

delineation of a huge triangle defined by the locations of Tothill (Westminster), the

Tower of London (identified as the ‘white hill’ Bryn Gwyn of early Welsh tradition) and

88 For more on the ‘Great Team’ see Dorson 1968a, 202–65 – and in particular (pp 220–9) on Gomme’s

own approach and contribution to folklore studies. Simpson (1999, 101) concludes, from a study of the minutes of the Council of the Folklore Society, that ‘Personalities, rivalries and ambitions, differing concepts of folklore, and diverging views about the future of the FLS [Folklore Society], meant that these five central players in the Society’s early history were more often in conflict with each other than working as a team.’ Dorson’s own account of their interactions (Dorson 1968a, 202–65 and passim) seems to confirm her conclusion. Simpson’s 1999 paper also provides good evidence to contradict Dorson’s characterisation of ‘the friendly atmosphere of The Folk-Lore Society’!

89 Rather more surprising is the fact that, as late as 1969, Ralph Merrifield – eminent London archaeologist but also a respected folklorist – was to comment on the location of London Stone in the wall of the Bank of China that it was ‘an odd resting-place for the last remnant of the ancient fetish-stone of London’ (Merrifield 1969, 96 – my italics). He had earlier suggested that in the Middle Ages London Stone ‘seems to have taken on something of the character of a fetish stone’ (1965, 123). He was clearly well aware of Gomme’s ‘fetish stone’ theory, though he does not refer to Gomme’s writings.

90 Roy Judge, in the second edition of his study of The Jack-in-the-Green (2000, 83–99) concludes that in spite of academic scepticism ‘we have, in fact, now virtually accepted a mythological Green Man as part of our cultural baggage’ (ibid 98).

91 Author also of a guidebook to the Natural History Museum for children (1903), and a book on St George (1907). Her unusual middle name was the maiden name of her mother Elizabeth Oke, of Axminster in Devon (Gordon 1894, 1).

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‘Llandin’ (Parliament Hill), together with ‘Penton’ (for Pentonville, as if from supposed

Celtic ‘Pen-ton’ – ‘head’ and ‘sacred mound’ (Gordon’s own translation) – rather than

from the family name of Henry Penton, the eighteenth-century developer of this new

suburb, as is generally understood) (Gordon 1914, 3–4).92 Of this theory, Peter Ackroyd

(2000, 13–14) comments, half approvingly:

It has been suggested that the London area was controlled from three sacred mounds;

they are named as Penton Hill, Tothill and the White Mound, otherwise known as Tower

Hill. Any such theory can readily be dismissed as nonsense, but there are curious

parallels and coincidences which render it more interesting than the usual fantasies of

latter-day psychogeographers.

As well as Ackroyd, Gordon’s theories appear to have influenced the work of Iain

Sinclair (Bond 2005, 61), perhaps the most significant of the ‘latter-day

psychogeographers’ to whom Ackroyd refers.

However, the most dramatic feature of her pre-Roman London landscape is

described by Gordon thus:

On the highest ground on the western hillock, where St. Paul’s now stands, might have

been seen silhouetted against the sky, the mighty unhewn monoliths of the Druidic

circle, the seat of the Arch-Druid of Caer Troia. (Gordon 1914, 10)

It hardly needs to be pointed out that this stone circle is unknown to archaeologists.

Gordon continues (ibid 11):

No trace of the circle remains, but at a little distance to the south-east (originally on the

site of the eastern hillock) stands a single obeliscal pillar or index stone, preserved

behind iron bars in the wall of St Swithin’s Church, opposite Cannon Street Station. [...]

Index stones, pointers or menhirs are found in connection with many British circles.

Perhaps the best known example of a British gnom, pillar or pointer, is the solitary

‘Hele’ (Gr. Helios = sun) or Sunstone standing somewhat in the same relation to

Stonehenge as does London Stone to St Paul’s Churchyard.

We are reminded of Strype’s contention, 200 years earlier, ‘that the Britains erected

Stones for religious Worship, and that the Druids had Pillars of Stone in Veneration’

(Stow 1720, book 2: 194), Pennant’s view that London Stone ‘might be might have been

part of a Druidical circle’ (1793, 4), and the links made by William Blake between

London Stone and Stonehenge (above). But Gordon was not the only writer in the

twentieth century to propose a prehistoric origin for London Stone.

In June 1921 Hereford business man Alfred Watkins (1855–1935), while driving (or,

according to some versions of the story, riding) in the hills near Blackwardine in

Herefordshire, first realised that he could see an underlying pattern to the landscape.

Poring over Ordnance Survey maps, and then confirming the alignments on the ground,

he was able to track straight lines over many miles linking features like megalithic

circles and standing stones, prehistoric mounds (including those that others identified

92 For Henry Penton and Pentonville see Temple (2008, 322). Peter Ackroyd (2000, 14–15) suggests

that these two derivations of the name Pentonville might both, in some significant fashion, be true simultaneously.

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as medieval mottes or windmill mounds), churches (assumed for this purpose to stand

on prehistoric sites), old trees, ponds, ‘mark stones’, natural landscape features and

crossroads. These alignments he interpreted as carefully-surveyed ancient trackways,

which (since they often passed through or close to places which contained the element

‘ley’ in their names) he christened ‘leys’ – more familiarly known today as ‘ley lines’. In

1925 he set out his theory, with numerous examples and illustrations, in his book The

Old Straight Track.

