London Stone: Stone of Brutus or fetish stone - making the myth

Folklore 121 (April 2010): 38–60 RESEARCH ARTICLE London Stone: Stone of Brutus or Fetish Stone—Making the Myth John Clark Abstract The remnant of once-famous “London Stone” stands almost unnoticed today in Cannon Street, in the City of London. Speculation about its origin began as early as the sixteenth century. This paper considers in particular the identification of the Stone as London’s talisman (a view embodied in an invented “ancient saying” that linked it to the city’s legendary Trojan foundation), or as a prehistoric “fetish Downloaded By: [Clark, John] At: 21:39 8 April 2010 stone” set up when London was first settled. The mythologising of London Stone continues, and at the turn of the twenty-first century it is regarded by some as an essential element in London’s indefinable “sacred geometry.” Introduction So long as the Stone of Brutus is safe, So long will London flourish. This reputedly traditional saying, quoted, for example, in Peter Ackroyd’s popular London: The Biography (2000, 18), and accepted as “a medieval proverb” by even such authorities as Jennifer Westwood and Jacqueline Simpson (2005, 478), identifies a block of limestone half hidden behind a grille in the wall of a building on the north side of Cannon Street in the City of London, last remnant of the mysterious London Stone, as London’s talisman or palladium. Moreover, it links it explicitly with a tradition that London was founded, as “New Troy,” by Brutus, descendant of the Trojan exile Aeneas and first king of Britain. The story of Brutus’s foundation of New Troy originated in the twelfth-century fictions of Geoffrey of Monmouth. The figure of Britto or Brutus, a descendant of Aeneas who settled and named Britain, is first found in the Historia Brittonum, compiled in Wales at the beginning of the ninth century (Nennius 1980, 19– 20 and 60– 1); but there was nothing in that source to suggest that he had established the city of London. New Troy was one of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s wholesale elaborations on the Historia Brittonum story of Brutus (Geoffrey of Monmouth 2007, 28– 31; see also Kendrick 1950, 3 – 7; Clark 1981). Yet Geoffrey in his turn said nothing of any stone associated with Brutus. This paper will show that, although the “Stone of Brutus” saying is indeed now “traditional,” passed on unquestioned from author to London author and popularised in the media, the saying has apparently only existed since 1862. It is typical of the myths that have gathered around London Stone. The undoubted mystery of the Stone’s origin has encouraged further mystification by mischievous as well as well-meaning interpreters, and the practice continues today. ISSN 0015-587X print; 1469-8315 online/10/010038-23; Routledge Journals; Taylor & Francis q 2010 The Folklore Society DOI: 10.1080/00155870903482007  London Stone 39 A Brief History London Stone is now a block of oolitic limestone, about 21 inches wide, 17 inches high and 12 inches front to back (Figure 1). It is set behind an iron grille and a pane of glass, built into the outside wall of a building (number 111) on the north side of Cannon Street in the City of London, nearly opposite Cannon Street station (Figure 2). It can also be seen inside the building (most recently, until it closed in April 2007, a sportswear shop), protected by a glass case. The site is to be redeveloped, leading to media speculation about the Stone and its fate (Coughlan 2006). But few of the commuters who pass it every working day pay it any heed. London Stone is admittedly a mystery. The use of limestone not local to the London area suggests it had its origin no earlier than the Roman period, when such stone was first carried to London for construction purposes; its name certainly hints at a special significance for those who first named it. The earliest record of the Stone is in a list of Canterbury Cathedral properties in London, datable between 1098 and 1108, which includes a property given to Downloaded By: [Clark, John] At: 21:39 8 April 2010 Canterbury by “Eadwaker æt lundene stane” (Kissan 1940, 58; Clark 2007b, 171). Other early medieval documents cite London Stone in this same local sense, either of people or of property. The most notable Londoner to have dwelt “at London Stone” was the first mayor, Henry Fitz Ailwin, at the end of the twelfth century— although the designation belonged properly to his father, “Ailwin of London Stone,” whose house stood nearby (Stapleton 1846, 1; Keene 2004). But no medieval source suggests that London Stone then had a ceremonial function or any particular significance. However, in 1450 the Kentish rebel Jack Cade struck his sword on London Stone and claimed to be “Lord of London” (Fabyan 1811, 624). Contemporary accounts offer no clue how Cade himself or the onlookers interpreted his action (Clark 2007b, 182– 6). Those who regard the episode as proof of the pre-existence of a “tradition” that possession of London Stone ensured control of London employ a circular argument. Too often they seem to be influenced by Shakespeare’s reinterpretation of the incident, in Henry VI Part 2 Act IV scene Figure 1. The last of London Stone. The block of oolite removed from its resting place in the wall of the ruined church of St Swithin in 1961. (Photograph: Museum of London.)  40 John Clark Downloaded By: [Clark, John] At: 21:39 8 April 2010 Figure 2. London Stone in 2006, in the frontage of the then Sportec shop. (Photograph: the author.) vi, in which Cade commandeers the Stone as a throne from which to issue his first edicts, and to deliver judgement on the first man to offend against them (Shakespeare 1999, 317– 18; Clark 2007b, 180– 1). [1] This is great theatre. It is also fiction. London Stone, clearly an important landmark, is identified on the earliest detailed map of London, the so-called “Copperplate” map of the late 1550s. [2] It appears as a large rectangular block in the roadway opposite the main door of a church recognisable as St Swithin’s (called “St Swithin at London Stone” in 1557; Harben 1918, 565) (Figure 3). Shortly afterwards, in 1598, John Stow (1524/5– 1605), in his Survey of London, described it as “a great stone” standing on the south side of Candlewick Street, now Cannon Street (Stow 1908, vol. 1, 224). It was “pitched upright” and “fixed in the ground very deep.” The medieval church of St Swithin was destroyed in the Great Fire of 1666, and replaced by a new church to the design of Christopher Wren. London Stone itself, damaged and worn to a stump, was later protected by a small stone cupola: “a new Stone handsomely wrought, cut hollow underneath so as the old Stone may be seen” (Stow 1720, book 2, 200). In 1742, a traffic hazard, it was moved, with its canopy, to a position on the north side of the street, beside the main door of the new church. Two further moves, in 1798 and in about 1828, saw it set in an alcove in the middle of the south wall of the church, and after 1869 protected by a metal grille (Clark 2007b, 173– 7) (Figure 4). During these moves the Stone must have been cut down to its present size. Wren’s church was destroyed by bombing in the Second World War. The shell of the building, with