Definition of "freestone"

Mr Allworthy […] died immensely rich and built an hospital […] but had he done nothing more I should have left him to have recorded his own merit on some fair freestone over the door of that hospital.

1749, Henry Fielding, The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling

It might, under all the circumstances above stated, have been a question with other builders, whether to import one shipload of costly jaspers, or twenty of chalk flints; and whether to build a small church faced with porphyry and paved with agate, or to raise a vast cathedral in freestone.

1853, John Ruskin, “IV, St. Mark's”, in The Stones of Venice, volume II (The Sea-Stories), London: Smith, Elder, and Co., […], § XXVII, page 77