One possibility in constructing corporate identity within a seal was to memorialise the celebrated past of the holding institution in both, visual and haptic form. From the high Middle Ages onwards this option was mainly taken-up by monastic houses which could – or at least pretended to – trace back their origins beyond recorded times. Among monastic common seals visually recalling their distinguished history, those from thirteenth century-England are the most remarkable in medieval Europe. Elaborate compositions in the smallest dimensions emerged from blending figurative imagery with microarchitectural settings.4 This artistic strategy was not only limited to iconographic appeal. In fact, this memory could only be materialised – as I will argue – through a sophisticated process involving the production ‘in bodily-form’ of a three-dimensional wax impression.
My paper will address this phenomenon by examining thirteenth-century common seals from English cathedral priories.5 I will focus on outstanding examples such as those of Canterbury and Ely in order to sketch major lines of developments within an environment, which was unique in medieval European church history: Convents of Benedictine monks serving the diocesan mother church were an English peculiarity stretching back to Anglo-Saxon times.6 For the questions raised here the seals of monastic cathedral priories provide excellent evidence in various circumstances. Firstly, their corporate identity was constituted by a long history with many changes and disruptions as a result of their ambivalent status as both monastic community and cathedral chapter. Secondly, their visual culture is much better preserved than that of other monastic houses in England because of their institutional continuity as cathedral chapters beyond the Reformation.7 This latter fact is essential to my approach, as their elaborate seals were part of a much wider artistic context rather than that of mere stereotypical seal imagery.
Probably the earliest seal that was designed to serve as a material storage of memory for a monastic house is the third common seal of the cathedral priory of Christ Church Canterbury. Around 1232/33 the monks decided to replace their second common seal from the mid-twelfth century and commissioned a set of matrices to impress a two-sided seal of 94 mm diameter (Figs 12.1 and 12.2).8 This seal continued the Anglo-Norman tradition of its predecessor in representing a monastic community through the image of an ecclesiastical building in which numerous human figures appear.9 Yet, as both sides of the third common seal are of equal size and therefore appearing together in a coin-like shape, the architectural setting on the obverse is doubled through a similar image on the reverse. The most innovative feature of this seal, however, was a new sealing technology that developed in the 1230s, which not only allowed the impression of human figures on to the seal’s surfaces, but also permitted their incorporation behind the façades and within the wax corpus.
The entire pictorial field of the seal’s obverse (Fig. 12.1) is thereby filled with a complex representation of a church and is surrounded by a legend identifying the cathedral’s monastic chapter as the seal’s holder.10 The perspective chosen by the artist suggests a view towards the west front of a basilica-type building. The image is dominated by a massive rectangular crossing tower with a large central spire and four pinnacles at each corner; this architectural façade is in turn framed by two censing angels descending from heaven. Adjacent to both sides of this tower is an annex with eaves, which terminates at its outer side in a minor tower topped by a similar, but smaller, set of spire and adjacent pinnacles. On the axis of the central crossing tower, however, a double-storied façade of a building with higher nave and narrower aisles projects into the foreground. At a first glance this elaborate composition suggests that the beholder is looking onto a cathedral church from the west.
This architectural setting is housed by a number of human figures: in the triangular gable above the closed portal appears the half-length-figure of Christ, flanked by his monogram IC / XC. He is holding a crosier in his left hand and blessing the beholder with his right hand. The tiny inscription EST DOMVS H XPI, consisting of letters less than 2 mm in height along the eave’s moulding, proclaims Christ’s patronage over this church. In contrast to the depiction of the Saviour, which is in very low relief on the façade, four heads in high relief emerge from the deeply recessed windows of the lateral towers. While the en-face male heads in the oculi of the upper tier are fairly generic, the two figures in the rectangular lower windows, both wearing mitres, have a clearly clerical appeal. Tiny inscriptions on the arches around their heads identify them as Ælpheah (S ELPHEGVS) on the left and as Dunstan (S DUNSTAN[us]) on the right and thus as prominent saintly archbishops from the cathedral priory’s Anglo-Saxon past.
