This paper will examine a number of seals with a radial motif and set this examination alongside an investigation of the seal-owners. In so doing, we will pursue two related lines of enquiry. The first will address the extent to which ‘conventional’ designs can in fact be encoded with cultural meaning. The second strand will consider the need for caution in, as has typically been the case, identifying radial motifs as indicators of the middling or lower social status of the seal-owner.
Personal seals, usually defined as those used by an individual in a private capacity, constitute the largest group of extant matrices and seal-impressions from medieval England and Wales.1 Despite an awareness of this corpus of material, scholars instead have traditionally focussed their attention on the numerically smaller groups of seals issuing from government (royal, national and local), the church and the ecclesiastical and secular elites,2 while only a handful of investigations have been directed at the seals of individuals from below the very highest levels of society.3 Some efforts have been made to redress this balance, assisted in recent years by access to large data-sets that do not discriminate by motif, owner or user.4 Furthermore, the integration of sigillographic material into social, economic, prosopographical, cultural and legal studies is leading to a growing awareness of the importance of seals as evidence for a wide range of questions relating to medieval societies.5 A ‘holistic’ approach to personal seals – combining attention to the graphic elements of motif and wording as well as a study of sealing practices and the seal-owners – has already proved fruitful for studies of the highest levels of society.6 While such an approach becomes more difficult as one investigates those lower down the social scale, it is if anything even more important, for here seals represent a greater proportion of the evidence available for such men and women.
Personal seals have tended to be sub-categorised by their principal motif, with those that display heraldic and equestrian imagery dominating studies of the material.7 Seal imagery that is familiar to scholars through other media or that can easily be associated with particular types of people or cultural trends have also elicited some interest. Thus seals with ‘merchant marks’ have been explored in the context of urban society and the mercantile economy, while those with hybrid grotesques or hares riding hounds have been studied in the context of the subversive visual culture of the fourteenth century.8 In contrast, while birds and animals are frequently identified as a significant sub-category of motif found on personal seals, little attempt has been made to establish whether, for example, certain types of fauna were employed by particular groups or social ‘types’ of seal-owners.9 The stylised lily and radial motifs that so frequently appear on seals of the later twelfth and thirteenth centuries are almost always described simply as ‘conventional’ or ‘miscellaneous’ designs, and identified as sigillographic motifs used by men and women of relatively modest social status.10
The seal impressions featured in this essay all have a radial motif. The images are in fact quite distinctive, but raise two significant problems often faced when investigating ‘conventional’ designs: firstly, issues regarding the standardisation of terminology and, secondly, the difficulty of interpretation. The descriptor ‘radial’11 can, for example, include motifs variously described as ‘stylised flowers’, ‘leaves’, ‘stars’, or ‘elaborate crosses’. Most certainly, there are differences in the form the radial pattern takes, and sometimes it is clear that the image was intended to represent a flower in bloom or conifer branches laid out as spokes from a central hub. Confronted with the same motif, the archivist or historian may however choose to record this in a number of different ways, and the same individual may even not always be consistent or confident in their own recording or description. When discussing the types of motif commonly found on personal seals of the thirteenth century, Paul Harvey and Andrew McGuinness described one variant of the radial image as ‘an arrangement of ears of corn (or perhaps conifer branches)’.12 Furthermore, while scholars have noted considerable variation within the broad categories of ‘conventional’ motif, the question of whether this has significance beyond the artistic prowess of the seal-maker or whim of the purchaser has rarely been asked and never fully investigated.13