Gerard the Giant’s staff

In the high hall of an old inn in Basing Lane, called Gerard’s Hall, stood a great fir pole reaching to the roof, with a ladder of the same length beside it. Stow was told it was the jousting staff of Gerard the Giant, who was said to have lived there, but he thought the house was named after John Gisors, Mayor of London in 1245, and that the pole had been set up in the street as a maypole each summer and stood in the hall, decked with holly and ivy, at Christmas. Stow measured it at nearly forty feet long and fifteen inches round. A carved figure of the giant holding his pole stood over the gate until the inn was pulled down in 1852.