The reverse’s pictorial field (Fig. 12.2) is equally dominated by a building, pretending to be the representation of a church built with a cross-shaped ground plan. While a gabled façade of three storeys projects into the foreground, this edifice is complemented by lateral annexes of slightly lower height but equally lavish architectural design in the back. The figurative imagery of this side of the seal even tells a whole pictorial narrative, the dramatic martyrdom of Thomas Becket that took place in Canterbury Cathedral at Christmas 1170.11 Through the said left portal, two knights enter the church, forming the rear-guard of the assassins. In the room behind the double-porch of the central façade their front man is already striking the kneeling archbishop’s head. Next to Becket stands a monk or cleric holding a processional cross – perhaps Edward Grim as the eyewitness and chronicler of this event12 – while two clergy men appear inside the right porch, gesturing in despair. Moreover, the narrative of Becket’s passion continues into the vertical axis of the building, showing his ascension into Heaven on the two upper levels.
On an iconographical level, corporate identity of the monks of Christ Church was represented by housing their major patron saints in a setting of ecclesiastical architecture. Concerning the figurative imagery, the obverse is clearly dedicated to the memory of the key figures of Canterbury Cathedral’s Anglo-Saxon past (Fig. 12.1). Apart from Christ, to whom the cathedral’s high altar was dedicated from the time of its foundation by St Augustine,13 the two mitred heads identified by inscriptions refer to Dunstan (held office 960–88) and Ælpheah (Latinised Alphege, held office 1005–12) as two saintly archbishops from the Anglo-Saxon past. While the earlier was the key figure of the monastic revival in late tenth century-England, the latter was even venerated as a martyr as a result of his violent death in the Danish raids just after the turn of the millennium.14 Their strong veneration at Christ Church is mirrored by the elevation of their bodily remains to altars placed directly to either side of the high altar.15 Even Lanfranc, the first Norman archbishop and the radical exciser of so much of Canterbury’s Anglo-Saxon pantheon, did not touch this liturgical arrangement, which therefore continued to exist until the Reformation.16 In his Instructio novitiarum secundum consuetudinem ecclesie Cantuariensis he even promoted this setting by defining it as the initial point for the instruction of new novices: immediately after their professio on St Jerome’s feast, they were expected to prostrate before the high altar, before turning to St Alphege’s tomb to the left of the altar and then to St Dunstan’s on its right.17 Therefore the iconographical arrangement on the seal’s obverse projects an imaginary floor-plan of the cathedral’s liturgical centre, whose memory was already absorbed by the novices in their very first steps of learning.
The imagery on the reverse, however, reflects the fundamental change of institutional identity caused by the murder of archbishop Thomas Becket in the cathedral at Christmas 1170 (Fig. 12.2). Even though this saintly archbishop had numerous quarrels with the monastic community inherited from his predecessor Theobald, he soon became an enlightened figure in the monks’ collective memory as these conflicts escalated under his successors.18 Hardly surprisingly, either parties, that is the archbishops of Canterbury and the convent of Christ Church as their cathedral chapter, had a strong interest in controlling a cult which originated within the immediacy of their shared church and from there had spread throughout medieval Europe within less than two decades. For both, the articulation of claims to authority as well as the distribution of Becket’s cult, visual artistic media played a crucial role.19 By means of creating new architecture, the monks managed, however, to incorporate entirely Becket’s body within their church and thereby successfully to defeat the archbishop’s attempts to build a new cathedral at Lambeth.20 In the context of the rebuilding of Canterbury Cathedral after the fire of 1174, the monks encouraged the construction of the Trinity Chapel, undertaken in lavish Early Gothic style in the 1180s. This annex to the east of the cathedral’s old sanctuary was intended to house the new martyr’s relics, which could, however, only be translated there on 7 July 1220 when this new part of the church was eventually dedicated, after settlement was reached with archbishop Stephan Langton.21 This made the site the focus of one of the most popular pilgrimages in later medieval Europe under the monks’ custody.22