← Not Just the Tudors
Not Just the Tudors
Mystery of the Cheapside Hoard
00:48:45
Where did the greatest cache of Elizabethan and Jacobean jewellery ever found come from?
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- [00:00]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Hello, I'm Professor Susannah Lipscomb. If you'd like Not Just the Tudors ad free to get early access and bonus episodes, sign up to historyhit with a historyhit subscription. You can also watch hundreds of hours of original documentaries, including my own recent two part series A World Torn, the Dissolution of the Monasteries and enjoy a new release every week. Sign up now by visiting historyhit.com subscribe.
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- [02:24]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Hello, I'm Professor Susannah Lipscomb and welcome to Not Just the Tudors From History Hit the podcast in which we explore everything from Anne Boleyn to the Aztecs, from Holbein to the Huguenots, from Shakespeare to samurais relieved by regular doses of murder, espionage and witchcraft. Not in other words, just the Tudors, but most definitely also the Tudors. It all began with a glimpse of gold. The year was 1912. Two laborers working in a cellar in Cheapside, not far from St. Paul's Cathedral in the City of London unearthed the remains of a wooden casket. Its tangled contents were perhaps the most remarkable single discovery of Elizabethan jewels ever found. Quickly labeled the Cheapside Hoard, this magnificent collection speaks to of England at the beginning of empire, with Colombian emeralds, Burmese rubies and Iranian turquoise among its dazzling examples. It was brought to the attention of the antique dealer known as Stoney Jack and then acquired in large part by what is now the Museum of London. But some pieces of the collection were lost, likely trafficked through the upper strata of London society. But how had this incredible array come to be together in the first place? To whom did they belong? And perhaps most crucially, how did they come to be buried and then forgotten? Here to discuss this remarkable story of profiteers and chances of transformation, consumption and the birth of modern London is Victoria shepherd, historian, writer and broadcaster. Her previous work includes the marvellous Explorative Social History, A History of Delusions, the Glass King, A Substitute Husband and A Walking Corpse, which was both a BBC Radio 4 series and a book of the same name. She returns with her new book, Stony Jack and the Lost Jaws of Cheapside Inning. Victoria deftly explores the intricate machinations of two distinct time periods. The magnificent court of Elizabeth I at the onset of empire and the messy dealings of the early 20th century antiquity trade. And we're going to do the same today. I'm Professor Susannah Lipscomb and this is not just the Tudors from history hit. Victoria, welcome to the podcast.
- [04:48]
Victoria Shepherd
Thank you. Great to be here.
- [04:50]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
So let's start with the discovery. Can you tell me a bit more about this incredible discovery and how it was made?
- [04:57]
Victoria Shepherd
Yes. So it's a sunny day, June 18, 1912. People talk about this period just before the First World War as a kind of golden age of croquet and ping pong and long summer days. And actually it's not just rose tinted spectacles, because that spring summer was not ordinary level of warm and this was a particularly beautiful spring day. There was a building boom going on this spring that hadn't been seen since the rebuilding of London after the Great Fire. So much like today, cranes and the sound of construction would have echoed through the streets of London, along with the sound of horses and trolley buses and so on. And so in 1912 they were building to new heights. It was the era think Forster and Howards End of mansion flats, knocking down pre existing older buildings and creating heights which needed deeper foundations and lift shafts and so on. And so this particular building on the corner of Friday street and Cheapside, the Main thoroughfare going from what was all Drury to St. Paul's was going to be Wakefield House was the design. It was going to have a bank down below. And much like many of the, we think, of department stores of the era, quite ornate building of the early 1910s. And they were digging that out for Mr. Wakefield and his Castrol Oil empire to have its new business premises. And certainly so these navigational engineers, as they were called, known as navvies, mainly from Ireland, although definitely not exclusively from Ireland, who were itinerant workers who had a lot of work building the Tube and Kingsway and Marylebone they'd just finished. So there was an enormous amount of work for these itinerant labourers, who were often paid in beer, had a bad reputation for fighting but very tough lives. And it was just these kind of labourers who arrived on the corner of Friday street and Cheapside. Outsider, a Victorian building that sat on top of another. Many iterations of building that had been on top of what was Goldsmith's Row originally in the 1400s. And they were to transform it. And they took their pickaxes and their shovels and went down to what was known as the old vault to start digging. And at some point that day, they were picking their way through what was a chalk for all in the basement of this building. And one of their pickaxes, we don't have a name, they were paid in beer, sometimes in petty cash. There's very little record of them. We don't know who these particular people were who made this key entree into the chalk, but probably five or six were in this particular chamber at that time. One of them put their pick in and uncovered. It's contentious. There's many different versions of this because several witnesses gave their account, but some people said there were several boxes, some that there was one box, some that they were chests, some that the chests had drawers, but certainly some sort of wooden vessel that had largely perished. But inside it, this staggeringly gorgeous collection of Judah and Stuart jewels, you can imagine they would have taken probably paraffin lamps down there would have been dark and hot, oppressive sort of workplace. And quite difficult, I would imagine, to see initially what they'd found. But such was the gorgeousness of some of the rubies and diamonds that they did pretty quickly work out that this was an extraordinary, unusually large cache of jewellery, along with fistfuls of less glamour, glamorous finger rings, some loose, some broken. And we can only imagine what went through their heads when they tried to decide what to do about what they had found, who to declare it to, and whether or not to take a little bit in the window that was shortly going to close when they might be able to pop a piece or two in their pocket for a girlfriend or a mother or a wife. And we'll never know quite what they discussed, but they were the finders. And in any kind of treasure trove or horde, discovery finders take on a key part in the story. And these workmen will remain nameless, but they find as they were nonetheless.
