The Cheapside Hoard

On 18 June 1912 workmen breaking up a cellar floor at the corner of Cheapside and Friday Street in the City of London struck a decayed wooden box holding roughly five hundred pieces of late Elizabethan and Jacobean jewellery and unset gemstones. It is the largest hoard of its kind known anywhere, and it is the only surviving body of English jewellery of that period that was never broken up and refashioned.

It is also, in provenance terms, the purest problem this archive has recorded. The finders are unnamed. No inventory was taken at the find spot. No coroner's inquest was held and the hoard was never declared treasure trove, so no legal process produced a document. The material reached the museum in parcels and handkerchiefs over the following weeks, bought from the workmen by a pawnbroker who paid in cash and beer. Nobody knows who owned it, why it went into the ground, or why it was never taken out again.

A hoard with no owner tests every method this publication uses. There is no chain of title to grade, so the evidence has to come from the objects themselves: a chipped intaglio bearing a badge that did not exist before 1640, fire damage that puts the burial no later than 1666, and roughly four thousand missing pearls that rotted in the soil and are now recorded only as empty settings.

The find, and what is actually recorded about it

A trio of adjoining houses on the north side of Cheapside, numbered 30 to 32, was scheduled for demolition in the summer of 1912. On 18 June a workman clearing a brick-lined cellar under a chalk floor struck through it with a pickaxe and exposed what the Museum of London's 1928 catalogue describes as a decayed wooden box or casket. The gems spilled onto the cellar floor.

That is very nearly the whole of the primary record of the discovery. The workman's own account was never taken. His fellow labourers are said to have filled their pockets. No archaeologist was present, no plan was drawn, and no photograph was made of the deposit in the ground. Everything that has since been argued about the hoard has had to be argued from the objects, because the context in which they were found was destroyed within minutes of being opened.

The site sits at the corner of Cheapside and Friday Street, a short walk from St Paul's Cathedral and a few steps from St Mary-le-Bow. The freehold of the tenement houses belonged to the Goldsmiths' Company. That fact is the strongest single piece of circumstantial evidence about the hoard, and it is also, on its own, worth almost nothing, because the Company let the properties out and the leases were sublet and sub-sublet, in large part to foreign craftsmen. Forsyth and Mitchell both note that the chain of occupancy cannot be reconstructed. The building the hoard was under cannot be tied to a named tenant.

Stony Jack, and why the hoard exists at all

George Fabian Lawrence, 1861 to 1939, was a pawnbroker and antiquities dealer who had built a standing arrangement with the navvies and demolition men digging up London. He paid them in cash or in beer for anything they turned up, and he taught them what was worth keeping. The Daily Herald quoted him near the end of his life: every scrap of metal, pottery, glass or leather that has been lying under London may have a story to tell the archaeologist, and is worth saving.

In 1912, the year of the find, Lawrence was appointed inspector of excavations at the newly established London Museum. Over his career he is reported to have obtained some fifteen thousand objects, sixteen hundred of them in his first six months in the post. The Cheapside material came to him not as a hoard but as a trickle: parcels and handkerchiefs of jewellery arriving at his office over the following weeks, each from a different pair of hands.

The consequence is exact and it is permanent. The hoard was reassembled from the pockets of men who were never named, at an unknown number of removes from the ground, with no way of knowing what did not arrive. Items said to be from the hoard have continued to surface for a century; Lawrence's own son presented two fancy-cut amethysts to the museum in 1927, undocumented, and they may or may not be two amethysts now in the collection. What is called the Cheapside Hoard is therefore a reconstruction, not a deposit, and the honest description of its provenance is that the object group and the find group are not the same thing.

Why there was no inquest, and why that matters

In 1912 the relevant law was the common-law doctrine of treasure trove. It turned on intent: gold and silver deliberately hidden by an owner who meant to come back for it belonged to the Crown, while goods lost or abandoned did not. A hoard buried for safekeeping is the textbook case of treasure trove, and a coroner's inquest was the mechanism that decided it.

