The Cheapside Hoard Revisited

The Museum of London has concluded a major exhibition investigating the secrets of the Cheapside Hoard.

The Cheapside Hoard is a hoard of late 16th and early 17th century jewellery discovered by workmen using a pickaxe to excavate in a cellar near Cheapside in London in 1912. They found a buried wooden box containing over 400 pieces of Elizabethan and Jacobean jewellery, including rings, brooches and chains, with bright coloured gemstones and enamelled settings.

The hoard of almost 500 pieces was a 17th-century goldsmith's stock – worth a king's ransom then and priceless now.

"Nothing in the world comes close," said Museum of London curator Hazel Forsyth. She has spent years studying the brooches and necklaces, rings and chains, pearls and rubies, scent bottles and fan holders, two carved gems which date back 1,300 years to Byzantium – and a watch set into a hollow carved out of one stupendous emerald which was originally the size of an apple.

Gold bow pendant set with rose-cut and step-cut foil-backed rubies and table-cut diamonds

Gold and enamel pendant set with two sapphires and an irregular polished spinel.