London Stone, the old Roman milliarium, or milestone, is now a mere rounded boulder, set in a stone case built into the outer southern wall of the church of St. Swithin, Cannon Street. Camden, in his "Britannia," says—"The stone called London Stone, from its situation in the centre of the longest diameter of the City, I take to have been a miliary, like that in the Forum at Rome, from whence all the distances were measured."
Camden's opinion, that from this stone the Roman roads radiated, and that by it the distances were reckoned, seems now generally received. Stow, who thinks that there was some legend of the early Christians connected with it, says:—"On the south side of this high street (Candlewick or Cannon Street), near unto the channel, is pitched upright a great stone, called London Stone, fixed in the ground very deep, fastened with bars of iron, and otherwise so strongly set, that if carts do run against it through negligence, the wheels be broken and the stone itself unshaken. The cause why this stone was set there, the time when, or other memory is none."
Strype describes it in his day as already set in its case. "This stone, before the Fire of London, was much worn away, and, as it were, but a stump remaining. But it is now, for the preservation of it, cased over with a new stone, handsomely wrought, cut hollow underneath, so as the old stone may be seen, the new one being over it, to shelter and defend the old venerable one."
It stood formerly on the south side of Cannon Street, but was removed to the north, December 13th, 1742. In 1798 it was again removed, as an obstruction, and, but for the praiseworthy interposition of a local antiquary, Mr. Thomas Malden, a printer in Sherborne Lane, it would have been destroyed.
This most interesting relic of Roman London is that very stone which the arch-rebel Jack Cade struck with his bloody sword when he had stormed London Bridge, and "Now is Mortimer lord of this city" were the words he uttered too confidently as he gave the blow. Shakespeare, who perhaps wrote from tradition, makes him strike London Stone with his staff:—
"Cade. Now is Mortimer lord of this city. And here, sitting upon London Stone, I charge and command that the conduit run nothing but claret wine this first year of our reign. And now henceforward it shall be treason for any that calls me Lord Mortimer."—Shakespeare, Second Part of Henry VI., act iv., sc. 6.
Dryden, too, mentions this stone in a very fine passage of his Fable of the "Cock and the Fox:"—
"The bees in arms
Drive headlong from the waxen cells in swarms.
Jack Straw at London Stone, with all his rout,
Struck not the city with so loud a shout."
Of the old denizens of this neighbourhood in Henry VIII.'s days, Stow gives a very picturesque sketch in the following passage, where he says:—"The late Earl of Oxford, father to him that now liveth, hath been noted within these forty years to have ridden into this city, and so to his house by London Stone, with eighty gentlemen in a livery of Reading tawny, and chains of gold about their necks, before him, and one hundred tall yeomen in the like livery to follow him, without chains, but all having his cognizance of the blue boar embroidered on their left shoulder."
A turning from Cannon Street leads us to Southwark Bridge. The cost of this bridge was computed at £300,000, and the annual revenue was estimated at £90,000. Blackfriars Bridge tolls amounted to a large annual sum; and it was supposed Southwark might fairly claim about a third of it. Great stress also was laid on the improvements that would ensue in the miserable streets about Bankside and along the road to the King's Bench. We need scarcely remind our readers that the bridge never answered, and was almost disused till the tolls were removed and it was thrown open to general traffic.