Williamson and Bellamy (1983, 11–15) and Pennick and Devereux (1989, 237–44)

have summarised the development of Watkins’s ideas and the reactions to them, and

their revival in a new guise the 1960s, when links were proposed between leys and the

sighting of UFOs, swiftly followed in the 1970s by New Age interest in ‘earth mysteries’,

when leys were seen as ‘dragon paths’, lines of earth force that could be dowsed for,

detected and indeed put to use. More recently attention has been drawn to the

prevalence of ‘straight lines’ in many other parts of the world, and it has been argued

that they form part of the conceptual landscape of many cultures – as ‘fairy paths’,

shamanic ‘spirit ways’, or ‘roads of the dead’ (Pennick & Devereux 1989, 245–62). Paul

Devereux (2007) has also provided a useful summary of the history of the subject and

the different approaches to it, most of which are all still current. He identifies a three-

way split between ‘a rump group of post-modernist ley hunters’, ‘dowsers and New

Agers [who] still maintain an unquestioned belief in “energy lines”’, and ‘research-

minded ley hunters’. Meanwhile, of course, sceptics claim that very existence of leys

remains unproven (Williamson & Bellamy 1983, passim)!

The reality of leys and, if they are real, their function and date are not issues here.

We should merely note that – as might be expected – London Stone has taken its place

in the conceptual geography of leys. Watkins mentioned London Stone only in passing,

during a disquisition on the significance of the prehistoric surveyor’s sighting staff: ‘It

was with a staff that Jack Cade assumed the mastership of the City by striking London

Stone [...] with it’ (Watkins 1925, 87–8) – my ellipsis conceals Watkins’s exclamatory

aside ‘(surely a mark stone!)’.93 Watkins himself seems never to have identified a ley

passing through this mark stone, but others have done so. Thus Paul Devereux (1990,

114–15) has traced an alignment running from the church of St Martin Ludgate through

St Paul’s, London Stone, and All Hallows Barking to Tower Hill, while also noting the

similar alignment recognised by Nigel Pennick that links London Stone with the sites of

a number of pre-Great Fire churches – St Thomas the Apostle, St John upon Walbrook

and St Leonard Milk Street – as well as with All Hallows (see Pennick and Devereux

1989, 147, fig 3.10).

In 1937 the Scots folklorist and mythologist, and Scottish nationalist, Lewis Spence

(1874–1955) published a book on Legendary London in which he combined a summary

of the archaeological evidence for the prehistory and early development of London with

93 And of course, the comparison with the surveyor’s staff is only valid if we accept the Folio version of

Shakespeare’s play, portraying Jack Cade striking London Stone with a staff, and ignore the Quarto texts and all the contemporary accounts that refer to his sword!

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a study of its early ‘legends’ (among which he included the writings of that arch-

inventor of tradition Geoffrey of Monmouth). Spence always placed a great value upon

‘tradition’ as historical evidence, often preferring it to the work of what he called

‘archaeologists of the Tape-Measure School’ (Spence 1928, 116). In his study of early

London he was prepared to accept that the tale of Brutus had an origin in fact – that it

represented oral tradition of the coming to Britain of an expeditionary force from the

Mediterranean:

The break-up of Troy about 1182 B.C. probably had the effect of scattering its leading

men far and wide and I think it not improbable that one or other of them may have

settled in Italy, and that a century or so later a descendant of his may have joined forces

with some of the expeditions of early traders and rovers who were then certainly

passing through the Pillars of Hercules and coasting along the shores of Spain and Gaul.

(Spence 1937, 165)

He allows an alternative – the arrival in the London area, in about 1000 BC, of Celtic

Bronze Age people from the region of the Danube, perhaps even led ‘by some young and

enterprising aristocrat who could boast of a Trojan descent’ (ibid 166).

It is in this context that he discusses London Stone (ibid 167–73). He quotes Stow’s

account in full, and the opinions of Malcolm, Gomme and others. The most probable

explanation, he believes, is that of Grant Allen – that the Stone was ‘the original

communal fetish of London which represented the guardian spirit of the community’ –

and he quotes the whole of the paragraph that Allen devoted to the subject in his The

Evolution of the Idea of God (ibid 170–1). He also cites the ‘old saying’ about the Stone of

Brutus, and the ‘popular tradition’ linking it to the Temple of Diana and to the oath-

taking by early British kings – all attributed to the Chambers’s Journal article of 1888,

and all apparently in ignorance of both the original Notes and Queries article and the

likely origin of these traditions in the inventive mind of Môr Meirion.

He notes that ‘Saxon charters speak of London Stone in terms almost of veneration’

and that ‘At the end of the sixteenth century it was still a recognised spot for the public

announcement of edicts’ (ibid 171). Both these bold claims, although unattributed by

Spence, are based directly on the Chambers’s Journal article, in which they refer to

Stow’s account of the Christ Church Canterbury property list and to Pasquill and

Marforius respectively (Anon 1888, 241 and 242)). There is in fact a significant

difference in emphasis. Chambers’s author had stated (ibid 242) ‘[...] it had come to be

one of the recognised places for the promulgation of edicts at the latter end of the

sixteenth century’ (my italics) – the writer takes what may be the orthodox historian’s

view in such cases that no practice can be assumed to have existed much before the

earliest historical reference to it. By contrast, Spence writes ‘At the end of the sixteenth

century it was still a recognised spot for the public announcement of edicts’ (again, my

italics). Spence, as might be expected, adopts the then fashionable folklorist’s view that

a ‘custom’ could (and probably should) be considered to have a history of incalculable

age predating its first recording.

On the basis of his interpretation of London Stone, Spence concludes:

I believe that its presence provides evidence of the fact that the site of the city was

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formerly a ‘high place’ of the proto-Druidic religion of the early inhabitants of the

Bronze Age river-side settlement of London. (ibid 171–2)

This of course brings us very close to Elizabeth Gordon’s concept of London Stone as

the outlier of a stone circle that crowned the ‘high place’ where St Paul’s Cathedral later

stood. But although Spence lists her work in his bibliography, he does not discuss her

theory about London Stone and the stone circle on the site of St Paul’s.