London Stone still in place, was left standing for many years, and was finally demolished in 1961. In October 1962, following the completion  London Stone 41 Downloaded By: [Clark, John] At: 21:39 8 April 2010 Figure 3. London Stone, shown set in the road opposite the door of St Swithin’s church, on a detail from the “Copperplate” map of London, c.1559. (Photograph: Museum of London.) of the new building on the site, the Stone was placed without ceremony in the barred and glazed setting that it occupies today. Speculations Speculation about the origin and significance of London Stone began at least as early as the sixteenth century. John Stow confessed that “The cause why this stone was set there, the time when, or other memory hereof, is none” (Stow 1908, vol. 1, 224). However, he recorded a number of guesses: some people said that it marked the centre of the city, others that it was “set for the tendering and making of payment by debtors,” and others that it was set up “by one John or Thomas Londonstone dwelling there against.” Stow was unconvinced, and wisely offered no conjectures of his own. Stow’s younger contemporary and friend William Camden (1551– 1623) ignored such “popular” explanations in favour of a classical antiquarian hypothesis. In his topographical work Britannia, he proposed that the Stone was a Roman milliarium,  42 John Clark Downloaded By: [Clark, John] At: 21:39 8 April 2010 Figure 4. London Stone in the 1920s, behind a protective grille in the wall of St Swithin’s church and “guarded” by a City of London policeman. (From St John Adcock, ed. Wonderful London. London: Amalgated Press 1926–7, vol. 1, 14.) a monolith marking the point from which distances throughout Roman Britain had been measured (Camden 1607, 304). This was to become orthodox opinion among seventeenth-century and eighteenth-century antiquaries such as William Stukeley (1724, 112), and, although totally without foundation, it remains popular today. John Strype, in his new edition of Stow’s Survey of London in 1720, seems the first to consider the possibility that London Stone might have been “an Object, or Monument, of Heathen Worship.” For, he says, “an exquisite British Antiquarian [Mr Owen of Shrewsbury] asserts that the Britains erected Stones for religious Worship, and that the Druids had Pillars of Stone in Veneration” (Stow 1720, book 2, 194). This suggestion has proved equally durable, although dismissed by archaeologists.  London Stone 43 In 1798 John Carter (1748– 1817), champion of the Gothic revival, protested against the moving of the Stone in words that suggest that at least to some observers London Stone had come to symbolise the city’s fate: It has been often called the symbol of this great City’s quiet state, from its being always believed to be “fixed to its everlasting seat” (“An Architect” 1798, 765). Although Carter seems to reflect sentiment (and his enthusiasm for the choral works of Handel) rather than popular belief, already in 1793 Thomas Pennant had commented “It seems preserved like the Palladium of the city . . . ” (Pennant 1793, 4). The longevity of the Stone had by then apparently encouraged a belief that it was, or had once been, the city’s talisman. The legendary Palladium was a statue of Pallas Athene that stood in the citadel of Troy and embodied the safety of the city. Its theft by Diomedes and Odysseus was critical, setting the stage for the Greek capture and destruction of Troy (Room 1999, 872– 3). The view that London Stone had similar significance was reaffirmed by Edward Brayley in 1828: Downloaded By: [Clark, John] At: 21:39 8 April 2010 In former times, the venerable remain was regarded with a sort of superstitious zeal, and like the Palladium of Troy, the fate and safety of the City was argued to be dependent on its preservation (Brayley 1828, vol. 1, 17). But neither Pennant nor Brayley presented evidence to support their claim that “in former times” London Stone was regarded as the city’s palladium, and there seems to be no such evidence. William Blake: To Hear Jerusalem’s Voice Contemporary with these first hints that the Stone had, or had had, some symbolic meaning for Londoners was William Blake (1757– 1827), whose works were to endow it with much greater mystery. For in Blake’s visionary writings London Stone plays an important but not always consistent role. Most straightforward is his identification of it as a druidic altar. Blake’s Druids were the priests of Urizen, carrying out bloody human sacrifices at Stonehenge and other megalithic monuments (Owen 1962, 227– 31). Thus in Jerusalem, his long poem on engraved plates begun in 1804: And the Druids’ golden Knife Rioted in human gore, In Offerings of Human Life [ . . . ] They groan’d aloud on London Stone, They groan’d aloud on Tyburn’s Brook (Jerusalem, plate 27, lines 30 – 4; see also Blake 1966, 650). Later in Jerusalem, Britannia dreams: [ . . . ] I have Murdered Albion! Ah! In Stone-henge & on London Stone & in the Oak Groves of Malden I have Slain him in my Sleep with the Knife of the Druid [ . . . ] (Jerusalem, plate 94, lines 23 – 5; see also Blake 1966, 742). And London Stone even seems to be envisaged as an element in a notional Stonehenge.  44 John Clark They build a stupendous Building on the Plain of Salisbury, with chains Of rocks round London Stone [ . . . ] (Jerusalem, plate 66, lines 2 – 3; see also Blake 1966, 701– 2). For Blake’s visionary city of London, Golgonooza, London Stone has a literally central role, described in his poem Milton (begun like Jerusalem in 1804). From Golgonooza the spiritual Four-fold London eternal, In immense labours & sorrows, ever building, ever falling, Thro’ Albion’s four Forests which overspread all the Earth From London Stone to Blackheath east: to Hounslow west: To Finchley north: to Norwood south (Milton, plate 4 [6], lines 1 – 5; see also Blake 1966, 485). And this centrality is echoed in London Stone’s role in Jerusalem as a place of judgement: Albion replied: “Go, Hand & Hyle! sieze [sic ] the abhorred friend ... “Bring him to justice before heaven here upon London stone, “Between Blackheath & Hounslow, between Norwood & Finchley” (Jerusalem, plate 42, lines 47 Downloaded By: [Clark, John] At: 21:39 8 April 2010 and 50 –51; see also Blake 1966, 670). Los stands in judgement upon London Stone: Groaning [the terrible Spectre] kneel’d before Los’s iron-shod feet on London Stone, (Jerusalem, plate 8, line 27; see also Blake 1966, 627). Later, Los returns: At length he sat on London Stone, & heard Jerusalem’s voice (Jerusalem, plate 31 [45], line 43; see also Blake 1966, 657). Elsewhere, Blake appears to identify London Stone with a Biblical stone, the Stone of Bohan (Joshua 15:6 and 18:17). Thus: Reuben slept in Bashan [ . . . ] Between Succoth & Zaretan beside the Stone of Bohan. ... Reuben return’d to Bashan; in despair he slept on the Stone (Jerusalem, plate 34 [30], lines 43, 45 and 51; see also Blake 1966, 661). But later: [ . . . ] I tell how Reuben slept On London Stone . . . (Jerusalem, plate 74, lines 33 – 4; see also Blake 1966, 715). Faced with such a complex of poetic and artistic imagery, one cannot identify a simple “Blakean” London Stone. However, Blake’s sources are evident. Both druids and “centrality” were among the speculations about the Stone we have already seen. Los and Albion dispensing justice mirror Jack Cade at London Stone—not the Cade of the chroniclers but the Cade of William Shakespeare. And the sacred stone on which Reuben slept recalls the stone on which his father Jacob had dreamed (Genesis 28:11– 22)—and Jacob’s Stone was itself (according to one tradition: Room 1999, 627– 8) identical with the Scottish Stone of Destiny, then to be seen beneath the Coronation Chair in Westminster Abbey. Blake’s view of London Stone may seem irrelevant to our study. No later writer cites him or admits to being influenced by him in their interpretation of the Stone.  