ALL THAT GLITTERS

A jeweller’s treasure trove or a robber’s plunder? Genevieve Gannon delves into the enduring mystery of the Cheapside Hoard, a stash of hundreds of ancient jewels found buried beneath a shop in London.

- Genevieve Gannon

For almost 300 years, a Colombian emerald the size of a plum lay buried beneath the foundations of a shop in London’s Cheapside. The green jewel had been cut, polished, hollowed out and fitted with a gold clock, which was set with smaller emeralds, to turn it into an incredibly ostentatious pocket watch.

The emerald has been described by London Museum curator Hazel Forsyth as “one of the most exquisite jewels in the world”. The only thing more remarkable than the fact it had been hidden in the ground is that it was not alone. An agate cameo of Cleopatra dating back to the time before Christ; a rare sapphire pendant believed to have been worn by a Byzantine emperor; a cameo from the court of Queen Elizabeth I; and hundreds of other jewels and gemstones had all been parcelled up with the watch and lowered into the earth.

They remained there, unseen, until the Cheapside building was demolished in 1912 and a worker noticed something glittering beneath his pickaxe. Amid clods of dirt, labourers found pearls, rubies, necklaces and gems. All told, roughly 500 pieces were retrieved from the hole in the ground. And even today, they remain shrouded in mystery.

The treasure trove, which came to be known as the Cheapside Hoard and now forms part of the London Museum’s permanent collection, “is the greatest hoard of its type and the most important source of our knowledge of Elizabethan and Jacobean jewellery,” Hazel explained, launching a fleeting exhibition of the jewels.