5.3: Archaeology: the official line?

Yet alongside these speculative reconstructions of the archaeology of prehistoric

London, we find what might be termed the ‘official’ opinion expressed in the volume on

Roman London published by the Royal Commission on Historical Monuments in 1928.

London Stone is included in the gazetteer in this volume, thus apparently confirming its

default status as ‘Roman’, but with the admission that there is ‘no evidence of its

original use’ (RCHM(E) 1928, 111). However, we must assume that the author

(Mortimer Wheeler) was convinced of its Roman date, since he employed it as one of

the arguments to prove that Cannon Street lies on the line of a Roman street: ‘A few

yards further west the line is marked by the old position of London Stone’ (ibid 48).

The northern edge of this same Roman road was revealed when excavations on the

site of St Swithin’s church, bombed and burnt out in the Second World War, were

carried out by Professor W F Grimes for the Roman and Mediaeval London Excavation

Council in 1960–61 (Grimes 1968, 142–3). Grimes does not comment on the age or

purpose of London Stone, noting merely that since it had been removed from the south

side of Cannon Street to its location in the wall of the Wren church, his excavations on

the latter threw no light on the Stone’s original site or function (ibid 199–200).

As we have seen, the plaque erected when London Stone was placed in its alcove in

the wall of the new building avoided all speculation, and explained quite frankly ‘its

origin and purpose are unknown’.

In 1965 Ralph Merrifield of the Guildhall Museum, like Wheeler before him, included

London Stone in the gazetteer of his (for its time) authoritative book on The Roman City

of London, although noting that ‘there is no evidence of a Roman date’ (Merrifield 1965,

271–2). He refers to Camden’s proposal that it was a Roman milestone, ‘possibly the

central milestone of the Province, from which all distances were measured’, but notes

that ‘modern archaeologists have been sceptical of this’ (ibid). He does, however, state

also that it had by the Middle Ages ‘taken on something of the character of a fetish

stone’, but that it was unlikely to be either an Anglo-Saxon wayside cross or ‘a sacred

stone of the pagan Saxon period’ (ibid 123–4). He concludes that ‘it is therefore feasible

that it was a roadside monument of some kind, set up in the Roman period, although

the use of Clipsham Limestone might suggest a later date’.

Ten years later Merrifield’s museum colleague Peter Marsden published a major

report (Marsden 1975) on his own archaeological investigations south of Cannon

Street, in the area where Christopher Wren had noted the existence of ‘tessellated

Pavements, and other extensive Remains of Roman Workmanship, and Buildings’

(above: Wren 1750, 265–6) and others had reported substantial Roman remains.

Marsden reconstructed the plan of an extensive building complex, including ‘an

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enormous official palatial residence containing a large ornamental garden and several

reception rooms of monumental proportions’ (Marsden 1975, 1). Marsden’s conclusion

was that this was ‘probably the residence of the Roman Governor of Britain’. He notes

that the original position of London Stone seems to align with the centre of the northern

range of this building, as he reconstructs it, and proposed that it may have originated as

part of the structure of a monumental entrance to the palace (ibid 63–5, fig 29). He

returned to this proposal in a general account of Roman London a few years later:

The landward entrance was probably situated on the upper terrace, on the south side of

modern Cannon Street, though deep modern basements have destroyed almost all trace

of this. It is here that possible remains of an entrance courtyard were found leading off

the main Roman street beneath Cannon Street, and it is now thought likely that the

enigmatic monolith that has been called London Stone for at least the past 800 years

belonged to the palace entrance. (Marsden 1980, 92)

This remains an attractive hypothesis, even if unproveable – although the identification

of this palatial building as the residence of the governor is no longer accepted, and its

overall plan seems not as symmetrical as Marsden thought (Milne 1996). The most

recent attempt to produce a detailed reconstructed map of Roman Londinium does not

include London Stone – and shows the great central block of the north wing of what was

previously identified as the ‘palace’ as the possible podium of a temple (MOLA 2013).

5.4: A Stone for the New Age

However, there was a continuing, less orthodox, tradition that favoured the works of

Gordon and Spence above those of Wheeler and Merrifield and other ‘archaeologists of

the Tape-Measure School’. Its nature was expressed in 1990 in The Aquarian Guide to

Legendary London (Matthews & Potter 1990)94 – which we have already cited with

reference to a ley line reputed to pass through London Stone. The volume embodied an

unexpectedly esoteric approach to studies of London, London monuments, and

London’s topography. A number of contributors to this volume refer to London Stone.

Nigel Pennick sums up the popular view in a chapter on ‘Legends of London’. It is not

immediately clear whether Pennick regards ‘prehistoric kings’ such as Lud and Bladud

as historical or as legendary figures (Pennick 1990, 21–2), although he describes Brutus

as ‘mythical founder of Britain’ when reporting the ‘tradition’ that London Stone was

‘originally a temple altar-stone, laid by none other than Brutus the Trojan’ (ibid 24) –

the ultimate source of this ‘tradition’ is of course Richard Williams Morgan. He

continues, however,

because of this it was considered to be a sacred object, upon which oaths were sworn.

The stone was also the point from which authoritative proclamations were made. Also,

the tradition of striking one’s sword against the stone as a symbol of sovereignty was

94 A reissue of this book appeared in 2016 under the title The Secret Lore of London (Matthews & Wise

2016). The original publication is not acknowledged, and although the bibliography contains a number of works published since 1990 most of the original authors’ contributions seem to have been reprinted with no attempt to update them. Paul Devereux’s chapter on ‘London leys and lines’ (1990), referred to previously, is not included in the reprint.