No inquest was held. The Goldsmiths' Company, as freeholder, did not assert a claim. The absence of both is the reason the material could be bought from workmen in a pawnshop and sold on to a museum without any legal process intervening, and it is also the reason there is no sworn record of who found what. Under the Treasure Act 1996, which replaced the common-law doctrine in England and Wales, a find of this kind would be reportable, an inquest would follow, the finders and the landowner would be identified in the report, and a valuation committee would set a reward. Every one of those documents would now exist. In 1912 none of them was created.

This record grades the whole ownership question unknown rather than disputed, because a dispute requires two positions and there has never been a claimant.

What is in it

Nearly five hundred objects, spanning a chronological range far wider than the burial date. There are finger rings, pendants, hat ornaments, buttons, earrings, scent bottles, fan holders, chains, loose stones and a small number of objects whose function is still not agreed.

The single most reproduced piece is a pocket watch set inside a hollowed hexagonal Colombian emerald crystal, of about 1600, roughly forty-two millimetres deep and twenty wide, with the crystal sliced to make a hinged cover and the removed material worked into the mount. A gold and enamel salamander hat ornament set with cabochon Colombian emeralds and table-cut diamonds in the tail is the other emblem of the collection. There is a gold scent bottle enamelled white and set with carved chalcedony leaves, rubies, pink sapphires, spinels and diamonds. Thirty enamelled chains survive, a survival rate without parallel, because chains are the first thing a jeweller melts.

The chronological spread is the part that is easiest to miss. A banded agate cameo of a Ptolemaic queen in the guise of Isis, wearing a vulture headdress, is Egyptian and predates the rest by more than sixteen centuries. A pale blue sapphire cameo of the Incredulity of Saint Thomas is Byzantine, of about the sixth or seventh century. A chalcedony cameo resembles the profile portraits made in the Medici workshops in Florence. Fourteen toadstones, believed at the time to sweat in the presence of poison and in fact the fossilised palatal teeth of a Jurassic fish, were among the loose stones.

How the burial is dated

The dating of the deposit does not rest on style. It rests on one small, chipped, visually unimpressive carnelian intaglio.

The intaglio carries the heraldic badge of William Howard, who was created Viscount Stafford in 1640 on his marriage to Mary Stafford. The badge did not exist before that year, so the stone cannot have been engraved before 1640, and the hoard cannot have gone into the ground before it. That is the terminus post quem, and it was only established when the intaglio was identified by Forsyth and her colleagues in the run-up to the 2013 exhibition. Before that identification the hoard was routinely dated to about 1600 to 1615.

The upper limit comes from the site. Fire damage recorded in the Cheapside excavations places the burial no later than the Great Fire of September 1666, which destroyed the buildings above the cellar and, after the rebuilding of about 1670, sealed it under brick for two and a half centuries.

A third strand narrows nothing but confirms the range: an agate cameo of Elizabeth I whose costume points to a carving date after about 1575, closely comparable to the Armada Jewel that Nicholas Hilliard made and that was given to Sir Thomas Heneage in 1588. The hoard therefore contains objects made across at least sixteen centuries and was buried inside a window of twenty-six years.

Whose stock was it

This is the question the hoard exists to pose and it has never been answered. Four explanations are in circulation and the evidence for each can be stated precisely.

A working jeweller's stock in trade. The strongest reading, and Forsyth's. The hoard mixes finished jewels of the latest fashion with older pieces, with stones removed from settings as if awaiting repair or reuse, and with material of every price level down to a chipped intaglio nobody would wear. That is what a workshop holds, not what a person owns. Cheapside and Goldsmiths' Row were the centre of the London trade, and before commercial banking a hole in the floor was where a jeweller kept his stock. Forsyth has put the possibility plainly: it could be that the jeweller did this regularly, that he had a hole in the floor where he kept his stock in trade.

A syndicate rather than an individual. Forsyth allows this too, and the sheer breadth of the material supports it. Almost sixty per cent of the jeweller goldsmiths working in London in this period were immigrant craftsmen, who travelled and who worked in partnership.

A collector. The ancient and Byzantine cameos and the antiquarian oddities point at a cabinet rather than a shop. Against it: a collector does not hold fourteen toadstones and a batch of unset garnets.