London Stone 45 But so many of these same themes reappear in later works—London Stone as druidic altar, as element in a stone circle, as central marker, as seat of justice, as sacred stone of destiny—that we must allow the possibility that some modern writers have consciously or unconsciously adopted Blake’s vision. [3] The Stone of Brutus In 1862 a short note (deceptively headed “Stonehenge”) appeared in Notes and Queries (Mor Merrion 1862). [4] The author of this note, one “Mor Merrion,” begins with an innocuous enquiry “Can Sir Roger Murchison [sic, for Sir Roderick Murchison, the geologist], or any other authority, favour the Antiquarian Republic with the proper geological term for the stones of which Stonehenge is composed?” After claiming that the “altar stone” of Stonehenge is made of porphyry, and that this is the same material as “the famous London stone,” he proceeds to what is clearly the meat of his article—the supposed traditions surrounding London Stone. Downloaded By: [Clark, John] At: 21:39 8 April 2010 It was, we know, the milliarium from which the Romans measured all the mileages in the kingdom. It was also the altar of the Temple of Diana, on which the old British Kings took the oaths on their accession, laying their hands on it. Until they had done so they were only kings presumptive. The tradition of the usage survived as late at least as Jack Cade’s time, for it is not before he rushes and strikes the stone, that he thinks himself entitled to exclaim— “Now is Jack Cade Lord Mayor of London!” Tradition also declares it was brought from Troy by Brutus, and laid down by his own hand as the altar-stone of the Diana Temple, the foundation stone of London and its palladium (Mor Merrion 1862). The author identifies these as “traditions.” Yet there is no trace of them in any independent source. Moreover, they are literally incoherent; they should never naturally coexist in a single context. Brutus, the Trojan settlers and the foundation of London as “New Troy” formed part, of course, of the pseudo-history of Britain developed by Geoffrey of Monmouth in the twelfth century (Clark 1981; Geoffrey of Monmouth 2007, 28– 31). Although long credited by medieval Londoners (Federico 2003, 1 – 28), the Brutus myth was already seriously challenged by the time of such antiquarian writers as John Stow and William Camden in the sixteenth century (Kendrick 1950, 104– 33; Ferguson 1993, 84– 105). On the other hand, the putative Temple of Diana, a Roman temple standing on the site later occupied by St Paul’s Cathedral, was a learned hypothesis advanced by the same William Camden (Camden 1607, 306– 7; Clark 1996). And the stone “on which the old British Kings took the oaths on their accession” seems to reflect nothing so much as the Irish/Scottish “Stone of Destiny” and the tradition that a ceremony at a sacred stone confirmed Celtic kingship (Mackillop 1998, 285 and 298, s.v. “Lia Fáil”)—a link possibly already implied, as we have seen, in the writings of William Blake. In proof of the role of London Stone as London’s palladium, the author presents for the first time in print the now familiar saying: “So long as the Stone of Brutus is safe, so long will London flourish.” However, he gives precedence to two lines in Welsh that he implies are the original of which our “Stone of Brutus” proverb is no more than a translation:  46 John Clark Tra maen Prydain Tra lled Llyndain. “As long as the Stone of Britain/Prydain [exists], so long will London expand/spread.” “Prydain” should in most circumstances mean “Britain”—but as we shall see, our author treats it as a personal name. The identification of this Welsh phrase and the English “Stone of Brutus” requires explanation. But, first, who was “Mor Merrion”? The Welsh Connection A clue to his identity had appeared in another contribution to Notes and Queries four years earlier, in May 1858. Headed “London Stone, Cannon Street,” it follows similar lines to the 1862 note, but is much shorter: Can any of your scientific correspondents supply me with the geological character of the above stone, by far the most ancient monument in the city of London, and held by tradition to be its Downloaded By: [Clark, John] At: 21:39 8 April 2010 foundation stone? Is there any quarry in the vicinity of the metropolis of the same material? (R. W. M. 1858) It is signed only with initials, “R. W. M.”—but it is more than supposition that R. W. M. and Mor Merrion were one and the same. Welsh readers have no doubt already recognised the misprint in Notes and Queries 1862. The name should read “Mor Meirion” (or “Môr Meirion”). And this was the bardic name “Morgan of Merioneth” adopted by the Revd Richard Williams Morgan (c.1815– 89), Welsh patriot and writer—and evidently the “R. W. M.” who wrote to Notes and Queries in 1858. No full biography has yet been published to do justice to Morgan’s extraordinary life. He does not appear in the Dictionary of National Biography, although he had in his lifetime been counted among Eminent Men, Natives of the County of Cardigan (Williams 1874a, 20) and warranted a brief entry in the Dictionary of Welsh Biography to 1940 (Lloyd and Jenkins 1959, 650– 1). However, a number of biographical sketches have appeared, from which most of the following account is derived (Freeman 2000; Thomann 2001; Brown 2002, 131– 66). Born into a Welsh clerical family—his uncle John Williams was Archdeacon of Cardigan—Richard Williams Morgan was educated in Edinburgh and Lampeter and was ordained priest in October 1842, when he was appointed perpetual curate in Tregynon, Montgomeryshire. An outspoken campaigner for the use of the Welsh language in schools and in churches, he perhaps went too far in personal attacks on English-born bishops in the Welsh church who could speak no Welsh. It was apparently his obduracy over this issue that in 1857 led to Morgan being refused communion in his own parish church in Tregynon. Although Morgan did not formally resign his curacy until 1862, he never again held an ecclesiastical post within Wales. Like many Welsh Anglican clergymen of his generation, Morgan was also active in the growing “Celtic revival” movement. As “Môr Meirion” he was one of the organisers, with his better-known cousin the Revd John Williams “ab Ithel,” of the Llangollen eisteddfod of 1858, although his presence among the organisers, at the height of the controversy over his attitude to the English bishops in Wales, had imperilled the plans. Morris Williams (the bard “Nicander”), invited to judge one  London Stone 47 of the competitions, publicly