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observed in 1450 by the Kentish insurgent, Jack Cade. [...] The London Stone is a typical

survivor of the thousands of mark-stones which used to exist at important geomantic

points in medieval cities. (ibid)

We have already noted the lack of evidence that any of these traditions about London

Stone actually existed, while Pennick’s use of the word ‘mark-stones’ betrays the

continuing influence of Watkins’s theory of leys, here in its developed geomantic or

‘earth mysteries’ form. The identification of the Stone as ‘the point from which

authoritative proclamations were made’ may come from Lewis Spence, who used

similar words (above), and the influence of Spence on these Aquarian Guide authors is

clear even when unacknowledged.

Perhaps the most developed of geomantic theories to incorporate London Stone is

Christopher Street’s ‘Earthstar’, a gigantic mandala based on a hexagram drawn across

Greater London from Barnet to Croydon (Street 2000, 70 illustration 28), its lines

defined by churches, prominent hills and similar features, and confirmed by dreams,

visions and ‘on-site mediumship’. One particular significant alignment Street calls ‘the

Horsenden Hill axis’ (ibid 73–9). It runs from a Neolithic earthwork near Gerrard’s

Cross in the north-west to an ‘ancient moat’ in Slade Green in the south-east. In the City

it passes through both St Dunstan’s church and St Bride’s church in Fleet Street, and

through the original site of London Stone.

Street comments:

This is the only remnant of the capital’s megalithic monuments and [...] the Horsenden

Hill axis passes directly through the site where it once stood, near to what is now

Cannon Street Station. This is extremely significant. The London Stone may have only

survived because it was the most important part of London’s megalithic complex, the

omphalos stone of the capital. (ibid 76)

He quotes Nigel Pennick (1990, 24) from the Aquarian Guide to the affect that

‘according to tradition, the London Stone was originally a temple altar-stone, laid by

none other than Brutus the Trojan, mythical founder of Britain’ – but goes on to add

that

Through some on-site mediumship, I learned that the temple’s other stones were

removed and broken up to build London’s city walls. Only because of its importance was

the omphalos stone spared. It is possible that no-one dared destroy it. (Street 2000, 76)

In fact, the geomantic approach adopted by Street and by some of the contributors

to the Aquarian Guide differs little from the ‘psychogeographical’ approach now

favoured in other quarters, which we must consider next.

5.5: The psychogeographers’ Stone

The term ‘psychogeography’ was, we are told, coined in the 1950s by the French

philosopher and situationist Guy Debord (Sandhu 2006, 46; Coverley 2006, 10–11). He

defined it as ‘the study of the specific effects of the geographical environment,

consciously organised or not, on the emotions and behaviour of individuals’. Thus the

Oxford English Dictionary describes psychogeography as ‘that branch of psychological

speculation or investigation which is concerned with the effects on the psyche of the

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geographical environment’. However, it has developed new meanings since its first

coining.

[...] it has come to be associated with a belief in the revolutionary insights and

epiphanies opened up by the act of walking [...]. And more, much more than this, it

refers to a particular kind of mental and imaginative mapping, one often associated with

writers such as Peter Ackroyd and Iain Sinclair.

The present-day city chronicler [...] is attuned to echoes of the past and prowls around

in search of psychological ley lines, eager to divine strange visual and acoustic

coincidences that offer evidence of the still-potent presence of darkness, history and

texture within a metropolis that seems to some critics increasingly to lack those

qualities. (Sandhu 2006, 46)95

It is not surprising, therefore, to find London Stone playing a part in the works of both

Peter Ackroyd and Iain Sinclair, and that one critic has entitled a study of

representations of London in contemporary fiction ‘Reading London Stone’ (Murray

2004).

There is no doubt of the pre-eminence of Peter Ackroyd (born 1949) as a ‘London’

writer. In his biography of William Blake (Ackroyd 1996, 330–4), he envisaged the poet

walking the streets of the city, like one of Sandhu’s prowling psychogeographers, in

search of ‘the great City of Art that dwells within the bosom of London’ – and the

culmination of Blake’s perambulation was to be London Stone, where he would sit like

Los and listen to Jerusalem’s voice (ibid 332).96 Ackroyd’s own attitude to London,

expressed in both his fiction and his historical and critical writings, has similarities to

that which he attributes to Blake. Thus, for example, in his novel Hawksmoor (1985) he

revealed the dark secrets that lay behind the placing and construction of a series of

London churches built in the early eighteenth century, and the malevolent influence

they still have on what happens around them.

When we turn to Ackroyd’s non-fiction we find that in the first chapter of his history

(or rather, as – significantly – he terms it, Biography) of London, Ackroyd mingles the

results of recent archaeological researches into London’s prehistory with the

speculations of writers like Lewis Spence and Elizabeth Gordon, lending equal weight to

the latter (2000, 13–19). Thus like Spence he seems willing to accept the possibility of a

Trojan settlement in the Bronze Age – and continues:

One token of Brutus and his Trojan fleet may still remain. If you walk east down Cannon

Street, on the other side from the railway station, you will find an iron grille set within

the Bank of China. It protects a niche upon which has been placed a stone roughly two

feet in height, bearing a faint groove mark upon its top. This is London Stone. For many

centuries it was popularly believed to be the stone of Brutus, brought by him as a deity.

95 These quotations are from a review of Merlin Coverley’s small book Psychogeography (2006).

Coverley’s introduction (ibid 9–30) provides a useful account of the development of psychogeographical thought and writing, largely in the context of London and Paris.

96 As we have seen, by Blake’s time it would have impossible to sit comfortably on London Stone, encased as it was within its stone cupola against the wall of St Swithin’s church.

