The term Cheapside Hoard Style describes the distinctive aesthetic and technical vocabulary of English jewellery produced roughly between 1580 and 1640 — the closing decades of the Elizabethan era and the reign of James I — as exemplified by the extraordinary cache of goldsmith's stock unearthed in Cheapside, in the City of London, in 1912. The hoard, now distributed principally between the Museum of London and the Victoria and Albert Museum, constitutes the single most important surviving body of evidence for the materials, techniques, and design sensibilities of the period. It is not merely an archaeological curiosity: it is a working inventory of a prosperous London jeweller's trade, frozen in time, and it defines what scholars and gemmologists now recognise as a coherent and identifiable style.

Historical Context

The late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries were a period of extraordinary expansion in the European gem trade. Portuguese and then Dutch and English merchant networks had opened direct sea routes to India, giving London goldsmiths access to Golconda diamonds, Burmese rubies, and Sri Lankan sapphires on a scale previously impossible. Simultaneously, the Spanish conquest of the Americas had flooded European markets with Colombian emeralds, which rapidly displaced the older Egyptian and Austrian sources. Persian and Ottoman turquoise arrived overland through Levantine trading networks. The result was a cosmopolitan abundance of gem material that a prosperous London jeweller of circa 1600 could assemble into a single tray of stock — and the Cheapside Hoard is precisely that tray, preserved intact.

The hoard was discovered by workmen demolishing a building on Cheapside in June 1912. It comprised some four hundred individual objects and loose stones, buried in a wooden box beneath the cellar floor, almost certainly concealed during the upheaval of the English Civil War period and never recovered by its owner. The collection includes finished jewels, unset stones, cameos, enamelled goldwork, and at least one extraordinary Colombian emerald watch — a piece of such technical and gemmological ambition that it remains a benchmark of the period's craft.

Materials: Gemstones of the Hoard

The gem materials present in the Cheapside Hoard are a precise map of the global trade routes available to a London jeweller of the Jacobean period. Colombian emeralds dominate in number and visual presence: the stones are characteristically included — displaying the three-phase inclusions, growth tubes, and fractures that gemmologists associate with the Muzo and Chivor deposits — and are set in ways that celebrate rather than conceal their colour. The emerald watch case, carved from a single large Colombian crystal, is the most celebrated single object in the collection.

Indian diamonds, sourced from the Golconda region of the Deccan, appear throughout the hoard in table-cut and point-cut forms. Golconda stones of this period are characterised by their exceptional transparency and, in many cases, a faint bluish or steely fluorescence under ultraviolet light, though such testing was unknown to the original craftsmen. Rubies, almost certainly of Burmese origin from the Mogok Valley, appear alongside Sri Lankan sapphires and spinels — the latter frequently misidentified as ruby in period documentation, since the mineralogical distinction between ruby and spinel was not established until the late eighteenth century. Persian turquoise, with its characteristic sky-blue to blue-green colour and matrix-free appearance in the finer specimens, is present in multiple pieces.

Amethyst, chrysoprase, plasma (a dark green chalcedony), garnets, and various forms of quartz also appear, reflecting the period's broad definition of the gem palette. Pearls — both natural saltwater pearls from the Persian Gulf and freshwater pearls — are integrated into many of the finished jewels as pendants and accents.

Cutting Styles

The lapidary vocabulary of the Cheapside Hoard Style is defined by two dominant cutting forms: the table cut and the rose cut, with the older point cut (essentially the natural octahedral crystal form of diamond, polished but not significantly shaped) also present in the diamond material.

The table cut — in which the apex of a natural crystal is ground flat to produce a large, flat top facet (the table) with a small corresponding flat base (the culet), and a simple girdle of four or more facets — was the dominant form for diamonds, rubies, and sapphires throughout the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. It maximises the visible face of the stone without requiring the sophisticated geometry of the brilliant cut, which was not developed until the mid-seventeenth century. Table-cut stones in the hoard retain a quality of quiet, almost meditative luminosity quite different from the scintillation of modern brilliant-cut stones: they reward close examination rather than demanding attention from a distance.

The rose cut, characterised by a flat base and a domed upper surface covered with triangular facets arranged in multiples of six, appears primarily in the smaller diamonds and in some of the coloured stones. The rose cut was well established in European lapidary practice by the mid-sixteenth century and remained dominant for smaller stones well into the eighteenth century.

Cabochon cutting — the simple polished dome without facets — is used for turquoise, some garnets, and several of the softer or more included coloured stones. The period's aesthetic did not require a stone to be transparent to be valued: opacity and colour saturation were virtues in their own right.

Settings and Goldwork

The goldwork of the Cheapside Hoard Style is characterised by high-carat gold — typically 18 to 22 carats — worked in a combination of casting, chasing, and filigree techniques. The dominant setting type is the closed-back collet: a box or tube of gold that surrounds the girdle of the stone and has a solid gold back, often lined with coloured foil to enhance or modify the stone's apparent colour. This setting type, which persisted from the medieval period through to the late seventeenth century, reflects both the technical limitations of the period (open settings require greater precision in fitting) and a deliberate aesthetic choice: the stone is presented as a self-contained object, its back protected and its colour optimised.

Foiling — the placement of coloured metal foil behind a stone to intensify or alter its colour — was universal practice in this period and should not be understood as deceptive. It was an accepted and skilled element of the jeweller's craft, and the choice of foil colour (gold behind yellow stones, silver behind diamonds and pale stones, red or green behind coloured stones) was a matter of technical judgement. Many of the stones in the Cheapside Hoard retain their original foils, providing rare documentary evidence of this practice.

