Leadenhall was a great market located in Lime Street Ward on Leadenhall Street. Its name stemmed from the fact that "it was a large manor house that must have had a leaden roof, a feature certainly remarkable enough to give name to the place, especially since it was a secular building" (Bebbington 197). In the fourteenth century, this house was used as a court of justice. Its garden was appropriated by the City and paved in 1320 (Richardson 43). By 1345, the courtyard of the house had become a market for poultry, cheese, and butter. A proclamation made it illegal to sell poultry in the lanes and hostels of the City, as poulterers from outside the City were doing, and forced everyone to sell in this centralized location (Richardson 47).
In 1411, the City purchased the manor house (Richardson 60). In 1445-46, they prudently built a granary on the site, in order to store corn (the medieval and Renaissance word for all kinds of grain) against years of crop failure or dearth. Simon Eyre, Mayor in 1445-46, funded the construction of the new building. Stow says that "Simon Eyre, Draper, Maior 1446 builded the Leaden hall for a common Garner [granary] of corne to the use of this Citie, and left five thousand markes to charitable uses" (Stow 1:110).
In The Shoemaker's Holiday, Thomas Dekker rescripts the story of Simon Eyre and the construction of Leadenhall. The play's most memorable character is named Simon Eyre, a shoemaker who becomes an Alderman, then Sheriff, and finally Lord Mayor of London. He builds Leadenhall, where the shoemakers are to be allowed to sell leather and where he later feasts all the apprentices of the city on Shrove Tuesday. The Shoemaker's Holiday, a socially conservative play catering to an audience of playgoing apprentices, veers from factual representation for the sake of dramatic impact. Only members of the twelve great livery companies could be elected Lord Mayor of London; not only was the Shoemakers' Company not among these twelve, but shoemakers were famously poor and their company one of the least of the lesser companies. The real Simon Eyre, who was free of the Drapers' Company, died on 18 September 1459 (Stow 1:154).
After Eyre's death, Leadenhall came to be owned by the Neville family, whose adjacent garden came to be known as the "Greene yard of the Leaden hall" (Stow 1:151). The house was shortly after acquired again by the city, and it became a market for the sale of goods by foreign merchants (Bebbington 197). In 1484 "a great fire happened upon this Leaden Hall, by what casualty I know not, but much howsing was there destroyed, with all the stocks for Guns, and other provision belonging to the Citie" (Stow 1:155).
Leadenhall was rebuilt, at great expense to the city, as an area with three courtyards, each designed for the selling of different wares (Weinreb and Hibbert 462). In 1503, the citizens of London requested that the Mayor and aldermen take action to protect them from cheap and readily available foreign goods. Stow quotes from their petition as follows:
Please it the Lord Maior, Aldermen & common councel, to enact that al Frenchmen, bringing Canvas, Linnen cloth, and other wares to be sold, and all Forreins bringing Wolsteds, Sayes, Staimus, Kiverlings, nailes, iron worke, or any other wares, and also all maner of Forreins bringing Lead to the Citie to be sold, shall bring all such their wares aforesaid to the open Market of the Leaden hall, there and no where else to be shewed, solde and uttered, like as of olde time it hath beene used, upon paine of forfeyture of all the sayd wares. (Stow 1:155-56).The definition of foreigners included not just people from other countries (who were usually called "aliens"), but all English merchants who were not freemen of the city of London. The laws against aliens and foreigners relaxed only when "the quantity of farm goods produced within the City boundary diminished to zero, and Leadenhall acquired its present position as the City's main general provisions market" (Bebbington 198).
Leadenhall was destroyed by the Great Fire of 1666. The late seventeenth-century buildings were replaced in 1881 with modern ones (Weinreb and Hibbert 462) that have been recently restored (Richardson 304). Leadenhall is still a site for the sale of poultry and game.
--James Campbell and Janelle Day Jenstad, 2003