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‘So long as the stone of Brutus is safe,’ ran one city proverb, ‘so long shall London

flourish’. (ibid 18)

The ‘many centuries’ during which ‘it was popularly believed to be the stone of Brutus’

we have suggested is more like 140 years, from the time of Môr Meirion’s infamous

letter to Notes and Queries. That Brutus brought the Stone with him ‘as a deity’ seems to

be Ackroyd’s own construction on events. As might be expected, he then goes on to

mention Stow’s ‘fair written gospel book’, Fabyan’s verse, the milliarium, a ‘forgotten

play’ called Pasquill and Marfarius [sic], William Blake, Jack Cade and Henry Fitz Ailwin,

to conclude: ‘It seems likely, therefore, that this ancient object came somehow to

represent the power and authority of the city. [...] It was once London's guardian spirit,

and perhaps it is still’ (ibid 18–19).

Ackroyd’s novel Hawksmoor, already mentioned, bears a resemblance to an earlier

work by Iain Sinclair. Sinclair (born 1943), had in 1975 included in his collection of

verse and prose Lud Heat an essay entitled ‘Nicholas Hawksmoor; his churches’ (1975,

4–26). In this he traced and mapped (ibid 8–9) a matrix of alignments linking the

London churches designed in the early eighteenth century by the architect Nicholas

Hawksmoor, encompassing within the pattern the sites of infamous murders. The map

is headed ‘Being a map of the 8 great churches; the lines of influence, the invisible rods

of force active in the city’. A complex of triangles and pentacles, these lines embody the

‘symbol of Set’ (ibid 7), and Sinclair assigns the churches to Egyptian protector-

goddesses (ibid 17).

Like Ackroyd, Sinclair was first a poet, and London and its mysteries have been a

constant theme in his verse, in his prose fiction and in his non-fiction. Thus his book

London Orbital (2002) described a series of walks around the course of the M25

motorway, investigating the history, literature, idiosyncrasies and mythology of the

places he passed through. Sinclair’s name is one always mentioned in any discussion of

modern psychogeographical writing (Sandhu 2006; and see the Iain Sinclair Special

Edition of Literary London (Bond & Bavidge 2005), passim).

Although London Stone did not appear on his ‘Hawksmoor’ map in Lud Heat in

1975, Sinclair has elsewhere emphasised its role as part of the ‘sacred geometry’ of

London. In Lights Out for the Territory (1997, 102) he notes ‘The London Stone, with its

mantic cargo, is now kept behind bars, beneath the pavement; a trophy for the Overseas

Chinese Banking Corporation Limited in Cannon Street. Grievously misaligned.’ He adds

‘A policy of deliberate misalignment (the Temple of Mithras, London Stone, the

surviving effigies from Ludgate) has violated the integrity of the City’s sacred geometry’

(ibid 116). In a more recent work he confirms his view that ‘the new alignment hurts.

It’s part of a process whereby all the ritual markers of the original city have been

shifted, not by much, by just enough to do damage; to call up petty whirlwinds, small

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vortices of bad faith’ (Atkins & Sinclair 1999, 168–9).97

We are reminded of John Carter’s lament in The Gentleman’s Magazine ‘Under what

innovating name can we term the cause that has removed the London-stone, in Cannon-

street, the awful informant of the antiquity of this town, some yards more to the East of

the church?’ (‘An Architect’ 1798, 765) – although as an eighteenth-century enlightened

rationalist Carter would have eschewed the sort of mysticism that seems to come

naturally to writers at the turn of the twenty-first century.

From modern psychogeography to the occult seems but a short step, and there is

little to choose (except perhaps in the literary reputations of the authors) between

Sinclair’s conclusions and those of Andrew Collins writing a short guidebook to

accompany the first London Earth Mysteries Moot tour of London sites in May 1984: ‘I

think there is little doubt that this small fragment of oolite limestone is the last

remaining piece of London’s omphalos, an important geomantic centre’ (Collins 1984,

16; quoted in Potter 1990, 208), or Adrian Gilbert making a similar identification of

London Stone as ‘the central omphalos or “navel-stone” not just of London but of the

kingdom of Britain as a whole’ (Gilbert 2003, 41), or Christopher Street interpreting its

role in the ‘Earthstars’ mandala through on-site mediumship (Street 2000).

Indeed, whereas writers in the Aquarian Guide tradition may identify London Stone

as a ‘mark-stone’ erected to locate a node in a geomantic network or a point on a ley,

they may not commit themselves as to whether that network has a real existence and a

potentiality independent of the Stone. Sinclair, on the other hand, with his concern that

the moving of London Stone (and other ‘ritual markers’) can ‘call up petty whirlwinds,

small vortices of bad faith’, seems to affirm that the Stone of itself has either had the

power ab initio, or has perhaps developed the power, to channel the force represented

by London’s ‘sacred geometry’. Moving the Stone distorts the geometrical network, with

dire results.

Or is this merely a modern version of the widespread belief that, as we have noted

previously, attempting to move or destroy a standing stone or even a natural boulder

will bring nothing but grief and ill fortune (Grinsell 1976, 64–5; Westwood & Simpson

2005, 422–3, 443, 446 and 571–2)?

5.6: Myth upon myth

The mythos of London Stone, like all mythology, continues to develop. Two ‘traditions’

seem to have been recorded only recently.

The first takes the form of a belief that a belief once existed – that there was once a

tradition that London Stone is the very same stone from which Arthur drew the sword

97 Sinclair’s implication that these changes have been deliberate is the starting point of Alex Murray’s

discussion of modern London literature (2004): ‘The fate of London Stone is symbolic of the material reserve of historic artefacts that litter London. During the 1980s and the rise of the heritage culture in England under Thatcherism, material history was grasped as being a form of oppositional engagement within the city, a means of reading the alternative history of the city beyond the misuse of Thatcherite historical discourse.’ The fate of London Stone seems to have become a rallying cry for those in revolt against the establishment, perhaps as it was to Jack Cade. And compare musician and journalist Bob Stanley’s identification of it as the ’people’s stone’ (in Clayton 2008, 5).

