The essays gathered in this collection were given at a conference held at Aberystwyth University and the National Library of Wales in April 2012. The conference was funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council project, Seals in Medieval Wales, 1200–1500 (hereafter SiMeW),1 and coincided with the launch of an exhibition at the National Library of Wales of materials curated by the project team and the National Library (Seals in Context: Medieval Wales and the Welsh Marches).2 The ambitions of the project team, as exemplified in the exhibition and associated work, were to examine in detail seals from Wales and the March for the high and late Middle Ages, both to shed new light on the politics, society and economy of medieval Wales and the March, but also to draw together a variety of approaches to the recording and examination of seals and to exemplify best practice in sigillographic research.
Detailed discussion of the research outcomes from the SiMeW project are reserved for the forthcoming volume issuing from the project. The project team were, though, committed to the examination of sigillographic material in terms of broad themes capable to shedding light on medieval society and, in this instance, Welsh and Marcher society in particular. Thus, such themes as family and lineage, power and politics, women and gender, religion and piety, were viewed through the prism of surviving seal impressions and their associated documents. The conference provided an excellent opportunity to present the project’s research and its initial outputs, notably, at that stage, the exhibition and associated publication, to a wide audience and, in particular, an audience of specialist historians and sigillographers. In turn, the conference allowed current research in this, as yet fairly small but already certainly vibrant, area of medieval studies to be shared and for some of the possible avenues for further study to be explored. In a fairly recent collection on medieval sigillography, researchers set out a series of important observations on the type and quality of seal, typically but not exclusively based upon institutions, be they spiritual, governmental or urban.3 In the present collection, authors were asked to consider as fully as possible the context in which seals were used; the SiMeW project team, as conference organisers, were keen to encourage research that moved beyond description and close analysis of the seal per se and to request that authors explored the variety of ways in which seals were employed, the mechanics of seal usage, and the placing of seal usage within the medieval world, themes as noted central to the conceptualisation of the SiMeW project.
Such an approach is very well represented in the papers collected in this volume. The volume is divided into three main sections which draw together papers on broadly comparable themes, namely status and power, law and practice, sources and context. As Elizabeth New’s important contribution makes clear, the presiding historiographical emphasis on politics and elites has been mirrored in sigillographic studies where a relatively small proportion of seals, those especially of noble lords and great ecclesiastics, has until recently been the main object of study, while thousands upon thousands of smaller personal seals have, again until fairly recently, been offered very little attention.4 In not all respects is the present volume a significant departure from this trend and the papers gathered here do have a good deal to say about elites, their power and the nature of seal usage amongst those of higher status and/or major institutions, as represented through their seals and associated documents.
The first section of the volume tackles directly questions of status and of power, and has, as its inevitable and appropriate emphasis, a focus upon elites, and especially kings and the nobility. While, as noted, this general feature is a familiar one in sigillographic study, the approach undertaken by the authors here offers significant and engaging departures, especially in the ways in which sigillography may elucidate the political ambition of medieval rulers. Nicholas Vincent’s chapter on the court of Henry II offers a detailed and varied discussion of self-representation in the twelfth-century court. Commencing with the royal seals of Henry II, and especially the great seals (one of which, it is suggested, might conceivably be the Exchequer seal), Vincent examines the seals of officials within the court and government of Henry II, including the choices made by Henry’s seal keepers in the motifs of their own seals. He also examines the ways in which Henry II may have constructed heraldic devices gleaned from Henry I and re-employed in his own privy seals. His officers and courtiers aped fashionable choices and also developed motifs of their own, including canting seals and humorous or cryptic devices and legends. Importantly, Vincent identifies a political agenda in the motifs used, most notably but not exclusively in the ways in which European kings sought, by the last quarter of the twelfth century, to represent their authority through heraldic devices which also found their way on to their seals. Daniel Power’s discussion of the development of sealing practice in Normandy also has a good deal to say on the chronology of adoption of practice and he notes that, by the early thirteenth century, Norman sealing practice generally was developing in a matter consistent with that found elsewhere in neighbouring parts of western Europe. By examining the seals appended to the 1205 declaration on the Norman church, Power is able to set out the variety of seal types in association with the respective sigillants and to identify trends and fashions within this broadly elite socio-political group, in a manner that is at least suggestive of an increasingly sophisticated and complex system of seal designs but one that is not easily linked to social status and position. Instead, as Power argues here, we are offered through the declaration’s seals, a snapshot of seal design and development, at a point when sigillants of essentially the same rank were prepared to experiment with design and to rely not only on more traditional common forms. Jörg Peltzer considers the extent to which fourteenth-century comital seals in England and Germany reflected, in their design, the rank of the sigillant and explores the ways in which subtle differences in design as well as in size allowed the general theme to be re-employed to denote relative rank. The size of seals was, as Peltzer notes, an important indicator of social status, the use of larger or smaller seals constrained by societal norms rather than by legislation. Size also mattered in the sense that the recalcitrant could use the size of their seal to challenge, symbolically at least, the authority of those deemed otherwise their superiors. Modification of equestrian seals also permitted individuals to illustrate, through the designs, their ascent through the comital ranks; this included the adoption of lance and banner in motifs, a development which also lost favour as the actual distinctions in comital rank became more secure in the later fourteenth century. More particularly, the ‘cap of estate’ added to equestrian motifs was also used by Edward III to distinguish ducal lordships, mostly involving his direct line, from comital lordships. Not all papers in this first section deal with aristocratic power. John McEwan’s examination of seal-makers in medieval London illustrates both the importance attached by seal users to the employment of skilled seal-makers but also the skills and discrete qualities of workmanship that served to distinguish seal-makers. As regards the first point, namely the use of high quality seal-makers by potential sigillants, McEwan’s discussion chimes with observations earlier in this section (and elsewhere in the volume, as for instance in Markus Späth’s discussion of Canterbury Cathedral seals) that seal owners and seal users often prized high quality work which, in its execution and its detail, allowed their individual motifs to be, in all senses, distinguished. Intriguingly, McEwan’s discussion also reminds us – the second point here – that the unique and prized skills of quality seal-makers gave them their own level of distinction, even without an organised craft guild of their own. Seal-makers, as McEwan notes, added value to metals, even precious ones, through their work.