expressed the fear that “the Eisteddfod may be converted into a party affair, in connection with Mr. Morgan’s most mischievous and antrinational [sic ] agitation about Welsh and English bishops” (Williams 1858). In the late 1850s and the 1860s, Morgan spent most of his time in London. In 1857 he published The British Kymry, or Britons of Cambria, a comprehensive, but unorthodox, history of the Welsh from the Flood to the nineteenth century, and in 1861 St. Paul in Britain: or, the Origin of British as Opposed to Papal Christianity. [5] Morgan argued that St Paul himself had evangelised Britain; the ancient Church of Britain was coeval with that established by St Peter in Rome, and represented an apostolic succession independent of the Roman Church that St Augustine introduced to England in the sixth century. Morgan’s approach to Welsh history in The British Kymry and St. Paul in Britain seems to have proved too eccentric for most of his contemporaries. A fulsome Downloaded By: [Clark, John] At: 21:39 8 April 2010 tribute to John Williams ab Ithel published by the Cambrian Journal on his death in 1863 is less generous about his cousin Richard Williams Morgan: . . . the Rev. R. W. Morgan (Mor Meirion), a man of genius, ability and learning, the energetic champion of all Cymric interests, and the uncompromising scourge of all ecclesiastical abusers. If only he would chasten his imagination, and moderate his patriotic impulses, in dealing with Welsh history, he would be also entitled to unqualified praise as one of the most eloquent and vigorous writers of the day (Anon 1863, 32, note 1). The thesis set forth in St. Paul in Britain eventually led Morgan to attempt to revive the original British Church. In 1874 (or possibly earlier) he was consecrated by Jules Ferrete or Ferrette as the first Bishop and Hierarch of “the Primitive Apostolic Patriarchal Church of the British Isles,” otherwise “the Ancient British Church.” Ferrete himself claimed to have been consecrated Bishop of Iona by the Syrian Orthodox Bishop of Emesa; Morgan thus established a Church independent of both Rome and the Anglican communion. He took the episcopal name “Pelagius” and as his see Caerleon-on-Usk (once, according to Geoffrey of Monmouth [2007, 88– 9 and passim], the seat of a British archbishop). In 1878 he published a liturgy and order of service, but little is heard thereafter of this Ancient British Church, which later merged with other breakaway sects (Brandreth 1961, 70 – 89; Thomann 2001, 9 –11). In spite of his commitment to the Ancient British Church, Morgan served as a Church of England curate three more times, before he died in Pevensey, Sussex, in 1889. The London Palladium Although Morgan was living in London when he first wrote about the Stone of Brutus, and one must allow the possibility that he had heard local traditions that are otherwise totally unrecorded, inevitably we attribute the story to “his imagination, and [ . . . ] his patriotic impulses, in dealing with Welsh history.” Morgan set out his views on the Trojan origin of London Stone first in his The British Kymry of 1857. Morgan claims to present the “version [ . . . ] of British  48 John Clark history in general” that is preserved among the Welsh themselves. He asserts, for example: The Trojan descent of the Britons [ . . . ] solves the numerous and very peculiar agreements in the social and military systems of pre-historic Britain and Asia which would otherwise remain inexplicable (Morgan 1857, v). Other than a list of “Authorities consulted” at the beginning of his book, Morgan gives no source for any of his historical claims, and their genesis is often a matter for conjecture. Yet the book provides rather more clues than do his contributions to Notes and Queries. The early part of the book proves to be largely an extensive reworking of the familiar “British History” promulgated by Geoffrey of Monmouth seven hundred years earlier. Into this Morgan has woven his account of London Stone. He identifies the Stone as the plinth on which had once stood the original Palladium of Troy. It was brought to Britain from Greece by Brutus’s Trojan fleet, in the care of Geryon the Augur (Morgan 1857, 26). [6] After founding London as his Downloaded By: [Clark, John] At: 21:39 8 April 2010 capital, New Troy, Brutus placed the Stone “in the court of the Temple of Diana” (Morgan 1857, 31 –2). “On it,” Morgan continues, “the British Kings were sworn to observe the Usages of Britain.” Morgan mentions “the belief in old times” that, as long as the Stone survived, London “would continue to increase in wealth and power”; with its disappearance the city “would decrease and finally disappear.” But he cites no traditional saying either in Welsh or in English—perhaps by 1857 he had not yet composed either of them! The Welsh verse of 1862 seems to be modelled on an authentic saying that Morgan was familiar with, and quotes elsewhere in The British Kymry (1857, 19): “Tra môr, tra Brython”—“As long as there is a sea there will be Britons.” This line occurred in the poem “Gwawlt Lud y Mawr” [“Praise of Lludd the Great”] (Skene 1868, vol. 1, 274; and vol. 2, 210), one of the longest prophetic poems in the Welsh manuscript volume known as the Llyvyr Taliessin or Book of Taliesin, a manuscript dated to the early fourteenth century (Haycock 2007, 1 and 5 – 6). The poem was known to Morgan and his contemporaries from its inclusion in the first printed corpus of Welsh medieval literature, The Myvyrian Archaiology of Wales, originally published in three volumes between 1801 and 1807 (Jones, Williams and Pughe 1870, 62– 3). “Tra môr, tra Brython” was also quoted by Morgan’s cousin John Williams ab Ithel in an influential work on bardism that began as a prize essay for the Llangollen eisteddfod of 1858 (Williams 1874b, 16, note). It became something of a patriotic slogan in nineteenth-century Wales; for example, it was emblazoned alongside other mottoes on the walls of the pavilion at the Carmarthen eisteddfod in 1867 (Baker-Jones 1972, 48– 9). In its turn, “maen Prydain” reflects the traditional Welsh phrase “Ynys Prydein,” used to designate the whole realm of Britain, and usually rendered in English as “the Island of Britain” (Bromwich 2006, passim). [7] Thus “Maen Prydain” should mean “Stone of Britain.” Why then does Morgan interpret it as “Stone of Brutus”? Evidently Morgan assumes the existence of an eponymous Prydein, after whom both Island and Stone were named, and then proceeds to identify him with Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Brutus. Thus the table in the front of his The British Kymry is entitled “genealogy of the Britanidae, or royal line of Britain,  London Stone 49 from Gomer and Brutus, or Prydain, to Queen Victoria,” while its numbered series of British monarchs begins with “Prydain Mawr (Brutus, founder of the Britannic Dynasty)” (Morgan 1857, fold-out—my italics in each case). [8] Elsewhere Morgan tells us that “Brutus is also celebrated in the Triads as one of the three Kings Revolutionists of Britain” (1857, 28). But Brutus does not appear in the recorded Welsh triads; Prydein, as we shall see, does. Further, Morgan writes that the ancient name of Britain was the “Island of Brutus” (1857, 