- [09:00]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
One name we do know, though, is Stoney Jack. So who was he and how quickly was he involved?
- [09:07]
Victoria Shepherd
Stoney Jack was critical to this discovery because it was his streetwise genius that meant that these navigational engineers, these navvies, these laborers, first of all knew what to look for and knew what they might have found. Stoney Jack was known as. He was known as Stoney Jack. His real name was George Fabian Lawrence. He'd grown up in Victorian London, started his life mudlarking and then set up this sort of antiquities dealership, unconscionable now because he was buying and selling to the British Museum and the London Museum, as it was then known. So, unconscionable conflict of interest. But he worked out that if he stalked the building sites, these plentiful building sites in the City of London, and got to know the navigational engineers and the labourers and anyone interested, he would teach what to look for. So he'd give them rudimentary lessons in archaeology, what kind of glaze to look for. That might mean it was Samian ware and Roman or medieval or of interest and of value. And so he had taught them that, and they trusted him. This is the critical thing. They trusted him and they knew that if they brought him, they'd have to spirit these items, of course, off the building sites on Saturday mornings so that they weren't being watched by the overseer. But they trusted him that if they brought him something that was junk, he would pay them in a half pint of beer. But if it was something valuable, he would split the value. They didn't trust other officers of, say, the Guildhall as much. And so on this day, their first thoughts turned to George Fabian Lawrence, Stoney Jack, because they knew that he would be fair. First of all, they knew what they had found was extraordinary. And second of all, they knew that they would be cut into the deal, if indeed it was as exciting as they must have thought it was. And he was sitting waiting in his extraordinary old curiosity shop that was stacked with Tudor and Stuart and Roman pieces, oil lamps, Elizabethan Shoes that had been preserved in the London clay. And he always had a hunch that there were great treasures still to be discovered under London. And obviously this building boom had whet his appetite. He knew there was more than just the wine and cheese of Samuel Pepys under there. And his luck came in. I really do have the sense of him waiting by the door for a day like this to come. And came it did. And they arrived at his doorstep in Wandsworth, which was then must have smelt extremely heady. It was a center of gas production and all sorts of noxious trades, as they called it then. And he waited in his shop. They pulled the little bell pull and dumped these, what they described as sort of concrete footballs, lumps of clay sticking out of which were crumpled jewels, gems, rings, neck chains. And Stoney Jack and his family who all lived in the flat above this shop. Jewels presumably hit the floor and again the dilemma moved to them, what to do with them, what to do with this sort of once in a generation discovery that had turned up literally on his doorstep.
- [12:11]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
And you've described the sort of rudimentary training he gave these labourers in archaeology. Do you feel that he had a particular interest in history or was he really motivated by financial gain?