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to reveal that he was rightful king.98 Those who propound this tale do not themselves

believe that Arthur – even if he actually existed – pulled a sword from a stone, so need

to distance themselves from it, citing it as a ‘legend’ or ‘tradition’.

In 2002 the on-line encyclopedia h2g2,99 at that time sponsored by the BBC,

reported ‘There’s even a legend that claims it to be the same stone from which King

Arthur pulled Excalibur, (although there are several places in Britain that make the

same claim)’ (‘coelacanth’ 2002). At about the same time (his book was first published

in 2002) Adrian Gilbert was suggesting ‘Quite possibly the story of King Arthur drawing

a sword from a stone is connected with a real ritual that once took place involving the

London Stone’ (Gilbert 2003, 52). Gilbert thus assumes the existence of the ‘legend’, and

attempts to rationalise it as a ‘ritual’. It remains unclear whether one or other of these

authors was the first to connect the story of Arthur and his sword with London Stone,

or whether they share a mutual source or inspiration; I have not been able to trace the

‘tradition’ back any earlier than 2002.

A second belief links London Stone to the sixteenth-century sorcerer,

mathematician and philosopher Dr John Dee. Thus ‘Queen Elizabeth’s adviser and

occultist, John Dee, was obsessed by the Stone, believing it had magic powers’

(Coughlan 2006).

Dr John Dee (1527–1608), or ‘Queen Elizabeth's Merlin’ as he was sometimes called,

was a famous figure, a very clever man, known for his understanding of the occult and

his huge library of books on the subject. Despite not always being popular he was a

favourite of Queen Elizabeth who consulted him often. Dee was fascinated by the

supposed powers of the London Stone and lived close to it for a while. (‘coelacanth’

2002)100

‘Coelacanth’ later comments that the Stone was once much larger, and asks ‘So, what

happened to the rest of the London Stone? Was it taken by Dr Dee who lived by the site

in the 16th Century […]? Some believe he stole it for a while.’

Standard works on the life and studies of John Dee (see Smith 1909; French 1987;

Woolley 2002) make no mention of any particular interest in London Stone – nor is

there any reason to believe that he ‘lived close to it for a while’. Indeed, the inspiration

for this ‘tradition’ seems to lie not in history but in a work of undoubted fiction – a

novel by an author whose interest in London Stone we have already noticed. In Peter

Ackroyd’s The House of Doctor Dee, John Dee – transposed for the purpose of this novel

from his historical residence in Mortlake to one in Clerkenwell – explains the

significance of London Stone. It is, Dee says, the last remnant above ground of a glorious

98 The Sword in the Stone episode first appears in Robert de Boron’s poem Merlin in the thirteenth

century (Lacy 1986, 536). In Malory’s Le Morte Darthur the stone, surmounted by an anvil pierced by a naked sword, makes its miraculous appearance in the churchyard of ‘the greatest church of London’ – Malory comments ‘whether it were Paul’s or not the French book makes no mention’ (Malory 1953, 10).

99 ‘h2g2’ = HHGG = Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

100 Is it significant that these two novel traditions, involving King Arthur and John Dee, seem both to have first been brought to notice in the on-line encyclopedia h2g2 by the same pseudonymous contributor?

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antediluvian and now buried city of London that he is searching for:

‘All that ever we are left with is the London Stone, which is a visible portion of the lost

city. Do you know it? It is on the south side of Canwicke Street, near St Swithin’s, and

speaks to me always of our common past.’ (Ackroyd 1993, 156)

Both these stories, then, seem to have originated in about 2002. None of the

contributors to the Aquarian Guide to Legendary London in 1990 (Matthews & Potter

1990) had referred to them, although London Stone, John Dee and King Arthur had all

made appearances in that volume. And it is not clear yet whether either or both of the

stories will form an enduring part of the London Stone mythos.

But alongside these surely invented traditions, we may have seen the natural

genesis of another – that of the ‘custodian’ or ‘guardian of the Stone’. It is an obvious

concept, but belief in a guardian of London Stone does not seem ever to have existed in

historical times. However, as we have seen, Grant Allen identified Henry Fitz Ailwin as

‘the hereditary keeper of this urban fetish’, a role presumably passed to each successive

mayor and Lord Mayor of London (Allen 1931, 181). However, this does not seem to

have been recognised by the Corporation of London as being among the duties of the

Lord Mayor!101

But in May 2006, a reporter identified Chris Cheek, manager of the Sportec sports

shop that then occupied the ground floor of the building in which the Stone is housed,

as its custodian.102 Mr Cheek is quoted as saying:

‘When we were setting up the shop, there were cowboy builders here, and one of them

was just about to take a chisel to the stone. I told him “Woah. Stop right there”.’

(Coughlan 2006)

We are told ‘Mr Cheek also enjoys the idea that, until it’s shifted to a museum, he is the

latest in a long line of people to be in charge of something so mysterious and ancient’

(ibid). Thus Mr Cheek was the first person to identify himself outright as guardian of

London Stone, while seeing himself also as the successor to an unrecorded ‘long line’ of

previous guardians. The concept of a long tradition seems to be vital to the recognition

of the role. Perhaps Mr Cheek is just the first of a future ‘long line’ of guardians, as it

becomes assumed that any resident of the building where the Stone stands must inherit

the duties of guardianship. I have not enquired whether the manager of the branch of W

H Smith, the newsagents, which subsequently occupied the premises, considered he had

that responsibility, and the tradition of a ‘guardian of the Stone’ may prove, after all, not

to be a viable one.