22)— which makes no sense unless he is referring to the Welsh “Ynys Prydein.” But who was this Prydein, and what might have led Morgan to identify him with the Trojan Brutus? Prydein Son of Aedd the Great At the beginning of his The British Kymry Morgan provides a long list of “Authorities consulted” (Morgan 1857, viii). The list includes “Historic Triads of Britain.” Downloaded By: [Clark, John] At: 21:39 8 April 2010 The “Triads of the Island of Britain” [“Trioedd Ynys Prydein”] are pre-eminent among the sources of our knowledge of early Welsh tradition, and the prime example of the Celtic use of triplets to catalogue and organise information in an easily memorised form (Bromwich 2006, liii). Of all of the nearly one hundred Triads of the Island of Britain included in Rachel Bromwich’s authoritative edition, none mentions Prydein as a person, nor indicates why the Island of Prydein was so called. However, Richard Williams Morgan would have known these triads as they had appeared The Myvyrian Archaiology of Wales of 1801 – 7 (Jones, Williams and Pughe 1870). This contained three series of triads. Two of these, originating respectively in a collection made by Robert Vaughan of Hengwrt (1592– 1666) and in the Red Book of Hergest (compiled during the period 1382– 1410 [Bromwich, Jarman and Roberts 1991, 10 – 12]), comprised triads accepted by Rachel Bromwich (2006, xii). The first triad in Robert Vaughan’s collection (Jones, Williams and Pughe 1870, 400) indeed mentions Prydein. It was included by Bromwich only in an appendix, in a series of nine geographical triads, headed “Enweu Ynys Brydein yv hynn” [“These are the names of the Island of Britain”] (Bromwich 2006, 246– 55). In Bromwich’s translation: The first Name that this Island bore, before it was seized or occupied: Myrddin’s Precinct. And after it was seized and occupied, the Island of Honey. And after it was conquered by Prydein son of Aedd the Great it was called the Island of Prydein (Britain) (2006, 247). Bromwich considers that this might represent the survival of a tradition older than the account of the settlement of Britain by Brutus and his Trojans. She suggests indeed that the reference to Prydein son of Aedd the Great [Prydein ab Aedd Mawr] may be “an allusion to an eponymous conqueror of Britain whose name and story Geoffrey intentionally suppressed” in favour of Brutus (2006, ciii). However, Bromwich rejected the third Myvyrian series of triads (Jones, Williams and Pughe 1870, 400–11), commenting “[it] is the work of Iolo Morganwg, who in the late eighteenth century rewrote many of the older triads in an expanded form, with the introduction of some fresh material” (Bromwich 2006, xii; and see Bromwich 1968; 1969). And in this suspect “Third Series,” Morgan would have  50 John Clark found Prydein son of Aedd the Great playing a prominent and eminently Brutus- like role. Iolo Morganwg, otherwise Edward Williams (1747 – 1826), is described succinctly by the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography as “Welsh-language poet and literary forger” (Morgan 2004). Study of the ancient Welsh documents he transcribed and preserved is bedevilled by his habit of embellishing them with his own additions, and concocting totally fraudulent ones. With Owen Jones and William Owen Pughe he edited the corpus of Welsh medieval literature, The Myvyrian Archaiology of Wales, to which we have referred—of which the third volume (published in 1807) apparently contains much that is pure Iolo Morganwg (Morgan 2004). On his death he left a mass of papers, correspondence and notebooks, some of which his son Taliesin was to edit and publish (Williams 1848), while others were drawn on by John Williams ab Ithel, cousin of Richard Williams Morgan, for his work on bardic lore (Williams 1862; 1874b). When editing Iolo Morganwg’s own manuscript English translations of the one hundred and twenty-six Third Series triads, Bromwich (1968, 300– 1) noted that Downloaded By: [Clark, John] At: 21:39 8 April 2010 eighty-four of them were adaptations of triads that had appeared in the First Series, from Robert Vaughan’s manuscript, while forty-two were entirely novel. And Prydein appears no less than ten times, in new triads and interpolated into adapted ones. Bromwich (1968, 322) comments: . . . Iolo erected an elaborate fiction which depicted the eponymous Prydain fab Aedd as the original legislator and administrator of the Welsh nation. Prydein was, she concludes, “the prime hero of the Third Series.” The first of the Third Series triads (Jones, Williams and Pugh 1870, 400; Bromwich 1968, 302) is an amended and extended version of that published by Bromwich from “Enweu Ynys Brydein,” which introduces Prydein son of Aedd the Great as conqueror and eponym of the Island of Britain (Bromwich 2006, 246– 7). The second triad lists the three “primary Divisions of the Island of Britain”—Cymmru, Lloegr and Alban—“according to the Institution of Prydain son of Aedd the Great” (Bromwich 1968, 302). Prydein appears again in Triads 3, 4, 34, 36, 54, 55, 58 and 59, the last of which sums him up as one of the three “Great [or Beneficent] Sovereigns” (Jones, Williams and Pughe 1870, 407; Bromwich 1969, 131). Prydein, this first ruler and legislator of Britain, is clearly a counterpart of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Brutus; and the three “primary Divisions” in Triad 2 are those which Geoffrey’s Brutus had assigned to his three sons: Loegria, Kambria, and Albania (Geoffrey of Monmouth 2007, 30 – 1). Unsurprisingly, Iolo gives primacy to Kambria/Cymmru (Wales), rather than to Loegria/Lloegr (England) as Geoffrey had! In spite of this apparent dependence on Geoffrey and the Trojan myth, Iolo’s triads avoid any overt identification of Prydein with Brutus of Troy. In his expanded Triad 1 we find (in his own English version) “and to [the Isle of Prydain] none but the nation of the Cymmry have any just claim, for it was first occupied by them, before which time it was not inhabited by men . . . ” (Bromwich 1968, 300). The equivalent in “The Names of the Island of Britain” is “And no one has a right to this Island except only the nation of Cymry, the remnant of the Britons, who came here formerly from Troy” (Bromwich 2006, 247, from the fifteenth-century  London Stone 51 manuscript Peniarth 50; emphasis added). Troy seems to have been silently elided from Iolo Morganwg’s version. But it was not only Iolo’s triads that Morgan could draw on for his picture of Prydein/Brutus. His list of “Authorities consulted” (Morgan 1857, viii) includes “Iolo M.S.S.” The reference is probably to the printed Iolo Manuscripts, the volume of Iolo’s papers collected, edited and translated after his death by his son Taliesin (Williams 1848), which contains several references to Prydein. Closest perhaps to the heart of Iolo Morganwg was the role he envisaged for Prydein in establishing the order of bards and their formal meeting, the Gorsedd (Williams 1848, 49 – 50 and 430– 1)—largely, alas, Iolo’s own invention (Morgan 2004). But Prydein also appears in “The genealogy of Iestyn, the son of Gwrgan, prince of Glamorgan,” the last Welsh ruler of the kingdom of Morgannwg, deposed by the Normans in 1091 (Williams 1848, 3 –11 and 331– 56). This