- [12:25]
Victoria Shepherd
We're lucky that he befriended a journalist who became very unfashionable but was extremely famous in the Edwardian period and after, called H.V. morton. Henry Morton was a friend of his and wrote these wonderful feature descriptions of his character and how he operated his shop. And H.V. morton ended up strangely, coincidentally being at the opening of Tutankhamun's tomb in the 1920s. So he said anyway, in the shop when these jewels were delivered and he wrote Wonder. He was a great writer, very strange individual with unsavoury, some kind of unsavory aspects to his personality that emerged later in the 20s. But thanks to him we get this wonderful evocation of Stoney Jack's personality. And essentially everybody who knew him described how he had a kind of almost clairvoyant attitude to the objects that he dealt in. And even though his day job was very upright, proper Edwardian museum position for the British Museum and also for the London Museum at weekends. And the other side of him, he saw the antiquities that he dealt in as a kind of channel to the cultures and the people who'd owned them. He would reportedly hold up Elizabethan shoes and imagine the person who'd worn them. And he could evoke kind of galleons coming up the Thames. He would bewitch the children who came into his shop with stories of. Of Boudicca and her era. And he would use the objects that were brought to his shop to tell these wonderful stories and evoke time, as though time really had no boundaries for him. He lived in all sorts of different eras, slipped between the past and the present very easily. He kept this very quiet, of course, because it was not entirely respectable. But I think that goes some way to answer your question, which is that I see him very much as a man who was not motivated by money. He never left his shop, despite the great fame and notoriety that the Cheapside Hoard, as it became known, bestowed upon him. He left some money, but really not very much, certainly not a thief's fortune to his relatives. And I think that sense of communion with the past, the way that objects could connect him to people and cultures of the past, was really absolutely what drove him. Although, as I say, he kept it a secret, but for reasons of respectability, because in 1912, that kind of idea of clairvoyance and of communing with the undead would not have been quite the thing for an officer at the British Museum.
- [14:59]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
You alluded a little earlier to the sense that there was something of a conflict of interests between his shop and his museum position. So can we delve a little bit more into the kind of ethics or legalities around his methods and indeed, how much of the hoard ended up as the property of the London Museum as it was then, and how much did, as far as you can tell, this.
- [15:28]
Victoria Shepherd
Is a complicated story, but luckily the hoard leads us through this very convoluted and enraged story, as different people who have a claim on this hoard get involved. I suppose it's probably sensible to start with definition of treasure trove, which goes back to Edward the Confessor in British law, all the way back, essentially, by 1912. Anyway, to qualify as treasure trove, objects had to be 50% precious metal. So silver or gold, be that bullion or plate or enough handfuls of coins to constitute treasure. But essentially it was a matter of how much precious metal was in the find. But as they quickly discovered, as the City of London slowly discovered, because Stoney Jack gave the hoard, or the lion's share of the hoard anyway, to the London Museum, Lord Harcourt and Lord Esher's kind of new museum for London. And they had every incentive not to be entirely honest with where it had been found, to be a little grey and grand about the petty details of exactly where it had been found, because they knew that City of London that the hoard having been found within the Square Mile would have a claim. And indeed when the City of London got wind of this discovery, they produced a charter. So treasure trove would normally go to the Crown, but there was an ancient charter that somebody managed to find in a chest of drawers somewhere in the City of London, proving that in the case of the City they had a special charter which meant that they owned any treasure trove discovered in the Square Mile. However, as Lord Harcourt argued that because there was very little precious met in the hoard, even though it was clearly very important and of huge, it was gorgeous and of huge historic value, it wasn't actually 50% gold or silver. And the wrangling and kind of subterfuge about who owned it, who had claim on it, where and exactly how it had been found, what constituted it, ran and ran was only finally divided up in 1916 when begrudgingly the London Museum as it was then decided to do the right thing and give a share to the British Museum and to the VA and to the Guildhall. Although Guildhall were always pretty suspicious that they didn't get the best bits. But essentially the London Museum were awarded it during a court case during the First World War. The wrangling continued and eventually it was begrudgingly split, but the London Museum kept the lion's share of it.
- [18:05]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
So let's talk about what was in this collection and why such a large collection of jewels might have been amassed.
- [18:14]
Victoria Shepherd
Yeah, it's a really intriguing question because it's such a diverse group of objects from the very blingy. There's the Salamander set with emeralds and diamonds. There's a single emerald cut into a watch case with a fold down lid. Enormous artistry and skill on this enormous emerald. There are scent bottles and pomanders encrusted so knobbly with fabulous jewels and gems. And then there are these fistfuls of what were at the time 10 a penny finger rings showing a sort of a Tudor Elizabethan fashion for taking little intaglios. So where the picture's been carved into a semi precious stone or cameos, where it's been carved into relief out of the stone, which they were ancient stones. And then the Tudors had a liking for setting those into new pieces of jewellery. And there's scores and scores of examples of those. So mythological scenes or characters or Christian medieval icons and figures, but put into Elizabethan setting. And then there are lots that are loose and some that are broken. So pretty quickly when the experts got their eye on Them they came to the conclusion that this was a jeweller's stock in trade. There were even some shavings of turquoise which really intriguingly indicates or suggests that somebody or some people swept the contents of a table or of a room at speed into this vessel or these vessels to hide them. So it's a really mixed bag. Some jewelry fit for kings and queens and some the kind of stuff that ordinance, emergent class people would bring in to, to be fixed and everything in between.