5.7: Urban fantasy

Literary references to London Stone – that is, references in works that are overtly

101 The Lord Mayor’s current job description can be found on line at

https://www.cityoflondon.gov.uk/about-the-city/how-we-make-decisions/Documents/Lord-Mayor-Job-Description.pdf [accessed 9 May 2015]. There is no mention of London Stone!

102 This was in response to Hedley Swain of the Museum of London, who commented ‘The trouble is that at the moment it’s not really looked after by anyone’ (Coughlan 2006).

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‘fiction’ – have for the most part, from ‘London Lickpenny’ and the Elizabethan stage to

Washington Irving in the nineteenth century, identified London Stone merely as a

physical entity, a familiar London landmark, as we have seen. An exception is, of course,

its role in the works of William Blake, while its status in Peter Ackroyd’s The House of

Doctor Dee as a last ‘visible portion of the lost city’ (Ackroyd 1994, 156) is at least

ambivalent, given the interplay between the mundane and the supernatural in that

novel. However, in the last few years there has appeared a flurry of novels in which

London Stone has taken on a much more esoteric character. Wikipedia provides a

useful summary:

London Stone appears as an embodiment of evil in Charlie Fletcher’s trilogy for children

Stoneheart. It also features in The Midnight Mayor, Kate Griffin’s second Matthew Swift

novel about urban magic in London, and in China Miéville’s Kraken, in which it is the

beating heart of London and the sports shop that houses it hides the headquarters of the

‘Londonmancers’ who may know the whereabouts of the Kraken stolen from the

Natural History Museum. The third of a series of fantasy novels for children The

Nowhere Chronicles by Sarah Pinborough, writing as Sarah Silverwood, is entitled The

London Stone: ‘The London Stone has been stolen and the Dark King rules the

Nowhere...’ In Marie Brennan’s Onyx Court series, the Stone is part of the magical bond

between the mortal Prince of the Stone and the fairie court beneath London. (Wikipedia

2015)

These novels, all written between 2006 and 2012, most of them for children or ‘young

adults’ (China Miéville’s Kraken is the obvious exception), fall within a genre that has

been called ‘urban fantasy’ – and which has been defined as follows:

Urban fantasy is a subset of contemporary fantasy, consisting of novels and stories with

supernatural and/or magical elements set in contemporary, real-world, urban settings –

as opposed to ‘traditional’ fantasy set in imaginary locations. (Goodreads 2011)

Or, as in The Encyclopedia of Fantasy: ‘UFs [urban fantasies] are normally texts where

fantasy and the mundane world intersect and interweave throughout a tale which is

significantly about a real city’ (Clute & Grant 1997, 195). In urban fantasy the city is not

just a backdrop, but provides a highly detailed and realistic environment in which the

narrative is set – often one that is endangered by the occult or supernatural forces that

the novel describes.103

Typically in the recent books cited in Wikipedia, London Stone has a talismanic role

or is a centre of occult power, not always beneficent. China Miéville describes it:

The London Stone. That old rock was always suspiciously near the centre of things. A

chunk of the Millarium, the megalith-core from where the Romans measured distances.

Trusting in that old rock was quaint or dangerous, depending on to whom you spoke.

The London Stone was a heart. Did it still beat?

Yes, it still beat, though it was sclerotic. (Miéville 2010, 181)

103 We may thus readily identify a subgenre within ‘urban fantasy’ – ‘London fantasy’, which would

include other work by China Miéville, as well as by such authors as Ben Aaronovitch, Peter Ackroyd, Neil Gaiman and Michael Moorcock.

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And Charlie Fletcher tells us:

The Stone, set behind a wrought-iron screen in the side of an undistinguished building

on Cannon Street, looked like nothing important. Only the tiniest percentage of the

thousands of normal people who walked past it every day actually noticed it, and of

those who did, none sensed the malevolence imprisoned within the rough block, or

realized that the flaking iron cage was there to protect them from the Stone, rather than

the other way round. (Fletcher 2008, 3–4)

This, then, is not the ‘mundane’ but the ‘mythic’ London Stone, whose emergence as

palladium, as geomantic mark-stone, or as node in London’s sacred geometry, we have

attempted to record.

The ‘urban fantasy’ genre now has a long history (the term was first adopted in the

1980s, but the genre can be traced much earlier – for example, in some of the works of

Lord Dunsany and H G Wells); why then is it that not until early in the twenty-first

century did a handful of authors, presumably independently, adopt the occult London

Stone as a narrative motif?

Presumably the answer lies in the way in which an understanding that London

Stone was potentially more than a mere Roman milestone was popularised in the last

years of the twentieth century and the first years of the twenty-first. The Aquarian

Guide to Legendary London of 1990 (Matthews & Potter 1990) included intriguing

speculations about London Stone, but its readership was perhaps limited and insular.

However, as we have seen, Iain Sinclair, a widely-read and influential author,

emphasised London Stone’s occult significance in books published in 1997 and 1999.

Peter Ackroyd’s London: The Biography, with its suggestion that London Stone ‘was

once London's guardian spirit, and perhaps it is still’ (Ackroyd 2000, 18–19), appeared

in 2000. And we have commented on the article on London Stone on the website h2g2,

with its apocryphal references to Dr Dee and King Arthur, which went on line in 2002;

this remains one of the most readily accessed accounts of London Stone, and certainly

the most unreliable!

