# Chain of Lovers' Knots, Cheapside Hoard > Unrecorded London goldsmith(s), Cheapside trade - 1590-1620 (this chain, per the V&A); the wider hoard was buried between 1640 and 1666 > Canonical HTML: https://iconotheca.com/artworks/cheapside-goldsmiths-workshop/cheapside-hoard-museum-of-london/ > Published by Servola Systems GmbH. Last verified: 2026-08-17 ## Tombstone - **Artist:** Unrecorded London goldsmith(s), Cheapside trade - **Date:** 1590-1620 (this chain, per the V&A); the wider hoard was buried between 1640 and 1666 - **Medium:** Gold, enamelled white and green, formed into a continuous chain of interlinking lovers' knots - **Dimensions:** 48.5 in (approx. 123 cm) long, 0.8 cm wide, 0.4 cm deep - **Object type:** Goldsmith's work - **Period:** Elizabethan and Jacobean, c. 1560-1650 - **Current location:** Victoria and Albert Museum, London, Jewellery Gallery (Room 91, the William and Judith Bollinger Gallery). This is one of a small number of Cheapside Hoard pieces held outside the Museum of London: the great majority of the wider hoard, some 500 objects, is held by the Museum of London, renamed the London Museum, which is due to reopen at West Smithfield on 28 November 2026 with the fullest display of the hoard ever assembled; a further group, most published counts giving either 20 or 25 pieces, is held by the British Museum. - **Attribution:** unknown ## Summary A gold chain of interlinking lovers' knots, enamelled white and green, over a metre long, made in London between about 1590 and 1620. It is one of roughly five hundred pieces of Elizabethan and Jacobean jewellery pulled from a cellar at 30-32 Cheapside on 18 June 1912, when workmen demolishing the building struck through a decayed wooden box with a pickaxe. Most of that hoard is held by the Museum of London; this chain, registered at the Victoria and Albert Museum in 1926, is one of the small number of pieces that left the main body.The hoard is the largest surviving assemblage of jewellery from this period anywhere, and it is also, in provenance terms, one of the purest problems a collection like this can pose. No owner was ever identified. No inquest was held. The material reached institutions through a pawnbroker who paid navvies in cash and beer for parcels wrapped in handkerchiefs, weeks after the ground had already been disturbed. What can be dated is the burial window, fixed by a chipped intaglio and by fire damage from the Great Fire of London; what cannot be dated, or named, is the person who put the box in the ground and never came back for it.This chain carries its own smaller version of that same problem. Its motif, a knot that has no visible beginning or end, was the conventional sign of a bond death alone could dissolve. Who wore it, who gave it, and how it came to leave the rest of the hoard and enter the Victoria and Albert Museum fourteen years after the discovery are all undocumented. ## Provenance Every link carries a grade. `documented` means a cited source supports it, `disputed` means the identification is argued but not established, `unknown` means we have no owner for that span and have not bridged it. - **c. 1590-c. 1620** Made by an unrecorded London goldsmith or workshop `[documented]` (manufacture) Dated by the Victoria and Albert Museum on grounds of style and enamelling technique to 1590-1620. No maker's mark survives. - **c. 1620-between 1640 and 1666** Unidentified, probably a working jeweller or syndicate in the Cheapside trade `[unknown]` (accumulation and concealment) No owner has ever been identified for the chain or the wider hoard it was found with. Concealed in a wooden box in a cellar under tenement houses at 30-32 Cheapside; the burial window is fixed at its earliest by the Stafford intaglio (Nov 1640) and at its latest by Great Fire damage (Sept 1666) recorded elsewhere in the hoard. - **18 June 1912-1912** Unnamed demolition workmen `[documented]` (discovery) Found during demolition of 30-32 Cheapside. No individual finder was named in the surviving record; no plan, inventory or photograph of the deposit in the ground was made. - **1912** George Fabian Lawrence ('Stony Jack'), pawnbroker and antiquities dealer, Inspector of Excavations for the London Museum `[documented]` (purchase) Lawrence bought the material piecemeal from the workmen, paying half-crowns or beer money on the spot. The Museum of London's own records show a cheque of 90 pounds paid to him on 26 June 1912, eight days after the find, and a further 47 pounds in August 1913. No purchase figure specific to any individual piece, including this chain, is published. - **1912-1926** Unrecorded `[unknown]` (gap) The route by which this specific chain passed from Lawrence's 1912 purchase to its 1926 registration at the Victoria and Albert Museum, rather than to the London Museum with the bulk of the find, is not documented in the sources consulted. - **1926-present** Victoria and Albert Museum, London `[documented]` (acquisition and institutional holding) Registered under accession