Enamelling is among the most visually distinctive features of the style. Opaque and translucent enamels in white, black, red, green, and blue are applied to the reverse faces of pendants and the shanks and shoulders of rings, creating polychrome compositions that are often as elaborate as the gem-set obverse. The technique of émail en ronde bosse — enamel applied over a three-dimensional gold surface — is used for figurative elements including flowers, insects, birds, and human figures. Champlevé and cloisonné techniques also appear, though en ronde bosse is the most characteristic of the period's ambition.

Design Vocabulary: Motifs and Symbolism

The iconographic programme of Cheapside Hoard Style jewellery draws on the broader visual culture of the European Renaissance and Mannerist periods, filtered through specifically English Protestant sensibilities. Naturalistic motifs predominate: flowers (particularly the Tudor rose, the pansy, and the carnation), insects (the fly, the butterfly, the bee), birds, and serpents appear repeatedly. These are not merely decorative: the period's emblem literature, exemplified by works such as Geoffrey Whitney's A Choice of Emblemes (1586), invested natural forms with moral and amorous meanings that a contemporary wearer would have read fluently.

Figural pendants — representing classical deities, allegorical figures, or devotional subjects — are present in the hoard, though the Protestant context of Jacobean England meant that overtly Catholic devotional imagery was less common than in contemporary Continental jewellery. Memento mori imagery (skulls, coffins, skeletons) appears in mourning jewels and rings, reflecting the period's frank engagement with mortality as a subject for personal ornament.

Heraldic and dynastic motifs — the Tudor rose, the fleur-de-lis, the crowned initial — appear on pieces that may have been made for presentation or for the upper reaches of the market. The period's jewellery was deeply embedded in a culture of gift-giving, patronage, and political display, and the choice of motif on a significant piece was rarely accidental.

The Colombian Emerald Watch: A Defining Object

Among all the objects in the Cheapside Hoard, the Colombian emerald watch is the most technically ambitious and gemmologically remarkable. The watch case is carved from a single large Colombian emerald crystal — a feat of lapidary skill that required a stone of exceptional size and sufficient structural integrity to survive the carving process. The movement is Swiss, and the combination of a European mechanism with a gem material sourced from the Americas and worked, most probably, in India (where the tradition of hardstone carving was more developed than in Europe at this date) illustrates the genuinely global character of the luxury trade in this period. The object is now in the collection of the Museum of London and is among the most frequently cited examples of Jacobean jewellery in the scholarly literature.

Gemmological Significance

From a gemmological perspective, the Cheapside Hoard is significant for several reasons beyond its historical interest. The stones it contains represent gem material in a pre-treatment era: there is no evidence of heat treatment of the corundum, no fracture filling of the emeralds (beyond natural healing), and no irradiation or diffusion of any material, since none of these processes existed. The hoard thus provides a reference point for the natural, untreated appearance of Golconda diamonds, Mogok rubies, and Colombian emeralds of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries — a period before systematic treatment became standard trade practice.

The closed-back settings mean that many of the stones have never been re-cut or re-polished since their original setting, preserving the exact proportions and surface finish of period lapidary work. This makes them invaluable for understanding the optical priorities of pre-brilliant-cut gem cutting: the emphasis on colour saturation and face-up appearance rather than light return and scintillation.

Influence and Legacy

The Cheapside Hoard Style did not survive the Civil War intact as a living tradition. The political and social disruptions of the 1640s and 1650s, followed by the Restoration of 1660 and the rapid adoption of the brilliant cut in the 1670s and 1680s, transformed English jewellery practice decisively. The closed-back collet, the table-cut diamond, and the polychrome enamel reverse gave way to open settings, brilliant-cut stones, and a new aesthetic that prioritised light return over colour saturation.

The rediscovery of the hoard in 1912 — at the height of the Arts and Crafts movement's interest in pre-industrial craft — gave the style a second life as a historical reference point. Subsequent revivals of interest in Renaissance and Mannerist jewellery, including the scholarly work of scholars such as Anna Somers Cocks and the curatorial programmes of the Victoria and Albert Museum, have ensured that the Cheapside Hoard remains a living reference for designers, gemmologists, and historians of decorative art.

In the contemporary market, pieces that can be securely attributed to the Elizabethan or Jacobean period and that display the characteristic features of the style — table-cut stones in closed-back collets, polychrome enamel reverses, naturalistic motifs — command significant premiums at auction, particularly when the gem material can be identified as Colombian emerald or Golconda diamond by laboratory testing. The combination of historical provenance, pre-treatment gem material, and period goldsmithing represents a convergence of art-historical and gemmological value that is rarely matched in other collecting categories.

Key Characteristics: Summary

• High-carat gold (typically 18–22 carat), worked by casting, chasing, and filigree
• Table-cut and rose-cut gemstones; point-cut diamonds; cabochon coloured stones
• Closed-back collet settings, frequently foiled to enhance stone colour
• Polychrome opaque and translucent enamelling, often on reverse faces
• Émail en ronde bosse for three-dimensional figurative elements
• Colombian emeralds, Golconda diamonds, Mogok rubies and spinels, Sri Lankan sapphires, Persian turquoise
• Naturalistic motifs (flowers, insects, birds) with emblematic significance
• Memento mori, heraldic, and figural pendant forms
• No evidence of modern gem treatments; stones represent pre-treatment natural material

Further Reading

• Museum of London: The Cheapside Hoard
• Victoria and Albert Museum: The Cheapside Hoard
• GIA Gems & Gemology: Cheapside Hoard reference