Cheapside Hoard

They found a buried wooden box containing more than 400 pieces of Elizabethan and Jacobean jewellery, including rings, brooches and chains, with bright coloured gemstones and enamelled gold settings, together with toadstones, cameos, scent bottles, fan holders, crystal tankards and a salt cellar.

Kris Lane has speculated that the hoard may have been brought back to England from the East Indies in 1631, having been assembled by a Dutch jeweller named Gerald Polman.

Adams was eventually forced to surrender the box and its contents to Robert Bertie, 1st Earl of Lindsey, Treasurer of the East India Company.

The hoard demonstrates the international trade in luxury goods in the period, including gemstones from sources across South America, Asia and Europe: emerald from Colombia, topaz and amazonite from Brazil; spinel, iolite and chrysoberyl from Sri Lanka, Indian diamond, Burmese ruby, Afghan lapis lazuli, Persian turquoise, pearls from Bahrain, peridot from the Red Sea; Bohemian and Hungarian opal, garnet and amethyst.

A small red intaglio stone seal bears the arms of William Howard, 1st Viscount Stafford, dating the burial of the hoard between his ennoblement in November 1640 and the Great Fire of London in September 1666, which destroyed the buildings above.

The workmen who discovered the hoard sold items to a man they knew as "Stoney Jack", the antiques dealer and pawnshop owner George Fabian Lawrence, who frequently paid labourers cash for interesting finds from London building sites.