- [20:04]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
And am I right in thinking there are counterfeit gems among the collection?
- [20:08]
Victoria Shepherd
How do we explain those counterfeit gems in the sense that there was at the time people did create fake rubies and so on. I don't think there were examples of gems that had been made to look more valuable than they were. But the object of the hoard itself or object of the collection itself was simply the stock in trade of a jeweller. What we know may come onto later about who this person may have been suggests that he had connections with royalty and that some of the gems may well have been earmarked, got from various different sources, but earmarked, put into, repurposed for his really top draw clients, even for royalty. And some of them, they were always knocking around particularly fake movies. They'd worked out how to create jewels, gems that looked like they were the real McCoy but actually were the work of kind of early chemistry. But I don't think that there wasn't subterfuge in the sense that there wasn't a counterfeiter's stash in that sense. It shows signs that somebody was working at various different levels and serving probably mainly the merchant classes of Elizabethan and Jacobean London that was supplying their work and serving various different communities at different economic levels. Obviously not the poorest, but that's what it suggests. And it is intriguing the difference and the variety and the depth not of the objects in the hoard. Not to mention the kind of wild. When you, when I realized, you know, just how far the gems had come from across the world into these boxes under the floor in Cheapside, it's mind blowing. And I think that's why, you know, what I came to become completely obsessed with is this what I started to see unfold or started to understand, which is this Edwardian kind of love affair with the Tudors, this Edwardian fetishization and thrill over the Elizabethans and the Tudors and the great sort of characters from that era. And that these duels really represented an opportunity to learn for the Edwardians or late Edwardians. In 1912, to feed their hunger, to understand more about this culture that they seem to have been really taken with. And I found that very interesting and still do. How the Edwardians and why they were so excited with the Elizabethans and the Stuarts and what was going on there.
- [22:32]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Because the collection gives us a bit of a sense of what displays of wealth looked like in the late Tudor, early Stuart period, doesn't it? Can you give us a sort of sense of that?
- [22:46]
Victoria Shepherd
Yes, I suppose. Conspicuous consumption kind of modern term. I think we can put that on the Edwardians. They didn't know it was the last hurrah vampire and that things were about to begin their decline. Although I get the sense, having researched this book, that they had a kind of sixth sense, that there was a kind of superstition in the air about this heyday of it was literally the sun never set on empire, all of that stuff. Most of the population, or a significant proportion, were living incredibly well and traveling without impediment and having a relatively speaking wonderful time. But society was creaking and social inequality was stretching. And their kind of conspicuous consumption of a certain group anyway in 1912 is echoed in some of the pieces in the Cheapside hoard. So wonderful. Hat pins, bejeweled hat pins, pomanders studded with gems and jewels, necklaces, neck chains, I suppose. Cause many of them were worn as carcanets in the hair or looped up. They weren't necessarily worn around the neck with true lovers knots and bows and circles and so on. So they run like Tudor code, with all of the encoded meaning that the stones and the designs had in jewellery, you know, the lapidaries and the understanding that the Tudors and those for many centuries before that had put into stemi precious stones and symbols and so on. And of course the Elizabethans loved that and they loved showing them off in fan handles. Or then of course there's the religious crosses, slightly different sort of religious crosses, which the best guess, certainly at the time, and probably still today, was that they were items taken at the dissolution of the monastery. So they made their way in these very elaborately jeweled crosses and other religious vessels in the hoard. But in terms of the sort of lion's share of it, rings, brooches, hat, pins. Symbolic both in terms of the meanings of the semi precious stones and of the gems. The size of the gems, of course, being very different, of the value of a huge ruby or huge emerald or diamonds being a completely different value set to the kind of superstitious currency that they all think. And that to me is what's so interesting about all of these pieces. Some of the less obviously ostentatious are some of the most interesting because they're packed with superstitious meaning. And clearly the Elizabethans were using ancient stones, ancient Roman and Greek stones and symbols as talisman that they could wear on their bodies. Just as the Edwardians were loving this hoard and trying to read them and saw the value in them as to do with protection and love. And these items that had survived showed a mastery over time and had a kind of mystique and power of protection. Most of the stones, it boils down to offering a variation of protection or enduring love or whatever. And that that was their mystique as well as their obvious financial.