Wikipedia’s ‘London Stone’ article first appeared on line in 2003, but not until

updated in 2005 was it much more than a ‘stub’ – though it remained patchy and

inaccurate, but providing a hyperlink to the longer h2g2 article (Wikipedia 2005).104

And in May 2006 Sean Coughlan’s article ‘London’s heart of stone’ first appeared in the

BBC’s on-line News Magazine, emphasising the ‘mystery’ of the Stone, the ‘legend that,

like the ravens at the Tower of London, the fortune of the city is tied to the survival of

the stone’, its identification as ‘the Stone of Brutus’, the imminent threat of demolition

of the Cannon Street building and the resulting need to ‘rescue’ London Stone, and the

role of the manager of the sportswear shop as London Stone’s ‘guardian’.105

104 In 2007 I quoted the opening paragraph of the then current Wikipedia article (Clark 2007, 170)

concluding ‘Most of this is untrue – or since it is so difficult to prove a negative, it is perhaps fairer to say that there is no evidence to support most of this farrago of myth.’ Wikipedia contributors have much improved the article since then!

105 This article is still readily accessible on line. Was Miéville’s characterisation of London Stone as a ‘beating heart’ perhaps inspired by Coughlan’s title ‘London’s heart of stone’?

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Thus it is against a background of new popular accounts of London Stone, many

available on the internet, all stressing its mysteriousness, and media attention to the

threat to the Stone from a proposed redevelopment of the site, that we find London

Stone playing a new and unaccustomed role in fiction. It remains to be seen whether

other authors will also make use of the concept.

5.8: The incredible shrinking monolith

***********to follow

Once we set aside the theories about the origin and purpose of London Stone – Roman

miliarium, Druid altar, Stone of Brutus, fetish stone or geomantic mark-stone – (for

none of which there is convincing supporting evidence) there is little that can be

definitely said about its date and function. Its name, already ‘lundene stane’ or ‘the

stone that is called lundenestane’ in the twelfth century, surely reflects a contemporary

feeling (right or wrong) that it somehow embodied London’s authority or had a special

significance for Londoners. By the sixteenth century, as we see from John Stow’s wise

comments, it was a mystery, but as yet had none of those mystical connotations that

later writers were to attribute to it.

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6: Conclusion?

Iain Sinclair has written of London Stone that ‘while everyone agrees it is significant,

nobody knows why’ (Atkins & Sinclair 1999, 168–9). And it seems all the more

portentous and potent because its original significance is unknown, allowing, as we

have seen, an extraordinary range of conjectures to be offered over the last 400 years.

London Stone is sadly lacking in ‘authentic’ folklore, the sort of traditional beliefs

that cluster around large stones elsewhere and have been eagerly recorded by

folklorists (Grinsell 1976, 15–65; Menefee 1993; Westwood & Simpson 2005, passim –

see their index sv ‘stones’). It has no healing properties; it was not dropped or thrown

by a giant, nor yet by the Devil; it is not a petrified dancer who profaned the Lord’s Day.

It is not ‘countless’, nor has it grown in size.106 It has played no part in the death by

strangulation of a sheep stealer. It is not the haunt of fairies; it does not bring good luck

or visions to those who walk round it three times; it never went down to the Thames to

drink when it heard the clock of St Swithin’s church strike midnight; nor has it ever

resisted the efforts of a team of forty oxen to move it from its original site. Instead, its

longevity has inspired a series of more or less elaborate historical myths that centre on

assumptions about its former status and significance.

We may agree with that anonymous contributor to Chambers’s Journal in 1888

whose writing was so influential in the establishment of the modern myth of London

Stone: ‘whatever its origin may have been, there is no manner of doubt that London

Stone possesses claims to be preserved which require no superstitious or sentimental

sanction’ (Anon 1888, 242). Yet the superstitious and sentimental sanctions that have

attached themselves to an unprepossessing lump of oolitic limestone in the heart of the

City of London are as much part of its history as its date, origin and purpose (whatever

that might have been!) ever were.

The mythology that has grown up around London Stone is a hardy plant and will not

readily die. In a recent volume on the folklore of London, Antony Clayton (2008, 31–3

and 49 note 37) acknowledged the work (then largely unpublished) of the present

author, and dismissed in particular the ‘Stone of Brutus’ rhyme and the idea that Dr Dee

had a particular interest in the Stone. Unfortunately the Foreword to the same book,

written by musician and journalist Bob Stanley (ibid 5), makes a great deal of London

Stone, of the John Dee connection and of the ‘Stone of Brutus’ ‘legend’ – going even

further by identifying it as the ‘people’s stone’ (‘tucked away by those holding the

capital’s purse strings’). Even the Museum of London in its recent temporary display of

the Stone paid lip-service to the ‘legend’ by incorporating the ‘Stone of Brutus’ rhyme,

although discreetly towards the bottom, on the plinth supporting the Stone.

Chris Cheek, manager of the Sportec sports shop in 2006 and temporary custodian

of the Stone, is reported to have said ‘I’m not into hocus pocus, but there is something

about this stone. For some reason it’s been kept, there’s something special about it’

106 We need not take too seriously the seventeenth-century author who looked back to a time when

‘London-stone was no bigger than a Cherry-stone, [and] Julius Caesar built the Tower’ (Dunton 1691, 1: 108).

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(Coughlan 2006). At the beginning of the nineteenth century Edward King commented

that London Stone had been ‘preserved with such reverential care through so many

ages’ (King 1799–1805, 1: 117–18). That it has survived the Great Fire of 1666, threats

of destruction as a ‘nuisance’ in 1742 and 1798, the Blitz in the 1940s, and

redevelopment in the 1960s (and current development in the twenty-first century)

seems to be in itself sufficient reason for us to recognise it as ‘special’ and therefore

deserving of future preservation.107

To Ackroyd’s conclusion (2000, 19) that ‘It was once London's guardian spirit, and

perhaps it is still’, one might respond that although it was never in fact London’s

guardian spirit in the past, it will, if enough people believe in it, assume that role in the

future.

107 In 1972 London Stone, together with its 1960s stone surround and metal grille, was designated a

Listed Structure, Grade II* (Historic England 2019).

89

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