Myths and Legends of the London Stone

Embedded into the wall of 111 Cannon Street, just over the road from the railway station, is a portland stone receptacle around a metre and a half high.

This has a glass front. Look into this little window and you see a stone as ancient as it is mysterious, a lump of oolitic limestone to which have accreted myths, legends and fables about the history of the capital, but which, in reality, tells us more about our need for myths, legends and fables.

Probably the most improbable of these tales is that the stone was brought to London by Brutus of Troy, the first king of Britain (so described in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s 12th century work ‘History of the Kings of Britain’. Geoffrey also has King Arthur sacking Rome and Merlin building Stonehenge.)

More prosaic attributions are that the stone marked the centre of Anglo-Saxon London, or that it was a ‘milliarium’, the stone from which all Roman distances to/from London were marked, a ‘golden milestone’ as it has been called.

It does seem to have had fame or importance from the early middle ages at least. The first mayor of London (who came to office in 1189) was known as Henry fitz Ailwyn de Londonstone; his house was just off Cannon Street showing that even in the 12th century the stone was well known enough for it to have given its name to the area in which it stood.

In Jack Cade’s uprising of 1450 the capital was stormed by Kentish men and a pitched battle was fought on London Bridge between the rebels and forces loyal to Henry VI, Cade is said to have struck the stone with his sword and proclaimed himself Lord of London. There doesn’t seem to be a record of any existing tradition here, so Cade might have simply been indulging in theatrics, but it was a compelling enough action for Shakespeare to include it in Henry VI part 2, and following the play the stone became associated with the ‘right’ to govern the city.

William Blake (never the man to go to for strict historical accuracy) followed the lead of an 18th century antiquarian in declaring that the stone was a druidical altar on which sacrifices had been made, and Victorian folklorist George Laurence Gomme went further, stating that it was a prehistoric ‘fetish stone’, something erected at the creation of a village where the head man of the community would make offerings to the tribal gods each year.

These claims are not true, and rank with more modern contentions that this was the stone from which Arthur pulled the sword, or this it is part of the ‘sacred geometry’ of the city in the utter twaddle stakes.

Current archeological thinking is that the stone might have been part of the gateway into the Roman praesidium that lies under Cannon Street station. Sometimes called the Governor’s Palace, this was a very substantial structure and the stone might have been part of the entrance or erected in the front courtyard of the building. 

Certainly the type of stone used is characteristic of Roman or post-Roman building, and is believed to be clipsham limestone, quarried in what is now Rutland. It does seem likely that the stone was once bigger (its current dimensions being 55 x 45 x 30cm, or about the size of a bag that you put in the overhead lockers on Easyjet). Stow’s 1598 Survey of London calls it “a great stone…fixed in the ground very deep”, so presumably the Great Fire and subsequent relocations have reduced its substance quite considerably.

But although its physical presence might have diminished its folkloric significance has increased, with it acquiring a mythology that it somehow represents the spirit of the city and if it is destroyed then London will crumble and fall. (Echoes of the equally invented legend of the Tower of London ravens.)

Truth be told it’s not really something to plan a trip to London around (it’s a bit of rock! In a glass case!), but if you’re close to Cannon Street it’s worth continuing a longstanding tradition by taking a moment to commune with it.

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