Fetching the article from Wikipedia…
Construction
Construction of London Stone
irregular block of oolitic limestone in the City of London
- 1100
- Europe
Construction
irregular block of oolitic limestone in the City of London
Fetching the article from Wikipedia…
London Stone is a historic landmark housed at 111 Cannon Street in the City of London. It is an irregular block of oolitic limestone measuring 53 × 43 × 30 cm (21 × 17 × 12"), the remnant of a once much larger object that had stood for many centuries on the south side of the street. It is designated a Grade II* listed structure.
The name "London Stone" was first recorded around the year 1100. The date and original purpose of the stone are unknown, although it is possibly of Roman origin. There has been interest and speculation about it since the medieval period, but modern claims that it was formerly an object of veneration, or has some occult significance, are unsubstantiated.
The present London Stone is only the upper portion of a once much larger object. The surviving portion is a block of oolitic limestone approximately 53 cm wide, 43 cm high, and 30 cm front to back (21 × 17 × 12 inches). A study in the 1960s indicated that the stone is Clipsham limestone, a good-quality stone from Rutland transported to London for building purposes in both the Roman and medieval periods. More recently, Kevin Hayward has suggested that it may be Bath stone, the stone most used for monuments and sculpture in early Roman London and in Saxon times.
The stone is located on the north side of Cannon Street, opposite Cannon Street station, in an aperture in the wall of 111 Cannon Street (EC4N 5AR), within a Portland stone casing.
When London Stone was erected and what its original function was are unknown, although there has been much speculation.
The stone was originally located on the south side of medieval Candlewick Street (afterward widened to create modern Cannon Street), opposite the west end of St Swithin's Church. It is shown in this position on the Copperplate map of London, dating to the 1550s, and also appears on the derivative "Woodcut" map of the 1560s. It was described by the London historian John Stow in his Survey of London (1598) as "a great stone called London stone", "pitched upright ... fixed in the ground verie deep, fastened with bars of iron".
Stow does not give the dimensions of this "great stone", but a French visitor to London in 1578 had recorded that the stone was three feet high (above ground), two feet wide, and one foot thick (90 × 60 × 30 cm). Thus, although it was a local landmark, the part of it standing above ground was not particularly large.
The earliest reference to the stone is usually said to be that in a medieval document cited by Stow in 1598. He refers to an early list of properties in London belonging to Christ Church, Canterbury (Canterbury Cathedral), and says that one piece of land was described as lying "neare unto London stone". Stow claims that the list had been bound into the end of a Gospel Book given to the cathedral by "Ethelstane king of the west Saxons", usually identified as Æthelstan, king of England (924–939). However, it is impossible to confirm Stow's account, since the document he saw cannot now be identified with certainty. Nevertheless, the earliest extant list of Canterbury's London properties, which has been dated to between 1098 and 1108, does refer to a property given to the cathedral by a man named "Eadwaker æt lundene stane" ("Eadwaker at London Stone"). Although not bound into a Gospel Book (it is now bound into a volume of miscellaneous medieval texts with a Canterbury provenance (MS Cotton Faustina B. vi) in the British Library), it could be that it was this, or a similar text, that Stow saw.
Like Eadwaker, other medieval Londoners acquired or adopted the byname "at London Stone" or "of London Stone" because they lived nearby. One of these was "Ailwin of London Stone", the father of Henry Fitz-Ailwin de Londonestone, the first Mayor of the City of London, who took office some time between 1189 and 1193, and governed the city until his death in 1212. The Fitz-Ailwin house stood away from Candlewick Street, on the north side of St Swithin's church.
London Stone was a well-known landmark in medieval London, and when in 1450 Jack Cade, leader of a rebellion against the corrupt government of Henry VI, entered the city with his men, he struck his sword on London Stone and claimed to be "Lord of this city". Contemporary accounts give no clue as to Cade's motivation, or how his followers or the Londoners would have interpreted his action. There is nothing to suggest he was carrying out a traditional ceremony or custom.
By the time of Queen Elizabeth I London Stone was not merely a landmark, shown and named on maps, but a visitor attraction in its own right. Tourists may have been told variously that it had stood there since before the city existed, or that it had been set up by order of King Lud, legendary rebuilder of London, or that it marked the centre of the city, or that it was "set [up] for the tendering and making of payment by debtors".
It appears to have been routinely used in this period as a location for the posting and promulgation of a variety of bills, notices, and advertisements. In 1608 it was listed in a poem by Samuel Rowlands as one of the "sights" of London (perhaps the first time the word was used in that sense) shown to "an honest Country foole" on a visit to town.
During the 17th century the stone continued be used as an "address", to identify a locality. Thus, for example, Thomas Heywood's biography of Queen Elizabeth I, Englands Elizabeth (1631), was, according to its title page, "printed by Iohn Beale, for Phillip Waterhouse; and are to be sold at his shop at St Pauls Head, neere London stone"; and the English Short Title Catalogue lists over 30 books published between 1629 and the 1670s with similar references to London Stone in the imprint.
