The great and Exchequer seals by no means exhaust our evidence for seals and sealing under Henry II. By the 1140s, in part as a consequence of the increasing formality that governed the keeping of royal or magnate great seals, there was a trend to employ not only a great seal but a privy seal or signet, often in the form of a ring that accompanied its user even when the great seal was elsewhere. We know of such seals principally because of their use as counterseals, used to stamp the back of the single-sided great seals of the kings of France (who were using a fleur de lys signet as a counterseal from at least 1180), bishops, and in England such seals as those of the earls of Leicester and Chester, again from the 1140s onwards.⁴⁷ In the case of Henry II, there can be little doubt that the King was often physically separated from his great seal. This is suggested by the place-dates to letters and charters, where the issue of charters seems to have clustered around certain locations and occasions when it can be assumed that the King, his counsellors and the equipment of the chancery were all together in the same place.⁴⁸ It also obtains support from an explicit statement in William fitz Stephen’s life of Thomas Becket that, as chancellor, Becket sealed his own personal correspondence with the upper part of the King’s seal of which he had custody (ut altera parte sigilli regii quod et ad eius pertinet custodiam propria signet mandata), and that his deputy, here described as the sigillifer regius, was responsible for all business transacted in chancery. Fitz Stephen notes that this sigillifer was to ‘sign’ all business (omnia … manu signentur).⁴⁹

I do not intend here to enter into the finer questions of sealing practices, as opposed to seals, at Henry II’s court, save to note two broad generalisations. Across the reign, from 1154 to 1189, we find an increasing elaboration both in the use of coloured seal cords and coloured wax seals, with a growing preference for coloured cords over parchment or leather tags, and a more frequent use of green wax. Green wax was not entirely unknown in royal seals before 1154. It can be found in an apparently authentic impression of the ‘fourth’ seal of King Henry I as early as the 1120s or early 1130s.⁵⁰ By the 1180s, however, it had become the standard though not invariable colour of great seal impressions attached to grants in perpetuity.⁵¹ By the 1180s there was as yet no precise significance attached to the use of colouring either of cords or of seals, save that the more solemn charters tended to attract the more magnificent of sealing methods.

As for the custody and day to day operations of the King’s seal, here again, a broad outline must suffice. Several men appear during the reign described as king’s sigillifer. These, I would suggest, were the officers responsible for physically keeping the King’s seal, acting as deputies to the titular or de facto chancellor, in a role later occupied, under Richard I and King John, by the official known as the vice-chancellor. References under Henry II to a signator seem to relate not to the seal but to the office of scribe, otherwise known as scriptor, physically responsible for writing the King’s letters.⁵² The officer charged with physically applying the seal, an office that would later go under the name of ‘spigurnel’, is much harder to trace.⁵³ We have a glimpse of his duties in 1170, in the confessions of that ‘servant of the royal court’ who, according to William fitz Stephen, admitted that he had with his own hand impressed the King’s seal to letters, themselves written by a weeping Nigel de Sackville (elsewhere identified as sigillifer), ordering that Becket be killed.⁵⁴ We read of sealing again in February 1189, in an account of the monks of Canterbury and their attempts to secure royal letters of protection against Archbishop Baldwin. The monks’ proctor waited whilst Hubert Walter dictated the required royal letters, which the proctor then took to be sealed (ego feci illas sigillare). When the archbishop arrived he wished to inspect the letters, and dispatched Hubert and Peter of Blois to the chancery (ad cancellariam) to recover them. Hubert and Peter broke the King’s seal, and in the face of protests from the monks’ proctor, the archbishop then retired to a private chamber where he rewrote the letters, inserting three new clauses in his own interest.⁵⁵