There is much in the chapters of the first section which crosses over into themes relevant to the second section of the volume, namely the practice of sealing, its associated bureaucracies and relevant law. In return, the chapters in this second section have much to say on the power contained within sealing practice and the legal and political authority located within medieval seals. In a contribution that stands also as a valuable introduction to the theme of sealing and medieval bureaucratic development, Brigitte Miriam Bedos-Rezak considers the ways in which seals and sealing practice invaded medieval secular and religious thought in the twelfth and thirteenth century, the seal coming to stand for both the corporeal and the incorporeal. The seal’s power and efficacy was examined by William of Auvergne (d. 1249) who denied that seals had intrinsic powers based upon nature but that their force and efficacy derived from conventional signs, i.e. their force was a symbol recognised by social and political convention. Bedos-Rezak wonders whether what she perceives as a retreat from total reliance on seals by the close of the thirteenth-century, with for instance a greater use of the signature, may reflect earlier theoretical uncertainties, as expressed by leading thinkers, and a lack of complete confidence in the power and authenticity of the seal. A century earlier, as Adrian Ailes describes in his chapter on governmental seals in the reign of Richard I, we find Richard redesigning his great seal during his reign, a second great seal reflecting dynastic and contemporary politics and considered choices in heraldic devices reflective of the same. The same themes arise in John Cherry’s discussion of Italian notarial and official seals, not least in the ways in which high-standing officers such as Giovanni da Vico, Prefect of Rome in the mid-fourteenth century, employed familiar concepts of justice as the leitmotif of city government within the motif of their seals of office. Importantly, in Cherry’s discussion, is the distinction between the notarial enrolment proved by the tabellion or signum of the notary, an act which was not dependent upon the use of a seal. Cherry notes that distinctions in the use of notarised documents and seals varied both over time and within jurisdictions and considers also a diplomatic distinction that may have applied between private (notarised) and public (sealed) documents in later medieval Italy. Brian Kemp’s examination of the thirteenth-and early fourteenth-century seals of the Longespée family also illustrates the ways in which a noble family could maintain both the symbolism of its name and the iconic ‘consequences’ of its family arms in seal design across a number of generations. Of significance here, family members, such as Nicholas of Longespée, who rose to become bishop of Salisbury in the later thirteenth century, or his mother, Ela, subsequently abbess of Lacock, did not chose to identify their familial symbols on seals of clerical office.
The hidden potential (both positive and negative) in seals, in terms of the memories they might invoke, is one feature contextualising seal usage; while serving to prove an immediate claim, seals could also reduce the ambitions of the sigillant by their representative association with images and memories, welcome and unwelcome (a theme that also emerges in Markus Späth’s chapter in this volume and to which some return will be made below). In his chapter on governmental seals in the reign of Richard I, Adrian Ailes also provides strong evidence for the identification of Richard’s exchequer seal, previously confused by some commentators with Richard’s privy seal, and used by the chancellor William Longchamp as his seal of office during Richard’s absence overseas c. 1190. Ailes also detects, in Richard’s design choices in relation to his second great seal, a desire through the omission of certain motifs evident in the first great seal to distance himself from his discredited chancellor. Another threat to the force and general good of seals came through legal challenge, as Paul Brand discusses in his chapter. In litigation over contracts, parties might, as Brand shows, challenge the validity of a claim on the basis of, for instance, the condition of the seal or the method by which the seal had been attached to the document or the validity of the manner or context in which the seal had been attached. Cases in which plaintiffs argued that sigillants were pressurised into securing documents by seal or that third parties had used seals without the seal owner’s consent or that sigillants had use forged seals speak also to themes identified by Bedos-Rezak, as discussed earlier; they add to the suggestion that total confidence in the power and authority of the seal was challenged by the end of the thirteenth century, from which period much of the English case law cited here also dates.