traces Iestyn’s lineage back to “Annyn of Troy, the son of Prydain, the son of Aedd the Great.” This Prydein is clearly Iolo’s, and like Brutus he divides his kingdom between Downloaded By: [Clark, John] At: 21:39 8 April 2010 three sons. Yet the genealogy seems to embody an attempt to distinguish Prydein from Brutus while combining them in a single lineage—for Prydain’s son Annyn Dro (Aeneas of Troy?) is the grandfather of Brwth (Brutus) (Williams 1848, 3– 4 and 332– 5). Iolo did not intend his Prydein to be equated with Brutus, but rather to replace him, for he categorically dismissed the story of Brutus and his Trojans “on the grounds that it made Welsh history subservient to a foreign myth, to the Virgilian vision of ancient Roman history” (Morgan 1975, 71). Prydein and Môr Meirion This prominent role of Prydein ab Aedd Mawr as Brutus-like nation-founder and lawgiver cannot be extrapolated from the scanty mentions in authentic Welsh tradition (Bromwich 2006, 484– 5). It depends upon the work of Iolo Morganwg, who either brought this patriarchal figure to light from the obscurity of now-lost documents—or invented the documentation that established him as a more acceptable ancestor than Trojan Brutus. Although not all of Iolo’s contemporaries or successors were convinced by his claims, John Williams ab Ithel for one certainly was. He commented that he could “unhesitatingly pronounce [Iolo] to be incapable of perpetrating literary deceit or forgery” (Morgan 1975, 67). Equally, ab Ithel’s cousin Môr Meirion accepted the validity of Iolo Morganwg’s documents; although he used them to prove a case that Iolo himself would not have accepted, the identity of Prydein and Brutus. Once the reputation of Prydein was established in the public consciousness (at least in Wales), the way was open for others to assimilate him to the more widely known figure of Brutus. Richard Williams Morgan did just that. And he surely himself gave the identification substance by the composition of Welsh and English proverbs that equated “the Stone of Brutus” with “Maen Prydain.” But what was his purpose in establishing this Welsh context for London Stone? Perhaps it was no more than to boost the large Welsh expatriate (but intensely patriotic) community in London, and to establish London as not merely a “British” foundation but as the traditional centre of Welsh power and influence! It is ironic that in giving free rein to “his imagination [and] his patriotic impulses” to glorify  52 John Clark Welsh history, he reworked legends that were themselves forgeries by Iolo Morganwg. Morgan’s invention of the Stone of Brutus was, in the long term, to have a disastrous impact on popular and pseudo-academic attitudes to London Stone. But the affect was not immediate. In spite of their appearance in the widely-read Notes and Queries, Môr Meirion’s confident assertions about London Stone seem to have attracted no attention at first. No subsequent correspondent to Notes and Queries commented on them, although there were replies to his query about the nature of the stone of which Stonehenge was built (Allport 1862; F. P. 1862). J. E. Price of the London and Middlesex Archaeological Society, writing an historical account of London Stone (Price 1870, 55 – 65), and drawing on research by the Guildhall Librarian W. H. Overall, does not mention Môr Meirion’s recent thesis—not even to dismiss it as fantasy—although both Price and Overall were frequent contributors to and assuredly readers of Notes and Queries. [9] Downloaded By: [Clark, John] At: 21:39 8 April 2010 The Fetish Stone In 1881, Henry Charles Coote (1815–85) published an article, part of it devoted to London Stone, in the Transactions of the London and Middlesex Archaeological Society. A distinguished lawyer, Coote was also Vice-President of The Folklore Society, to whose journal he contributed papers on the origins of fairytales, on Irish, Greek and Italian folklore, on Robin Hood, and on a variety of other subjects. But in his 1881 paper on London Stone he ignored any tempting folkloric possibilities, while admitting that “between the stone and the lordship of the city was a close, if vague, relation” (Coote 1881, 291). Instead, he concluded that its reputation derived solely from its status as a relic, the last remaining stone, of a great stone house that once belonged to Henry Fitz Ailwin, the first mayor of London (Coote 1881, 292) (disregarding the fact that, as we have seen, the name London Stone long predates Henry Fitz Ailwin). Other late Victorian writers, whose views on London Stone we must next consider, were readier to come to less mundane conclusions than Coote had. But they too ignored the Stone of Brutus. If they were aware of Môr Meirion, their silence surely condemns his “traditions” as (in their view) unauthentic. In an influential book on the origins of religion, first published in 1897 but reprinted in the popular Thinker’s Library series as late as the 1930s, the prolific science writer and novelist Grant Allen (1848– 99) argued that “To the present day London preserves her foundation-god in the shape of London Stone” (Allen 1931, 181). In an earlier contribution to Longman’s Magazine he had emphasised this identification of London Stone as “probably the very oldest and most sacred relic of ancient London. It is, in point of fact, the City fetish” (Allen 1891, 378). To support this hypothesis he cites two notable London historians, G. L. Gomme and W. J. Loftie. Indeed, when he first discussed London Stone in print in 1891, Grant had expressed regret that “Mr Laurence Gomme has, to some extent, taken the words out of my mouth, and anticipated some part of my perilous conclusions” (Allen 1891, 378). George Laurence Gomme (1853– 1916) combined extensive research into folklore and mythology with the writing of London history and with his role as clerk to the fledgling London County Council (Gomme 2004). In an early work  London Stone 53 on the origins of the English “village community” (Gomme 1890a, 218– 19), the source first cited by Grant Allen, he had noted the significance for modern London of the practices of primitive villagers, and he reasserted this view (in identical words) in his later influential work The Governance of London (Gomme 1907, 149– 50): In early days, when a village was first established, a stone was set up. To this stone the head man of the village made an offering once a year. Of the many traces of this custom in England I will not speak here, but of its survival in London municipal custom there exists some curious evidence accidentally preserved, and it relates to London Stone. [10] As was standard practice among folklorists of the time, Gomme cites anthropological sources for practices “in early days”—“in early Aryan days” in a previous version of this same text (1890b, 544). He refers us to two works on India and one on Early Races of Scotland. As a modern parallel he cites Bovey Tracey in Devon, where “on the mayor’s day [ . . . ] the mayor used to ride around the stone cross and strike it with a stick. This significant action proclaimed the Downloaded By: [Clark, John] At: 21:39 8 April 2010 authority of the mayor at Bovey.” For “municipal custom” surrounding London Stone itself, he