St Paul's Cross

The pulpit stood in 'the Cross yard', the open space on the north-east side of St Paul's Churchyard, adjacent to the row of buildings that would become the home of London's publishing and book-selling trade.

The eastern half of the Cross churchyard had been controlled by the Corporation in the Middle Ages: it was the site of the London 'folkmoot' (or general assembly of the people).

[2] The earliest folkmoot known to be held here was by John Mansell, a king's justice, on St Paul's Day (29 June) in 1236, to announce that Henry III wished London to be well-governed and its liberties guarded.

[citation needed] The Archbishop of Canterbury and the King attended the next such meeting we know of, in 1259, at which Londoners came to swear their allegiance to the latter and to his heirs (though under duress, as a royal army was holding the city gates at this time).

Bishop Thomas Kempe rebuilt the cross in 1449 in grand architectural form, as an open-air pulpit of mostly timber with room for three or four inside it, set on stone steps with a lead-covered roof and an ambulatory around it.

On Sunday 22 June 1483, a Cambridge Doctor of Theology, Ralph Shaa, was commissioned to preach a sermon from St Paul's Cross, in which he set forth Richard, Duke of Gloucester's claim to be King of England.

John Earle's 'bold forward man' would 'if hee bee a scholler ... ha's commonly stept into the Pulpit before a degree; ... and his next Sermon is at Pauls Crosse, and that printed'.

[9] Because the pulpit stood in one of the few open spaces within an increasingly crowded city, and because royal proclamations were often delivered here, Paul's Cross was the site of several political disturbances in the early modern period.

Attendance at the Paul's Cross sermons became an important means for the corporation to make their civic rituals compatible with Protestant teachings in the years after the Reformation.