M.1140-1926. Held continuously since, currently displayed in the Jewellery Gallery, Room 91. The rest of the wider hoard was divided between the London Museum (the great majority), the British Museum (20 or 25 pieces, sources disagree) and the Guildhall Museum, which merged with the London Museum in 1976 to form the Museum of London. ## Auction results Hammer and buyer's premium are stated separately. Where a source conflates them this record says so. - **** , - This chain has never been offered at public auction. It passed from the finders to a dealer and from the dealer directly into institutional hands, reaching the Victoria and Albert Museum by 1926. No purchase price, insurance valuation or probate figure for this piece, or for the wider hoard, is published in the sources consulted. Any figure a reader encounters for what the Cheapside Hoard is worth today is an estimate made without a market test. ## Open questions - Who owned the hoard, or this chain specifically? No name has ever been documented on any evidentiary basis, and the tenancy of 30-32 Cheapside at the time of burial cannot be reconstructed. - Why was the hoard buried, and by whom, in the window between 1640 and 1666? The Civil War is the favoured circumstantial reading; Kris Lane's Gerard Polman theory offers a specific but unproven alternative source for at least part of the material. - How and when did this particular chain leave the main body of the find and reach the Victoria and Albert Museum? It was registered there in 1926, fourteen years after the 1912 discovery, and no acquisition route is published. - Do the published counts of pieces held by the British Museum (20 or 25, depending on the source) and the Victoria and Albert Museum reconcile? No source consulted resolves the discrepancy. - Who wore this chain, or for whom was it made? The lovers' knot motif carried a documented betrothal association in the period; nothing ties this particular example to a named person, betrothal or marriage. - How many objects were taken by workmen at the find spot and never reached George Fabian Lawrence at all? Contemporary accounts describe pocketing at the site, and pieces attributed to the hoard have continued to surface for decades after 1912. ## Sources - [1] Victoria and Albert Museum, collections database, 'Cheapside Hoard (chain)', object O74076, accession M.1140-1926. - [2] Victoria and Albert Museum, Open API, museum object record for O74076. - [3] London Museum (formerly Museum of London), 'The Cheapside Hoard', London Stories collections page. - [4] London Museum, 'Jewels of the Cheapside Hoard', London Stories collections page. - [5] Wikipedia, 'Cheapside Hoard'. TERTIARY SOURCE, consulted for the Stafford intaglio dating detail, the institutional division figures, and the Kris Lane theory summary; flagged for replacement with primary museum and academic-press citation. - [6] Mike Dash, 'Stoney Jack and the Cheapside Hoard', A Blast From The Past (blog), 19 August 2013, drawing on Francis Sheppard, Treasury of London's Past (1991) and H.V. Morton, In Search of London (2002). - [7] Smithsonian Magazine, 'The Commoner Who Salvaged a King's Ransom' (on George Fabian Lawrence). - [8] Jerry H. Bentley, review of Kris Lane, Colour of Paradise: The Emerald in the Age of Gunpowder Empires (Yale University Press, 2010), American Historical Review 116, no. 1 (2011). - [9] The Goldsmiths' Company, 'Goldsmiths' Gallery will bring the Cheapside Hoard to new audiences at London Museum from 28 November'. - [10] London Museum, press release, 'London Museum in Smithfield will open its doors on 28 November 2026'. - [11] Robert Weldon and Cathleen Jonathan, 'The Museum of London's Extraordinary Cheapside Hoard', Gems and Gemology, Fall 2013, Vol. 49, No. 3. SECONDARY USE: cited via search-indexed excerpts and consistent cross-reference in other sources; the full article could not be directly retrieved this session and should be verified against the original PDF before further reliance. - [12] Exhibiting Fashion (University of the Arts London), 'The Cheapside Hoard: London's Lost Jewels', on the 2013-2014 Museum of London exhibition. - [13] Folger Shakespeare Library, '"A smale remembrance": Elizabethan Posy Rings', The Collation (blog). - [14] Lang Antiques, 'Lover's Knot', Antique Jewelry University. TERTIARY, TRADE SOURCE: a jewellery-retail reference encyclopaedia, used only for the conventional 'which naught but death shall loose' motto and general motif history; flagged for replacement with an academic costume-history source. - [15] Wikimedia Commons, file metadata (extmetadata/LicenseShortName) for the three images used in this record, verified via the Commons API. - [16] Wikipedia, 'Staffordshire Hoard' and 'Fishpool Hoard'. TERTIARY SOURCE, used only for the comparanda entries in related_works. --- Images on this record are public domain or CC0 and are hosted by us. No image on this site is generated or simulated. If you quote this record, quote the provenance grades with it.