London Stone. 



But before going further we ought to say that this venerable relic 

 has not always occupied its present position. There was a time when 

 it stood erect in the street, as one of the monuments of the city, and it 

 has been sheltered and defended as it now is for only eighty five years. 

 When old John Stow made his survey of London at the close of the 

 sixteenth and the beginning of the seventeenth century, it was stand- 

 ing in Cannon street, which is a corruption of Canwick or Candlewick 

 street, and is so called from the multitude of candle-makers who lived 

 there. In this street also were many weavers of woolen cloth brought 

 from Flanders by Edward III, so that Stow says there were settled 

 there "weavers of divers sorts, to-wit of drapery or tapery and 

 napery." Lydgate in his ballad of London Lackpenny describes a 

 countryman traveling through London. In Westcheape he was called 

 on to buy fine lawne, Paris thread and linen cloths; in Cor nh ill to buy 

 old apparel, and his own hood, which he had lost in Westminster Hall; 

 in Eastcheape the cooks cried hot ribs of beef roasted, pies well baked 

 and other victuals, and when he comes to Candlewicke street he says: 



"Then went I forth by London Stone, 

 Throughout all Canwicke street, 



Drapers much cloth offered me anone, 



One cried ' mackrel,' ' ryster grene,' another gangrete, 

 One bad me buy a hood to cover my head, 



Stow thus describes London Stone as it stood in this busy street : 

 "On the south side of this high street, near unto the channel, is 

 pitched upright a great stone, called London Stone, 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." The cart-wheels must have 

 been made stronger after his time to resist such perils as this ; for cer- 

 tain it is that the stone has not always had the best of such encoun- 

 ters. He further says " that why this stone was se't there, the time 

 when or other memory hereof is none, but that the same hath long 

 continued there." But about two centuries after Stow's time, on the 

 13th of December, L742, it was removed from the south side of the 

 street, where it had stood since it had been erected, to the north side, 

 close to the edge of the curbstone. But even there the march of im- 

 provement voted the old relic to be a nuisance; and it would have been 

 utterly destroyed had not Mr. Thomas Marden, a printer of Sher- 

 bourne lane, prevailed upon the parish officers of the church of St 

 Swithin, at the time the church was undergoing repairs in 1798, to 



