Stow says the height was 520 feet “whereof the stone-work is 260 feet, and the spire was likewise 260 feet. The cross was 15 feet high by 6 feet over the arms, the inner body was of oak, the next cover was of lead, and the uttermost was of copper red varnished. The bowl and the eagle or cock were of copper and gilt also.” The ball at the apex was three feet across and the weathercock four feet from bill to tail and three feet six inches across the wings. “Certes,” says Harrison, “the toppe of this spire where the weathercocke stode was 520 foote from the ground of which the spire was one half.” The measurements of Wren confirm the height of the stone tower (which alone was standing in his day) as being 260 feet, the spire, he says, had been 40 feet diameter at the base and rose 200 feet or more. It must have been altogether worthy of this vast church of twenty-five compartments in the interior vista of arch and vault, 600 feet in greatest length and 100 feet high. In 1444 the spire narrowly escaped destruction by lightning, but the fire was put out. “In the year 1561, the 4th of June, between the hours of three and four of the clock in the afternoon, the great spire of the steeple of St. Paul’s Church was fired by lightning, which brake forth as it seemed two or three yards beneath the foot of the cross: and from thence it went downwards the spire to the battlements, stonework, and bells, so furiously that within the space of four hours the same steeple with all the roofs of the church were consumed to the great sorrow and perpetual remembrance of the beholders.”[5] It was thus destroyed a hundred years before the great fire when the cathedral perished. [5] Stow. London was a city of lead spires. Stow tells us that at St. Paul’s School close by the Cathedral was “of old time a great and high clochiard or bell-house, four square built of stone and in the same a most strong frame of timber with four bells the greatest that I have ever heard. The same has a great spire covered with lead with the image of St. Paul on the top.” It was said that Sir Thomas Partridge won it by a throw of dice from Henry VIII., and pulled it down. Stow, who would have thought the Society for the Preservation of Ancient Buildings, to which we owe so much good work, much too cautious in its methods, reports with much pleasure, “This man was afterwards hanged on Tower Hill.” At St. Bartholomew’s Priory, Smithfield, was another of these timber spires.