alludes firstly to the Jack Cade episode and then quotes the jurist Woodthorpe Brandon’s account of the customary practice of the Lord Mayor’s Court in cases of “foreign attachment” for debt: The summons or calling of the defendant was orally made [by the serjeant], and in early times was, without doubt, a substantial summons and bidding of the debtor to appear in court, and by some supposed to have been at London Stone (Brandon 1861, 5-6; emphasis added). Sadly, Brandon cites no authority for this throwaway remark. Indeed, he particularly notes how few details of the court procedure are recorded (Brandon 1861, 4). An earlier legal treatise on the subject says nothing of a summons at London Stone or elsewhere (Locke 1853). In view of the apparent lack of supporting evidence, this “supposition” is of little worth. However, Grant Allen for one not only accepted it but elaborated it: “as though the stone itself spoke to the wrong-doer with the united voice of the assembled citizens” (Allen 1931, 181). Allen cites an equally eminent London historian William John Loftie (but gives no reference that I can trace in Loftie’s writings) in support of his conclusion that the first mayor Henry Fitz Ailwin took his soubriquet “of Londonstone” (actually his father’s by-name) from his role as “the hereditary keeper of this urban fetish.” “In short,” says Grant Allen, “the representative of the village headman” (Allen 1931, 181). We must view the comments of these late Victorian and Edwardian authorities in their context—the style of anthropological scholarship that was to culminate in J. G. Frazer’s The Golden Bough. For Sir Laurence Gomme (he was knighted in 1911) was one of the so-called “Great Team” of British folklorists of the late nineteenth century (Dorson 1968, 217), who adhered to a common “doctrine of survival” that led them to identify forms of activity reported to be prevalent among so-called “primitive” peoples as practices once universal at a certain stage in human development, and to compare them with supposed “survivals” in modern society. And the existence of the latter served to confirm the validity of the argument. Thus it is not surprising that they identified London Stone as a village fetish stone, and the Lord Mayor as its hereditary keeper.  54 John Clark From Fetish Stone to Omphalos These folklorists ignored Môr Meirion. But in April 1888 the popular weekly Chambers’s Journal included a short unsigned article on London Stone (Anon 1888), which quoted, without citing its source, “an old saying to the effect, that ‘so long as the stone of Brutus is safe, so long shall London flourish’” and the “traditions” that it was brought by Brutus from Troy, that it was laid on the altar of the Temple of Diana, and that British kings took their oath of office upon it, exactly as proposed by Môr Meirion (Anon 1888, 241). It seems likely that it was Chambers’s Journal that was instrumental in bringing Môr Meirion’s Stone of Brutus and its mythology from Notes and Queries to the attention of a wider and perhaps less discerning audience. This article seems to be the source drawn upon, indirectly and without acknowledgement, by the more recent writers who have quoted or expounded upon these traditions. The Scots folklorist and Scottish nationalist Lewis Spence (1874– 1955) was unusual in both being aware of the article and identifying it as his authority—and he was probably Downloaded By: [Clark, John] At: 21:39 8 April 2010 the intermediary through whom knowledge of the Stone of Brutus reached later writers. In 1937 Spence reopened the case for the Stone of Brutus in his book Legendary London. In this work he combined a summary of the archaeological evidence (as it was then understood) for the prehistory and early development of London with a study of its early “legends” (among which he included the writings of that arch- inventor of tradition Geoffrey of Monmouth). Spence always valued “tradition” as historical evidence, preferring it to the work of those he called “archaeologists of the Tape-Measure School” (Spence 1928, 116). Spence (1937, 165) believed that the “legend” of Brutus and the Trojan settlement of Britain might reflect a migration of peoples from the Mediterranean area in prehistoric times. In this context he discusses London Stone. The most probable explanation, he considers, is that of Grant Allen, that the Stone was “the original communal fetish of London which represented the guardian spirit of the community” (Spence 1937, 170–1). He then cites the “old saying” about the Stone of Brutus, and the “popular tradition” linking it to the Temple of Diana and to the oath-taking by early British kings, crediting these to the Chambers’s Journal article of 1888, and apparently unaware of the original Notes and Queries article and of the origin of the “tradition” in the inventive mind of Môr Meirion. Thus Spence united Môr Meirion’s talismanic Stone of Brutus with Allen’s and Gomme’s fetish stone. And it is this mythical Stone that has gone on to enrich the imaginings of more recent writers, to whom it is the Stone’s contribution to a London-wide “sacred geometry” that is significant. In June 1921 Alfred Watkins (1855– 1935), while driving in the hills in Herefordshire, realised that he could see an underlying pattern to the landscape. Poring over Ordnance Survey maps, and confirming the alignments on the ground, he was able to trace straight lines over many miles linking not merely prehistoric but also natural, medieval and modern features. These alignments he interpreted as carefully-surveyed ancient trackways, which (since they often passed through places that contained the element “ley” in their names) he christened “leys,” familiarly known today as “ley lines” (Watkins 1925). By the 1970s New Age enthusiasts for “earth mysteries” saw these leys rather as “dragon  London Stone 55 paths” or lines of earth force that could be dowsed for, detected and indeed utilised (Williamson and Bellamy 1983, 11 – 15; Pennick and Devereux 1989, 237– 44). The reality and, if real, the function and date of leys are not at issue here. We should merely note that (as might be expected) London Stone has taken its place in this conceptual framework. Watkins mentioned London Stone only in passing, during a disquisition on the prehistoric surveyor’s sighting staff: “It was with a staff that Jack Cade assumed the mastership of the City by striking London Stone (surely a mark stone!) with it” (Watkins 1925, 87– 8). [11] Watkins himself may never have identified a ley passing through this “mark stone,” but others have. Thus Paul Devereux (1990, 114 –15) traced a ley running from the church of St Martin Ludgate through St Paul’s Cathedral, London Stone and All Hallows Barking to Tower Hill, while also noting the alignment proposed by Nigel Pennick that links London Stone with the sites of a number of vanished churches (Pennick and Devereux 1989, 147, figure 3.10). In a further development of the ley-line concept, London Stone has now come to be regarded as an essential element in the “sacred geometry” of London. This Downloaded By: [Clark, John] At: 21:39 8 April 2010 phrase is used, for example, by Iain Sinclair, protagonist of the fashionable “psychogeographical” school of