Also 7 Lumber-, Lumbard-. The name of a street in London, so called because originally occupied by Lombard bankers, and still containing many of the principal London banks. Hence used transf. or fig. for: The ‘money market’; the body of financiers.
Paris has a Rue des Lombards, the name of which had the same origin.
1598. Stow, Surv. (1603), 202. Then haue ye Lombardstreete, so called of the Longobards and other Marchants, strangers of diuerse nations, assembling there twise euery day.
1645. Ord. Lords & Com., Presb. Govt., Elect. Elders, 4. Alhallowes Lumberstreet.
1647. N. Eng. Hist. & Gen. Register (1885), XXXIX. 179. Mr Dixon Meht in Lumber Street.
1721. Ramsay, Rise & Fall of Stocks, 190. Trade then shall flourish, and ilk art A lively vigour shall impart To credit languishing and famisht, And Lombard-street shall be replenisht.
1763. A. Murphy, Citizen, II. i. (1815). There we go scrambling together—reach Epsom in an hour and forty-three minutes, all Lombard-street to an egg-shell, we do.
1819. Moore, Tom Crib (ed. 3), 38. All Lombard-street to nine-pence on it. Note, More usually ‘Lombard-street to a China orange.’
1849. Lytton, Caxtons, IV. iii. ‘It is Lombard Street to a China orange,’ quoth Uncle Jack. ‘Are the odds in favour of fame against failure so great?’… answered my father.
1902. Speaker, 26 June, 369/2. Much of the floating credit of Lombard Street is based … on loans against securities.