- [25:58]
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- [28:13]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
One of the things you mention in your book is the discovery of toadstones among the collection, which is is connected to what you've just been talking about in terms of magic and superstition. Tell us about those.
- [28:24]
Victoria Shepherd
I think they were the head of a toad. They were seen as a head of a toad and they had all kinds of folklore to do with their protection about for newborns and women who'd just given birth. People didn't quite understand at the time that they'd actually got them wrong and they were little fossils. But they are extremely unglamorous. They look. They're little gray objects, but they had this enormous cachet. They are probably the most extreme example of a stone which is not blinging and sparkling, but which people treasured and attributed, projected enormous amounts of meaning onto and kept and obviously had given to this jeweller to mend or to set into a ring. And it's a really useful one to help unlock the understanding of the different kinds of value that the jewels in the hoard offered people. And I would argue that the superstitious currency may be the more enduring than the financial value. That's what leaks out of it. And it's a beautiful thing because of course it hasn't changed people's attachment to their engagement rings or to pieces of jewelry that they feel give them a kind of amulet in life is arguably just as strong. Now, people maybe keep it quiet more than they did then. But yes, I think that the toadstones as well as the little sods, not the quite, quite dreary coloured stone. The Romans like to carve mythological scenes out of Sard and the Tudors like to set them into rings. And there's lots of them in the Cheapside hoard. And again, a really useful item to unlock that mentality that isn't just obsessed with the most sparkly or the largest or the most financially valuable, but reusing, resetting and caring about enough that you'd give it to a jeweler or that a jeweller would. Would do it up to give to somebody else.
- [30:13]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
And you've given an impression of this moment of a whole heap of stuff being swept into this cache. Why do you think, given the value both in terms of material wealth, financial importance and this superstitious power, might it have been buried? And how did it stay undiscovered for so long?
- [30:40]
Victoria Shepherd
Gosh. So why would it have been buried? That is the million dollar question that everybody from 1912 onwards has fretted and deliciously debated ever since. Initially, they got it wrong. Spoiler alert. But the Edwardians assumed that it had been buried around about 1600. They were actually out by several decades, but there's certain research that they didn't have access to. So there's always some dramatic irony going on here. But the reasons their thought process is still correct. It wasn't uncommon, in the absence of banking that we have today, that jewellers remember, this was Goldsmith's Row and it had been for hundreds of years. And this was a place where jewellers showed their wares in shops onto Cheapside, and then they'd have workshops upstairs. And for hundreds of years from the 1400s, that's what was going on that site. So it's absolutely logical to assume that it was a jeweller, to assume that perhaps they put it into the ground just as an overnight storage, because they didn't have a bank vault. And that was a kind of ordinary practice. But the identity, the question of why they never came back for it is the thing. That's the thing that makes it a hoard. Intriguingly, I love this definition, the thing that makes a treasure trove a hoard is this idea which is animus revicandi. You have to have a mind, or you have to agree that the person who buried it had a mind to come back for it and just couldn't, for whatever reason, and that's what makes it a hoard. And so this notion that quite clearly somebody had buried it full of very valuable things and the intention likely was that they were going to come back for it, why didn't they? What stopped them? And of course, the 17th century and the 16th is packed with reasons why somebody might have put it down there, perhaps just on an ordinary Friday night. And then anything from plague through to all sorts of things that were perfectly logical. The political, religious turmoil, that might have meant that somebody had to leave town quickly. But they all in 1912. And as they were mulling this over, they landed fairly quickly on the idea that it had been buried. And then somehow the Fire of London was probably. They were probably hiding it from the Fire of London, or perhaps 1600. Some people thought much earlier that it had been buried in around 1600, because so many of the objects were of approximately that age. But they didn't have access to this crucial little carnelian intaglio, which the staff at the Museum of London found 10 years ago, showing us that they were out by 40 years. If they imagined that it had been buried in 1600. But, yes, they were trying to understand who they were, why they hadn't come back for them. And I think that the idea that it was something unexpected and disastrous was widely intuited from the evident rush of the burial and the strangeness of the fact that it was under the chalk floor. There was intrigue there to be uncovered and a story and a face and a personal people, and it drove people putty trying to work it out. Because the fire did burn the buildings above the cellar in 1666. There are rent books and tithe books, but the nature of the jeweller's population, it was itinerant people came and went. There were workers from the continent who were trying to get round Goldsmith's Regulations about the City of London and would not have been signing a visitor's book. Plus the exact walls and arrangement of any particular buildings or site, very difficult. Cause there's so many different layers of building that's gone on over the top. So. So what we think of as 30 to 34 Cheapside, which was not called that at all, or thought of in those terms when our jeweller, our mysterious jeweller was there. In fact, one of the original buildings was an inn called the Blackmoor's Head that had been on that site and in the 1600s and before. If an inn changed purpose, it would keep the name. So people began to understand, scholars and people researching it began to understand that jewelers were, were taking leases in what had been the Blackmoor's Head Inn. But how to work out which lease corresponded with which person when the records were very sketchy, many of them lost, was impossible. So it seemed as though a date for the burial and an identity for the burial would elude everybody. And certainly Stoney Jack never discovered, much to his exasperation, he never discovered who'd buried it or really got close to an accurate date for the burial that we have now.