metropolitan literature. [12] Commenting on the Stone, along with other relics from London’s past that have been moved from their original sites, Sinclair (1997, 116) suspects that “A policy of deliberate misalignment (the Temple of Mithras, London Stone, the surviving effigies from Ludgate) has violated the integrity of the City’s sacred geometry.” “It’s part of a process whereby all the ritual markers of the original city have been shifted, not by much, by just enough to do damage; to call up petty whirlwinds, small vortices of bad faith” (Atkins and Sinclair 1999, 168– 9). Psychogeography can be distinguished only with difficulty from geomancy. Nigel Pennick, a contributor to the Aquarian Guide to Legendary London, considers “The London Stone is a typical survivor of the thousands of mark-stones which used to exist at important geomantic points in medieval cities” (Pennick 1990, 24). Andrew Collins, in a short guidebook to accompany a “London Earth Mysteries Moot” tour in May 1984, noted “I think there is little doubt that this small piece of oolite limestone is the last remnant of London’s omphalos, its geomantic centre” (quoted by Potter 1990, 208). Adrian Gilbert identified London Stone as “the central omphalos or ‘navel-stone’ not just of London but of the kingdom of Britain as a whole” (Gilbert 2003, 41). And it plays an essential role in Christopher Street’s “Earthstar”—a gigantic pentagram drawn across Greater London from Barnet to Croydon (Street 2000, 70, illustration 28). There is clearly now a mythical London Stone that transcends any possible historical reality. Conclusion: “A Very Famous Stone” London Stone is sadly lacking in “authentic” folklore, the otherwise ubiquitous traditional beliefs that have grown up about large standing stones (Grinsell 1976, 15– 65; Westwood and Simpson 2005 passim—see index s.v. “stones”). Instead, its longevity has inspired more or less elaborate historical myths that centre on assumptions about its former status and significance. The anonymous contributor to Chambers’s Journal wrote: “But whatever its origin may have been, there is no  56 John Clark manner of doubt that London Stone possesses claims to be preserved which require no superstitious or sentimental sanction” (Anon 1888, 242). Yet the “superstitious and sentimental sanctions” attached to an unprepossessing lump of stone in the heart of the City of London are now part of its history. Môr Meirion concluded his mischievous Notes and Queries article of 1862: “At any rate it is a very famous stone . . . ” It is perhaps sufficient for our purpose that London Stone is simply famous for being famous. Acknowledgements I am grateful to the editors and to a first anonymous referee for advice on reducing an earlier unwieldy draft of this paper into publishable form, and to the second referee for providing a number of helpful references to Welsh sources. The use that I have made of their advice remains, of course, my own responsibility. Downloaded By: [Clark, John] At: 21:39 8 April 2010 Notes [1] Thus, Grant Allen (1891, 383) writes “To sit upon [London Stone] was to enthrone himself on the collective city.” [2] This large-scale map is known only from copper printing plates, of which three sections have been identified (Saunders and Schofield 2001). London Stone is shown on the plate covering the eastern central part of the City of London, now in the Museum Of London. [3] Peter Ackroyd, in his biography of Blake (1996, 330– 4), envisaged the poet walking the streets in search of “the great City of Art that dwells within the bosom of London”—and the culmination of this perambulation was at London Stone, where Blake would sit like Los to hear Jerusalem’s voice (1996, 332). Ackroyd’s own attitude to London, expressed in both his fiction and his historical and critical writings, has similarities to that which he attributes to Blake. [4] I drew attention to the Notes and Queries article and the identity of its author in a note in The Folklore Society’s newsletter (Clark 2007a) and in a brief paper “London Stone: The Stone of Brutus, the Luck of London?” presented at the Leeds International Medieval Congress in July 2007. My recognition of the significance of the name “Mor Merrion” had come only after a holiday in North Wales. [5] St. Paul in Britain went through several editions, and was reprinted as recently as 2008. [6] Geryon, Gero or Gerio the Augur appears only once in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History, assisting Brutus in his devotions to the goddess Diana (Geoffrey of Monmouth 2007, 18 – 19). [7] Prydein and Prydain: both spellings occur—and while preferring “Prydein” I use “Prydain” when that is in my immediate source. [8] Prydain Mawr: Prydein the Great. Morgan has silently transferred the title “the Great” to Prydein from his father Aedd Mawr. [9] Overall contributed some 18 notes on a variety of topics to Notes and Queries between 1860 and 1883, and Price the same number between 1868 and 1888. [10] This was a favourite subject with Gomme, who had dealt with it in much the same words in a lecture to the London and Middlesex Archaeological Society “On the early municipal history of London” in November 1884 (Gomme 1890b, 544– 7).  London Stone 57 [11] The comparison with the surveyor’s staff is only valid if we accept Shakespeare’s version of the event, in which Cade strikes London Stone with his staff, and ignore all the contemporary accounts that refer to his sword (Clark 2007b, 181). [12] “[Psychogeography] refers to a particular kind of mental and imaginative mapping, one often associated with writers such as Peter Ackroyd and Iain Sinclair. The present-day city chronicler [ . . . ] is attuned to echoes of the past and prowls around in search of psychological ley lines, eager to divine strange visual and acoustic coincidences that offer evidence of the still-potent presence of darkness, history and texture within a metropolis that seems to some critics increasingly to lack those qualities” (Sandhu 2006, 46). References Cited Ackroyd, Peter. Blake. London: Minerva, 1996. ———. London: The Biography. London: Chatto & Windus, 2000. Allen, Grant. “The Heart of London.” Longman’s Magazine 17 (February 1891): 378– 86. Downloaded By: [Clark, John] At: 21:39 8 April 2010 ———. The Evolution of the Idea of God: An Inquiry into the Origins of Religions. New ed. London: Watts & Co., 1931. Allport, Douglass. “Stonehenge.” Notes and Queries 3rd series 1 (1862): 59. “An Architect” [John Carter]. Letter on “architectural innovation.” The Gentleman’s Magazine 68 (1798): 764– 5. 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Biographical Note John Clark was until recently Senior Curator (Medieval) in the Museum of London. He has a research interest in legends of and fictions about the origin and early development of London, and the ways in which they reflect medieval and modern attitudes to the past. In published papers, lectures and contributions to conferences he has considered such topics as the foundation of London as New Troy, the supposed Temple of Diana on the site of St Paul’s Cathedral, the burial of Queen Boadicea at King’s Cross station, and the relatively modern origins of the “foundation legends” of some London churches.