The Cheapside Hoard: London's Buried Treasure
In 1912 workmen at 30-32 Cheapside uncovered more than 400 Elizabethan and Jacobean jewels, buried four centuries earlier. Most are now at the Museum of London, with pieces at the British Museum and the V&A.
In 1912, during building work at 30-32 Cheapside in the City of London, workmen broke into a cellar and found a hoard: more than four hundred pieces of Elizabethan and Jacobean jewellery, buried in the 1640s and never reclaimed. It is the greatest single find of early modern jewellery ever made in Britain.
Not portraits but the bench: what English jewellery actually looked like around 1600.
The hoard contained finished jewels and jewelers' stock side by side: enamelled gold necklaces, cameos, scent-bottle pendants, and loose stones, including diamonds, rubies, emeralds and spinels. It was, in effect, the inventory of a working goldsmith, hidden during the turmoil of the Civil War and left for nearly three centuries.
Where it is now
Most of the hoard is held by the Museum of London, with pieces also at the British Museum and the Victoria and Albert Museum. The V&A's holdings include enamelled gold work of the kind the hoard is famous for: the lovers'-knot motifs and painted enamel that define Jacobean taste.
For collectors, the hoard is a reference library. It shows what English jewellery actually looked like around 1600, not in portraits but on the bench: the techniques, the stone cuts, the enamel colours. Every serious student of the period starts here.
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