Which from all his foon
Hath ever preserved it.
By means of dyvyne servyce
That incontinuall wyse
Is kept in devout guyse
Within the mure of it.
However great the stone may have been in the beginning, the ravages and fires of London could have left but little of the original remaining in the sixteenth century.
After the Fire its foundations were disclosed by Wren: no doubt a certain part of its upper end had been destroyed in the flames and possibly damaged in clearing away debris, but at all events a small portion of it, in shape somewhat like a cannon ball, was saved, says Strype, and placed within “a new stone handsomely wrought, cut hollow underneath, so as the old stone may be seen, the new stone being over it to shelter and deface the venerable one.” Strype’s map shows that the stone, in its new case, was at first re-erected on the old site on the south side of the street. On December 13, 1742, it was complained of as an obstruction, and was removed by order of the churchwardens of St. Swithin, at a cost of 12s., to the opposite of the “kerbstone” on the north side of the street. By kerbstone is here meant the stone protecting the foot of the buildings and not (as now) a stone protecting a pavement. At the beginning of 1798 the church was about to undergo a complete repair, and the historic stone was actually doomed to be removed as a nuisance. Fortunately Mr. Thomas Maiden, a printer of Sherborne Lane, championed the cause, and prevailed on one of the parish officers to preserve it and to have it replaced against the church wall. The enclosing stone, “somewhat like a Roman altar,” had formerly a curved bar of iron projecting across the elliptical aperture through which the relic is seen; but the present grill was placed over the front of the case in 1869, when the present inscription, in English and Latin, was cut in the wall of the church over the stone at the instance of a Committee consisting of members of the London and Middlesex Archæological Society, and the parish officers. At the same time a careful examination of the stone itself was made. It was found to measure about a foot cube, and that instead of being basaltic, capable of giving off sparks when struck by steel, it was in reality an oolite, such as the Romans used extensively in their buildings, and sometimes for coffins and sepulchral monuments, thus corroborating the idea of its Roman origin.
In Cannon Street is the Cordwainers’ Hall.