I propose first to consider the seals of William Longespée, earl of Salisbury (d. 1226), and Ela, his countess, and then the surviving seals of their immediate offspring, namely, three of the sons and one of the daughters. The only surviving seal of the father is a rather fragmentary example in the archives of Winchester College Archives on a deed of 1215–26, very precious and preserving important details of the obverse and most of the counterseal.²² Fortunately, a drawing of a complete seal is included in Bowles and Nichols, plate I, and a plaster cast of an imperfect original is in the British Library, dated to 1219; both reveal, with the seal at Winchester, the only known example, among all the male members of the family, of a circular equestrian seal with the earl galloping to the dexter (that is, to the viewer’s left), brandishing a sword and displaying on his left arm an heraldic shield charged with six lioncels, as represented on his grandfather’s plaque and on his own monumental effigy, and, for good measure, single lions on the front and back of the horse’s caparison. The legend (lost from the original, but given in full in Bowles and Nichols) reads: + SIGILL’. WILL’I: LONGESPEIE: COMITIS: DE: SALESBERI (Fig. 10.1).²³

The known dating range for the use of this seal is the period 1215–26, but it is clear, from a drawing (?c. 1700) by the French antiquarian, Roger Gaignières, of a now lost seal, that the earl used earlier another seal of generally similar design but with the rider’s shield charged with a single lion rampant. This seal was attached to a deed which can be dated to 1198 × 1205.²⁴ It seems probable, therefore, that the earl’s first seal, with a shield of one lion rampant, was superseded in the first or second decade of the thirteenth century by the one more familiar to us, with the shield charged with six lioncels The original at Winchester, the cast in the British Library, and the two drawings all include a circular counterseal, depicting the image of a sheathed sword pointing downwards and a baldric, with the legend: SIG’ [or SIGILL’] WILL’MI. LONGESPEIE (Fig. 10.2).

The seal of the countess is also known only from one, now damaged example, but, again fortunately, a seventeenth-century drawing of the complete seal survives, as noted earlier, in Sir Christopher Hatton’s Book of Seals, with another from the early nineteenth century in Bowles and Nichols, which is slightly more accurate as regards the counterseal.²⁵ Ela is depicted on the obverse as a noble-woman, standing frontally and holding on her left wrist a bird of prey, which intrudes into the legend, while on either side of her is a single lioncel (derived from her husband’s arms) facing outwards to the legend and looking back at her; the legend reads: + SIGILLVM. ELE COMITISSE. SARESBERIE (Fig. 10.3). The counterseal is her secretum, rather unusually in the shape of a shield, and bearing the Longespée arms and the legend, + SECRETV(M). ELE COMITISSE. SARESBERIE (Fig. 10.4).