- [35:32]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
And actually one of the explanations comes back to this idea of superstition. In your book you talk of a letter sent to the London Museum warning about the ghost of the Cheapside hoard. What can you tell me about this?
- [35:45]
Victoria Shepherd
Oh, yes, the ghost. As I was saying that the Edwardian kind of love affair that I've found between the Edwards, the late Edwardians and the Tudors, the Shakespeare plays on in 1912, before and after the so called Merry England, an operetta comic opera, was on from 1902 virtually. I don't think it was ever off the stage until the 1940s when it fell absolutely out of favor. But this was a sort of comic opera with Bess, Elizabeth I, and it had Jiggs and it had Lord Essex and it had Sir Walter Raleigh and it had this kind of delightful confection of an Edwardian idea of. Of Elizabethan London. When the ghost of the Cheapside hoard emerges, Edwardian London is in full throes of this love affair with all things Elizabethan and with these characters. The moment in history. At a shaky time politically and socially in 1912, the Elizabethans offered a sort of a lovely nostalgic reminder of when we were at the center of a growing empire and our reach and power was huge. And these wonderful characters, the Elizabethans loved that. And the ghost is very much a kind of central casting when he steps on stage the day, in fact, that the jewels are discovered, as it's reported in the papers, in Stoney Jack's family apartment upstairs, they've just washed the jewels and they've laid them out in the den, which is already full of stuff with antiques anyway, and they have a friend over for tea. This is reported after the First World War in the newspapers widely. And the room goes cold and in walks this something straight off a stage, like something out of Merrie England, this operetta, a kind of pantomime, Elizabethan and doublet. And he's saying, those are my jewels. What have you to have them? That's what he's quoted as saying. And this character who gets angrier and is seen following, reported in the papers to be following the Cheapside horde over the ensuing decades, becomes angrier and angrier. And he's a really interesting figure because, as I say, I see him as a beginning, simply as part and parcel of this love affair with the Elizabethans and with the characters of the Elizabethans. But there's also this very creeping, slowly creeping question that begins on the very day on the 18th of June, 1912, about who owns these jewels. Who was this person? And the question that this ghost supposedly asks, you know, what have you to have them? It's a question that I don't think it's overstating, starts to really reflect the beginnings of anxiety about ownership of property and gems taken from across the world and empire, and the beginnings of anxiety about ownership, British ownership and British theft of objects from around the world. And this ghost, so he's seen in the apartment, supposedly, Stoney Jack loved a good ghost story and he was a brilliant teller of them. I don't think cynically, it's impossible to prove. I think he. He, as I said, he was known to have this clairvoyant belief in the objects that he had, that they had these kind of resin, that they still contained connection to the people who'd owned them. I don't think he was being cynical in this report, whatever it was that he wants to communicate with this experience. But then after the war, when the Cheapside hall is first exhibited, it's first exhibited just before the First World War, but then it has to go straight back into storage and then it's exhibited in the Museum of London's new premises or the London Museum's new premises after the First World War. And the ghost comes back again now, for obvious reasons, because of the disaster of the First World War and the mass death and how many people had lost loved ones and the growth in spiritualism and the desperation that people felt and their desire to speak to those who died. The ghost. There's an audience for this ghost and certainly people within the museum, probably STONEY Jackson, certainly H.V. morton, the journalist who was supposedly there when the jewels arrived and who again knew how to spin a good story told again and again of psychics and people arriving to see the jewels in Lancaster House, which is just off the Mall, where the jewels were then shown in this huge gold room there. And the ghost continues to appear and he gets angrier and angrier in the news reports so that by 1919, the reports he's people having visions of him tearing a necklace from the hoard off the person he stole it from. So there's a suggestion that these jewels were ill gotten gains and the ghost has become vengeful. Quite what purpose this particular ghost was, it was certainly getting people in through the door. It was a good story to have a kind of house ghost at the London Museum. And as I say, people were interested in, in ghosts like never before. But as I say, the kind of the idea of this character that nobody knew who they were, nobody knew why they'd buried such beautiful and interesting objects and not come back for them, continued to haunt them. So what had started life perhaps is I see the ghosts, initial reports of the ghost. As I say, this kind of vaudevillian figure becomes much more of a haunting figure to people after the First World War. He's still in Elizabethan, but he's very unsettling in terms of how he's reported. He's menacing, he wants his tools back, he's angry. And those reports continue.
