The court of Henry II was a self-consciously peculiar place. Its apologists proclaimed its majesty even though its critics observed only boastfulness and an empty pretence to antiquity. Serving a monarch elsewhere derided as a usurping parvenu, its ethos was shaped by self-doubt.1 To a degree unusual even in a highly self-conscious age, this was a court to which both history and symbolism mattered. The sheer number of chroniclers and literary figures in Henry II’s orbit dwarfs anything seen in western Europe since the time of Charlemagne, more than three hundred years before. As a result, just as the coinage and sigillography of Charlemagne offer crucial insights into the self-presentation of the early Carolingians, so the seals of Henry II and his courtiers have an important role to play in our understanding of the fears and the pretensions of early Plantagenet kingship.
Seals were amongst the most public means of image projection. It is therefore no coincidence that the contemporary witnesses to Henry’s court dwell upon their significance. The chronicle of Battle Abbey has a famous story of Richard de Lucy, Henry’s first justiciar, ridiculing the pretensions of ‘every mere knightlet’ (quemlibet militulum) to the possession of seals, previously (according to the chronicler’s, by no means entirely reliable report) an attribute reserved to kings and other great men (regibus et precipuis … personis).2 Walter Map, another court reporter, recounts the efforts of a counterfeiter to make an impression of the royal seal in pitch and thereafter to cast it in copper, so exactly that noone could distinguish it from the royal original. Henry II initially condemned the culprit to hanging, but later took pity on him, at the petition of the man’s brother, merely confining him to a monastery.3 The Gesta Abbatum of St Albans (a thirteenth-century source but here rehearsing details from what must have been a twelfth-century record) describes the King’s handling of the early charters of St Albans, remarking the lack of seals from Anglo-Saxon diplomas, themselves confirmed in a sealed privilege of Henry I. Having determined to confirm the immunity set out in these charters, the King displayed his approval of a charter of the abbot of St Albans by placing his hand upon it and attaching to it a lace (laqueus) from his silk cloak, perhaps as a cord for the abbot’s seal.4 This was a court to which seals and sealing clearly mattered. Collectively, the stories recounted above suggest the self-conscious manufacture of a wider sense of Plantagenet majesty and magnanimity.