John Conyers

Who was John Conyers?

John Conyers was an English apothecary and pioneering archaeologist.

Conyers had a shop in Fleet Street, near St Paul's Cathedral during the period of construction of Sir Christopher Wren's new cathedral to replace Old St Paul's after the Great Fire of London, and collected the medieval and Roman artefacts unearthed, recording the finds in notebooks, including a Roman kiln found 26 feet below surface level in the 1670s. According to his younger friend John Bagford, Conyers "made it his chief Business to make curious Observations and to collect such Antiquities as were daily found in and about London". His antiquarian collection was praised by the Athenian Mercury, and there was talk of opening it to the public, although this does not seem to have happened.

He was present at the excavation in 1679 of the remains of a supposed elephant at Battlebridge in a gravel bed; the site was near Gray's Inn Lane, opposite "Black Mary's", and the remaining tooth was later thought to be of a mammoth or straight-tusked elephant. A flint handaxe was found nearby, now famous as the Gray's Inn Lane handaxe and on display in the British Museum's Enlightenment Gallery.