- [41:30]
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- [42:00]
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- [42:58]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
And it's very interesting that we have Henry Morton involved here who's also of course, as you mentioned there at the time of the opening of Tutankhamun's tomb and the legendary curse that grows up around it. It's a very good PR tactic. But I feel like we have danced around the question that the listeners are going to be now screaming, which is, so who owned these things? What have you discovered? What is the, what is the new research and what does it show us?
- [43:30]
Victoria Shepherd
There are two key discoveries. The first is, I alluded to very briefly, was this little carnelian, so semi precious red stone. It's tiny, it's one of the tiniest little loose pieces in the Cheapside hoard and it had on it the coronet, nine pearls on a coronet and a swan of Viscount Stafford and some very BDI about 10 years ago realised that there's only ever been one Viscount Stafford and he was ennobled in 1640. And since this stone was in the Cheapside hoard, it cannot have been buried before 1640. And then we know that all of the workshops or whatever was left of it was bit down on its luck. By this point, its heyday was over. But the goldsmith's row burned in the fire of London, leaving a kind of perfectly sealed Marie Celeste of The cellar, which we know nobody would go into for another 300 years. So it dated this little tiny little intaglio, dated it between the burial between 1600 and 1666. And then Rosemary Weinstein made a much more recent discovery, looking at something completely different, which is often how these discoveries happen, isn't it? Looking at tithe books and lease books connected to the Goldsmiths. And it was a passing back reference in a lease for Mr. William Taylor to the person who had owned what we know was the site 30 to 32 Cheapside in the 1640s. Francis Simpson. There was a Simpson family. We'd known that the Simpson family were well known jewelers, but no one could have linked those two things. Certainly our Edwardians couldn't without knowing that they were out by as much as they were, that the burial was 1640 or later. So when you know that burial is after 1640 and that Francis Simpson and his brother were on that site, suddenly you start to hone in and you can see a very logical explanation and it essentially takes us to the Civil War. Francis Simpson was a staunch royalist who was in Oxford when he went off with the King to Oxford at the beginning of the Civil War, leaving his band of cutters and his artisans in the place we know was, so let's call it the site of Wakefield House as it would become. And essentially the story then flows that when he finds himself on the wrong side of the Civil War and parliamentarians come to sequester Royalist property, bang on the door, turn up in Goldsmith's Row and the people there bury his stock in trade, including the best bits as fast as they can at the back towards the wall, going onto the butting onto the property behind. I'm convinced by that. Impossible to prove beyond all doubt. But certainly he was royal jeweller. He was doing so well with the King until he very much wasn' Obviously as the King wasn't, he was doing very well and was made royal jeweller. And so suddenly these wonderful jewels in the hoard start to make sense. It also makes sense why he didn't take them because he was setting absolutely fabulous diamonds and so on for Charles and his wife, the Queen. So perhaps he left behind even rather fabulous ones because they weren't literally the absolute tops which he'd taken with him to Oxford. And of course, those gems linked to to Murder on the High Seas as well. Another wonderful story about where some of those jewels had come from. That's Chris Lane in Chilean University discovering about basically a robbery murder that happened on the high seas in the 1630s with an East India Company ship carrying somebody who'd paid a lot of money to be carried back from his jewel hunting expedition. He was a man called two Gerard Pullman, with a great big bag of jewels, many of which we can connect now to the Cheapside hoard. And he was murdered and thrown overboard and the ship's carpenter rode ashore off Kent and many of those jewels were then sold. We know about this because there was a court case where as the Lord Lindsay, who was running things for the East India Company, desperately tried to get his jewels back from the man who'd been not working for him, but whose passage he'd paid for and he wanted these jewels back. We have all of these depositions of people who were called to explain where these jewels had gone or who stole them, and almost certainly the emerald. There's very suggestive connections between some of the jewels that were stolen from the discovery and those that had ended up in the Cheapside hoard. And of course, Simpson and others like him would have known these workers and dealers from all over Europe. It's a much more European affair than you might imagine. Italians and Dutch dealers. A lot of the gem trading was centered around Holland. That's where the royal family would go to pawn fabulous jewels if they ran out of money for wars. And I found it touching and fascinating imagining Simpson was an English jeweller, but he had had workers with him working for him who had these brilliant new kind of foot pedal ways of cutting. They would bring expertise in particular ways of cutting, particular styles of cutting diamonds, say, or polishing things, and these contraptions that they would literally bring with them from the continent, some of whom weren't allowed to work because of the very strict rules of the livery company. I feel strongly that the burial was connected to people who he'd helped or worked alongside. A very mixed itinerant group of people who'd come to London to work. He's highly skilled and that perhaps they'd heard that he was in trouble in Oxford, were the ones who buried his treasures.
