What is certain is that in at least two cases the ‘teasel’ motif was used across generations in the manner of a more conventional armorial device.⁴³ Gruffudd, brother of Rhys Goch Fychan, may well have been the natural son of the Rhys Goch the elder, and at the very least was closely connected through kinship.⁴⁴ Although details of the seal imagery are different, the overall design is the same. The use of the same device forms a clear visual connection between the two men, and if Gruffudd was not in fact Rhys Goch’s son or his paternity was contested, this was a powerful statement about the younger man’s claim to membership of the kinship group. Owain, Rhys and Caradog were undoubtedly the sons of the owner of the teasel-motifed-seal,-Alaithur ab Idnerth, and were in frequent and often violent dispute about land with Margam Abbey in the 1220s–40s.⁴⁵ The bishop of Llandaff had to intervene on more than one occasion, and in about 1231 a final concord was drawn-up between the brothers and the monks of Margam, with the former quitclaiming their rights in various lands and swearing not to enter the monks’ grange of Resolfen because of damage they and their men had previously done to Margam’s property.⁴⁶ All three brothers appended a seal with a name legend to this document. That of Rhys closely resembles the ‘teasel’ seals of his father and uncle, albeit with thicker arms and no discernible spikes on the bulbous terminals; the other two seals display more conventional stylised flowers, so similar that they appear to have been made as a set. They do however have the distinctive frames around the arms of the radial device that characterise the images on the seals of their father, uncle and brother. Rhys used his seal again on a deed of 1246, but on that occasion both of his brothers used different ones to those employed on the earlier document.⁴⁷ It may well be that Rhys had a seal, deliberately employing a ‘family’ motif, by 1231, but his brothers did not and so Margam provided them with matrices for that occasion – copying Rhys’s radial motif, but without the nuances of detail.

These examples, all drawn from a modest collection of documents relating to a single monastic house, challenge a number of assumptions. It is clear that sweeping generalisations cannot be made about the use and ownership of seals with geometric or foliate motifs, because a close examination of the material, coupled with prosopographical investigation, reveals that people of high social status and even communities possessed matrices with such designs. Moreover, this study highlights the dangers of retrospectively imposing later taxonomies, such as armigerous language, on the semiotic systems of earlier societies without fully understanding the nuances of the visual culture. Finally, this essay has demonstrated that paying close attention to seals with supposedly ‘conventional’ motifs enables us at least to ask new questions, even if not always to be able to answer them.