In 1671 the Worshipful Company of Spectacle Makers broke up a batch of substandard spectacles on London Stone:
Two and twenty dozen [= 264] of English spectacles, all very badd both in the glasse and frames not fitt to be put on sale ... were found badd and deceitful and by judgement of the Court condemned to be broken, defaced and spoyled both glasse and frame the which judgement was executed accordingly in Canning [Cannon] Street on the remayning parte of London Stone where the same were with a hammer broken in all pieces.
The reference to "the remayning parte of London Stone" may suggest that it had been damaged and reduced in size, perhaps in the Great Fire of London five years earlier, which had destroyed St Swithin's church and the neighbouring buildings; it was later covered with a small stone cupola to protect it.
In 1598 John Stow had commented that "if carts do run against it through negligence, the wheels be broken, and the stone itself unshaken", and by 1742 it was considered an obstruction to traffic. The remaining part of the stone was then moved, with its protective cupola, from the south side of the street to the north side, where it was first set beside the door of St Swithin's Church, which had been rebuilt by Christopher Wren after its destruction in the Great Fire. It was moved again in 1798 to the east end of the church's south wall, and finally in the 1820s set in an alcove in the centre of the wall within a solidly built stone frame set on a plinth, with a circular aperture through which the stone itself could be seen. In 1869 the London and Middlesex Archaeological Society arranged for the installation of a protective iron grille and an explanatory inscription in Latin and English on the church wall above it.
During the 19th and 20th centuries the London Stone was regularly referred to in popular London histories and guidebooks, and visited by tourists; during his stay in England in the 1850s the American author Nathaniel Hawthorne recorded a visit to London Stone in his journal, noting the indentations on the top "which are said to have been made by Jack Cade's sword". In 1937 Arthur Mee, the founder of The Children's Newspaper and author of The King's England series of guidebooks, described it as "a fragment of its old self [...] said by some to have been a stone set up in Stone Age days".
The archaeologist George Byron Gordon was more expansive (and fanciful) in the course of his Rambles in Old London, published in 1924. He described London Stone as "the very oldest object in London streets" and "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".
In 1940 St Swithin's church was burnt out by bombing in the Blitz. However, the outer walls remained standing for many years, with London Stone still in its place in the south wall. In 1962 the remains of the church were demolished, and replaced by an office building, 111 Cannon Street, which originally housed the Bank of China; London Stone was placed without ceremony in a specially constructed Portland stone alcove, glazed and guarded with an iron grille, in the new building. Inside the building it was protected by a glass case. The stone and its surround, including the iron grille, were designated a Grade II* listed structure on 5 June 1972.
In the early 21st century the office building was scheduled for redevelopment, and in October 2011 the then landowners proposed to move the stone to a new location further to the west. Objections were raised by, among others, the Victorian Society and English Heritage, and the proposal was rejected by the City of London Corporation.
Until February 2016 the ground floor of the building was occupied by a branch of WHSmith newsagents. Inside the shop London Stone in its glass case was hidden behind a magazine rack and not usually accessible. In March 2016, planning permission was granted to allow the building to be demolished and replaced by a new one. The stone was put on temporary display at the Museum of London while the building works were carried out. It was returned to Cannon Street in October 2018. The new premises publicly display London Stone on a plinth, within a Portland stone casing loosely inspired by its 19th–century predecessor, and behind glass. The plaque adjacent to the stone reads:
London Stone
The remaining part of London Stone, which once stood in the middle of Cannon Street, slightly west of its present location. Its original purpose is unknown, although it may be Roman and related to Roman buildings that lay to the south. It was already called 'London Stone' in the 12th century and became an important city landmark. In 1450 Jack Cade, leader of the rebellion against the corrupt government of Henry VI, struck it with his sword and claimed to be Lord of London.
In 1742, London Stone was moved to the north side of the street and eventually set in an alcove in the wall of St Swithin's church on this site.
The church was bombed in the Second World War and demolished in 1961–1962, and London Stone was incorporated into a new office building on the site. Following redevelopment it was placed in its present location in 2018.
The Short English Metrical Chronicle, an anonymous history of England in verse composed in about the 1330s, which survives in several variant recensions (including one in the so-called Auchinleck manuscript), includes the statement that "Brut sett Londen ston" – that is to say, that Brutus of Troy, the legendary founder of London, set up London Stone. This claim suggests that interest in the stone's origin and significance already existed. However, the story does not seem to have circulated widely elsewhere, and was not repeated in other chronicles.
In 1598 the London historian John Stow admitted that "The cause why this stone was set there, the time when, or other memory hereof, is none". However, his contemporary William Camden, in his Britannia of 1586, concluded that it was a Roman milliarium, a central stone from which all distances in Roman Britain were measured, and similar to the Milliarium Aureum of Rome. This identification remains popular, although there is no archaeological evidence to support it.
Text from the Wikipedia article “London Stone”, available under CC BY-SA 4.0.