- [49:41]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
And it's a global story as well, isn't it? Because here we have this incredible parallel between the rise of empire and the decline when these things were buried and when they were found. Perhaps decline is a little too early, but we're on the cusp of it anyway. But in this collection, this is a snapshot of the gem trade that is taking in, I don't know, lapis lazuli from Afghanistan and garnets from India and Colombian emeralds and all These extraordinary things you chart. So here also we have the beginnings of colonialism intersecting with an increased appetite for consumption.
- [50:24]
Victoria Shepherd
Yes, precisely that, precisely that. And it's interesting how the Edwardians saw it. I found the journey of learning more about this fascinating, as I say, the fact that these centers of commerce and trade with the gems that were coming from the Far east, from Iran or Kaja as it was, or from, from, as you say, all over the world, often getting to Holland, being traded, brought often to London to be cut and made into jewellery or it was all sorts of objects that they would go into. It's far more far reaching than certainly I would have imagined. And also as I said, the fact of that kind of empire. I perhaps knew more about the soldiers and the wars that were playing out. Spain, France, Holland, all of these things over these centuries, these wars that were flaring up and rearranging sections of land. But what I hadn't clocked was the fact that this trading, this kind of leverage of jewels for money, for war chests, involved literally Henrietta Maria going to Holland with gold and jewels to break down in her skirts, carrying jewels so that she could, could trade them for money to have them broken down. And the traders, the hierarchy in terms of class and rank is much more anarchic than I could have imagined. Whilst of course by the time they're found, Mary of Teck, who's on the throne in 1912, extraordinarily brilliant. Just almost as good as the Tudors, understanding the iconography of jewellery and breaking, going in search of search of pieces she thought were rightfully hers, like from the Cambridge emeralds that had gone through her own family, the Teck family, to a mistress. And she went and got them herself and brought them back and put them into her own tiara, the Delhi Durba, for this great ceremony in India, becoming the Empress of India when George V was crowned. Of course they're then co opted into these enormous symbolic giant pieces of crown jewel. But I didn't know and I think it's intriguing how hands on that had been but a few hundred years before that, if you fell out with Parliament and you needed some money because your war chest was empty. Leveraging jewelled James the First and his wife Anne of Denmark, came to a deal with another like Francis Simpson, another royal jeweller, George Heriot, where he would literally give them cash advances, like a payday loan against gems and jewels so that they could continue their war efforts. And she ended up the equivalent of 2 million pounds in debt and would just continue to give him jewels he'd continued to give her. She never managed to pay them off. And they obviously had compounded they'd inherited Elizabeth I's debts. So this astonishing story of how these incredible natural resources had been brought from the colonies, as we would think of them, to but the dance of kind of redemption, claiming money against them, getting them back, breaking them up again, then hitting the markets again, is an absolute whirlwind and far stranger a story of empire and its resources than I could ever have guessed before I wrote the book.
- [53:48]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Well, thank you so much for introducing us to the story. And it's a timeless blue story not only because of your wonderful new book, but also because for the first time in 11 years, the Cheapside hall will go on display at the new Museum of London in Smithfield this year. Victoria shepherd, thank you so much for your time.
- [54:11]
Victoria Shepherd
Thank you so much for having me. I really enjoyed it.
- [54:16]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Thanks for listening to Not Just the Tudors and to my researcher Alice Smith and my producer Rob Weinberg. And do join me, Professor Susanna Lipscomb next time for another episode of Not Just the Tudors from history. Hit.
- [54:39]
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