In a third and final section of essays in this collection, seals are set in distinct contexts, be that in terms of their reuse as pictorial images in later documents, as in the discussion by Matthew Sillence and Sandy Heslop of a eighteenth-century plan of the city of Norwich, or in the ways in which location and architecture are refashioned symbolically through the medium of the seal, as discussed by Markus Späth. Sillence and Heslop illustrate the ways in which medieval seals could be re-employed in civic plans from the mid-eighteenth century, the post-medieval design reflecting contemporary views of the civic nature, its moral compass and the governance of the city. As in previous sections, we see again such themes as the (re-)representation of governance and office, noted, for instance, in seal design from fourteenth-century Italy (in John Cherry’s chapter) and the persistence of authority, associated with the enduring force of office. The re-employment and repetition of motifs in later centuries provided an immediate device for reinforcing civic roles through association with their distant antecedents, in much the same way as did the long history of shared familial devices supported the transmission of familial identity from one generation to the next, as for instance described in the chapter by Brian Kemp. In this respect the survival of seals, as impressions and as matrices, allowed later uses to reflect upon the durability of their lineage, be that familial or official, its transmission over time conveyed through the relatively fragile device of the seal. Memorializing of a similar kind also sits at the heart of Späth’s examination of the ways in which monastic houses, mostly drawn from English instances, used the motifs of their seals to remind the user and viewer of their ‘glorious pasts’. Through his discussion of thirteenth-century common seals for English cathedral priories, and especially Canterbury and Ely, Späth shows the ways in which monastic communities at great cathedral priories created seal motifs that reflected not so much the local and immediate architecture of their actual church but a contemporary reflection on an idealised and universal church. Within this ‘micro-architecture’, and through the innovative use of double matrices, the monks were able to locate figures representative of the particular claims of the cathedral, such as the martyrdom of Becket at Canterbury. In such instances, as Späth makes clear, the essential history of the cathedral and the claims to spiritual authority of the monastic community were literally impressed within the represented structure of the church; in each act of sealing, the involved process would also serve to invoke the same essential claims.
Placing seals in a different context, David Williams, in his chapter, deals not with impressions but with matrices and concentrates upon seal finds from medieval Wales. Adopting an approach that offers significant insight into the use and distribution of seals, Williams identifies certain trends both in the location and typology of medieval Welsh seal finds. Here we are offered a sense of the considerable opportunities which archaeology and such beneficial initiatives as the portable antiquities scheme (http://finds.org.uk/) can offer sigillography, a complementary study of matrices and of location of finds offering vital new perspectives on seal use, its range and aspects of its typicality. Returning to the essay by Elizabeth New, which was also mentioned earlier, we are offered a departure from a longstanding commitment to the study of higher status seals. New’s aim is to remind us not only of the extent of lower status personal seals surviving from medieval England but also, and here with an emphasis on the greater concentration of such seals from the thirteenth century, to illustrate how apparently simple motifs were far more nuanced than has always been supposed. By examining radial motifs from two large databases of seals (SiMeW at Aberystwyth and the TNA database of seals from the Duchy of Lancaster), New argues that apparently conventional devices most certainly contained complexities, in terms of the detail of geometric design and/or the identified objects from which such designs were constructed, such as particular plants or religious imagery, to create sometimes subtle yet certainly powerful – to contemporary eyes – messages of faith, dynasty, or social aspiration.
This volume begins with a paper that is set outside of the main organising themes identified here but also speaks to each of them. Paul Harvey asks why seals announce themselves as such in their legend. The use of the form ‘sigillum x’ seems, as he notes, redundant when located on the actual seal itself; this he explains in terms of Anglo-Saxon diplomatic, sigillum in this instance referring to signum: ‘this is my sign’ rather than ‘this is my seal’. In the subsequent chronology of the terminology, and the disappearance and reappearance of the term sigillum, its meaning, as Harvey suggests, shifted from the act of signing the cross to the literal reference to the seal. Here, as with the discussion of sealing practice and law discussed by Paul Brand in this volume, we are offered another view of the ways in which sealing occurred as well as an insight into the changing context, both in terms of the diplomatic surrounding the sealing of documents and the behaviour of sigillants at the very point of sealing. It is in that spirit of considered reflection and close contextualisation of this varied and potentially fruitful material that the present collection of essays has been gathered.
I am most grateful for the support of staff at Oxbow Books for the care and attention they have given to this work. In particular, Oxbow’s typesetter, Julie Blackmore, has been careful and thoughtful throughout the process and, with much good grace and patience, has been instrumental in bringing this volume to publication; Sarah Ommanney has also offered invaluable advice regarding the images and has helped greatly in preparing them for publication. I am also grateful to the contributors to this volume for their diligence and willingness to respond to myriad queries and to engage with the various minutiae involved in producing a work of this kind.
PRS, November 2014