A fence. Among the pieces is a counterfeit balas ruby made by quench-crackling cheap rock crystal and running a red dye, probably cochineal, into the fissures. In 1610 the Goldsmiths' Company investigated one of its own members for making exactly these. The dye has now faded to a pale pinkish orange. A deliberate fake in a working stock is ordinary; it is also the single object in the hoard that raises the possibility that the owner was not straight.

No name has ever been attached to any of these readings. That is the finding.

The four thousand pearls that are not there

Pearls are organic. Buried in London soil for two and a half centuries, they dissolve. Forsyth has worked out from the empty settings that the hoard originally held on the order of four thousand pearls, perhaps more in loose form, and that almost all of them rotted away.

That single figure changes what the object is. What survives is not the hoard; it is the mineral fraction of the hoard. The proportions a visitor sees, emerald and diamond and enamelled gold, are an artefact of differential survival, and the assemblage as it went into the ground would have looked substantially more like the pearl-heavy jewellery of the portraits of the period than the collection looks today.

One large pearl survives, on a pendant with the Byzantine sapphire cameo, and the breakdown of its nacre layers is visible.

What the stones say about the world in 1640

The gem sources in this cellar are a map of the first global economy, and the hoard is one of the few places that map survives as physical material rather than as a customs ledger.

The emeralds are Colombian. Spanish forces under Jimenez de Quesada seized the emerald-bearing country of what is now Colombia in 1537, and by the late sixteenth century the stones were crossing Europe in quantity and eclipsing the ancient Egyptian workings. The diamonds are Indian, most likely from the Golconda field, reaching Europe in far greater volume after the sea route around the Cape opened around 1500. Sapphires, rubies and spinels come from Sri Lanka and Burma. Turquoise is Persian. Peridot is Egyptian. Garnets are European or Indian. Amethysts came from Russia or Brazil. Pearls came from the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Mannar, and possibly from Scotland, the Caribbean and the Comoros.

A single London workshop, on a leasehold owned by the Goldsmiths' Company, was drawing on Spanish South America, Mughal India, Ceylon, Burma, Safavid Persia and the Ottoman Levant simultaneously. The hoard is not evidence that London was a large market in 1640. It is evidence that it was a global one.

Where the hoard went, and the counts that do not agree

The material did not stay together. Twenty items went to the British Museum in 1914, on the account Forsyth gave in 2013. The bulk was divided in 1916 between the London Museum and the Guildhall Museum, which merged in 1976 to form the Museum of London, at which point the two halves came back together.

The counts in circulation do not reconcile. The London Museum's own published account states that five pieces are at the Victoria and Albert Museum and twenty-five at the British Museum. Forsyth, quoted in 2013, gives twenty to the British Museum in 1914 and does not mention the V and A in that context. This record carries both figures and does not average them, because the difference is exactly the kind of drift that a hoard reassembled from pockets produces, and because at least one Cheapside Hoard object is on public display at the V and A under that name.

The hoard was first shown in a single glass case in 1914, at the London Museum's opening. An illustrated catalogue followed in 1928. It was shown complete, for the first time in a century, at the Museum of London from 11 October 2013 to 27 April 2014, in an exhibition curated by Hazel Forsyth alongside her book of the same year.

The folklore, and who published it

Three stories attach to this hoard and none of them is evidence.

The first is that the owner was a jeweller who died in the Great Plague of 1665, or fled it, and never came back. This is a reasonable-sounding inference that has hardened into a statement through repetition. The plague and the Civil War are both inside the 1640 to 1666 window and both are plausible reasons to bury a stock; neither is attached to this deposit by any document. Forsyth's own published position lists a calamity, a planned journey abroad and simple routine practice alongside each other, without choosing.

The second is the picturesque literature around Lawrence himself, the pints of beer, the pockets full of Roman glass, the parcels and handkerchiefs. Most of it is true and it is well sourced to his own statements and to museum records, but it functions in retellings as an origin myth that conceals the actual problem, which is that a documented chain of custody was never created.

The third is the recurring claim that the hoard was pronounced treasure trove. It was not, and the absence of an inquest is more informative than the presence of one would have been.

Separating these from the record is not pedantry. A reader who takes the plague story as fact will read the burial as a single desperate act by one man. A reader who holds to the evidence will see a twenty-six-year window, an unreconstructable tenancy, and a strong probability that the deposit was routine rather than dramatic.