For this reason the Canterbury seal’s micro-architecture needs to be examined as much as does its mere iconographical appearance. There can be hardly any doubt that the architectural settings represent Canterbury Cathedral, as clearly indicated both by the inscription EST DOMVS H XPI below the Saviour on the obverse and the insertion of Becket’s Martyrdom into the church on the reverse. Yet the visual evidence is much more complicated, as the images on both sides obviously do not show the same church: in fact, neither of the buildings represented on the seal’s obverse and reverse closely resembles Canterbury Cathedral as it would have appeared in the early thirteenth century. The variety of styles shown in the church’s actual superstructure at that time, which ranged from the late Romanesque in the nave to the early Gothic in the choir of William of Sens and William the Englishman, was at odds with the homogeneity of the seal’s micro-architectures. They seem to be much more indebted to the most cutting-edge church design in England around 1230.25 Even if one takes into account that the medieval concept of copying architecture did not require an exact transfer of forms and designs,26 the many inconsistencies of the two micro-architectural structures point to the fact that they were not intended to ‘portray’ the Cathedral in a modern sense. In particular, the obverse seal image rather bears a strong resemblance to the spectacular screen façades built at Salisbury or Wells Cathedral from the 1220s onwards. Their surfaces are fissured with numerous niches, recesses and other openings in order to house extensive sculptural programmes.27 These arrangements created, as Paul Binski has recently pointed out, an image of the universitas of the church.28 Thus the micro-architectural design on the Canterbury seal cannot solely be read as a representation of a local institution, but rather as a symbolic one of the universal ecclesia in thirteenth-century imagination.
In this regard one has to ask how the seal’s figures and scenes were placed in relation to its architectural framework in order to memorialise and to help the sigillants to commit the priory’s past to memory. In the oldest surviving impression of this seal attached to a charter of 1232/33 the obverse nowadays provides irritating evidence: both, the martyrdom scene and the bust of the Saviour, appear as isolated images, whereas the elaborate façade is missing (Fig. 12.4).29 Thus it becomes fairly clear that this figurative imagery has not been impressed on the seal’s surface, but was rather incorporated into a separate cake of wax upon which a front cake containing the façade was placed that is now lost. The creation of a seal out of two cakes of wax bears witness to an extraordinary technical innovation taking place in the environment of religious houses in south-eastern England throughout the thirteenth century. In order to impress such a two-layered seal a whole set of matrices was necessary.30 Although the matrices for the Canterbury seal are lost today, a comparable set of stamps has survived from the Augustinian Priory of St Mary’s in Southwick, Hampshire, which was engraved around 1260 on four plates of copper (Fig. 12.5).31 They enabled the monks to impress both sides of the two wax cakes before joining them together with a metal loop, probably made of lead, such as seen in the earliest impression of the Canterbury seal (Fig. 12.4). Thus figures and scenes such as the Saviour and the martyrdom of St Thomas appear behind a real façade in portals and windows, thereby creating a three-dimensional microarchitectural space.
The common seal was therefore a medium which made it possible not only to depict, but also to make incarnate a monastic community’s history in its alterations. The murder of Becket in 1170 was such a far-reaching event that, as already noted, we might wonder why it had become part of the chapter’s seal imagery only after 1230. There is, however, significant coincidence between the first use of the third common seal and the launch of the forged Magna carta Sanctae Thomae, which purported to be a charter by the saintly archbishop and granting major liberties to the monks of Christ Church.32 Through this new sealing technology the community could underline the fact that the donor’s bodily remains were incorporated in their own church. The complicated and multi-levelled process of the seal’s production directs us to the contemporary expectation that historical memories were not only thereby evoked in the beholder of the completed seal, but were also in those involved in the sealing. Each time, the matrices had to be brought into the right order, impressed in the correct way on the two wax cakes, which had then to be bound together to form the seal’s corpus. Moreover, at the very end of the process the sigillant(s) had to testify that the wax really had the capacity to represent all that was required of it. In fact, some of the surviving impressions of the Canterbury seal bear a legend of hardly 4 millimetres in height around the rim running clockwise if seen from the obverse:33
SIT MICHI CAVSA MERA STILVS APTVS LITERA VERA [//]
CIRCVMSPECTA SERA TENOR VTILIS INTEGRA CERA
‘May you be my unadulterated cause, appropriate style, true word,
encompassing bolt, advantageous sense, intact wax’.
These enigmatic hexameters could easily be associated with Becket’s glory as a martyr, who was also praised in the metric legend of the reverse.34 Further, the rim’s circumscription refers to a much broader metaphorical impact of sealing, one issuing from the theological discourse of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.35 As the metric phrase of the ‘true word’ (LITERA VERA) is also echoed in the ’intact wax’ (INTEGRA CERA), the inscription, the application of which was an involved process employing a special matrix of the kind that survives for the common seal of Boxgrove Priory in Sussex,36 attested to the integrity of the object. Hence only an intact impression guaranteed the legibility of the inscription and the completeness of the incorporated memories.
This idea was also employed by the monks of the cathedral priory of St Etheldreda and St Peter at Ely, when they decided to commission matrices for their new conventual seal in the 1280s to replace the first recorded common seal, which dated from the twelfth century.37 Instead of the old-fashioned, single-sided seal, the monks acquired a fashionable, double-sided seal with a diameter of 83 mm, whose impressions bear a circumscription about the rim (Fig. 12.6):38
+ PETRVS ET EDELDREDA MOLLIS SVB TEGMINE CERE ELY SECRETA CELARE SIMVL STATVERE
‘Peter and Etheldreda have jointly decided to cover the secrets of Ely under the cover of the soft wax’.
The legend suggests that the cathedral’s two patron saints, Peter and Etheldreda, considered the seal as a safe treasury for the church of Ely’s secreta. Whatever this term meant precisely, it clearly points to the fact that medieval seals were not only perceived as a medium of representational display, but rather one of internal storage.39 In this case the term seems to address the monks as insiders, and therefore as possessors of a deeper knowledge of Ely’s long-lasting and most vicissitudinous past, dating back until Anglo-Saxon times.40 The community was founded around 673 as a double monastery by the Anglo-Saxon queen Æthelthryth (Latinised as Etheldreda, d. 679), who retired from court to devote herself to a monastic life. In the course of its turbulent history, the abbey was raided by the Danes in the late ninth century and only re-established as a male Benedictine house in 970. Finally it was turned into a cathedral priory in 1109, serving as the see for a newly created bishopric covering most parts of Cambridgeshire. Despite these significant changes in Ely’s fortunes, the thirteenth-century monks enjoyed a rich documentary as well as visual culture, both of which allowed them to access memory regarding their institution’s glorious past to a degree not found in other long-established English monastic houses.41
Many of these milestones in the community’s history are embodied in the images of Ely’s two patron saints, Etheldreda and Peter, to each of whom one side of this coin-like seal is dedicated (Figs 12.7 and 12.8). They are each placed in the centre of a lavish architectural setting, the design of which appears – unlike in the instance of the Canterbury seal – almost identical in design on both sides. As the circumscription addresses the corporate act of the saints in keeping Ely’s secrets, one might ask if this was part of an artistic strategy by a talented goldsmith, perhaps one located within the cathedral’s precinct.42 Even if the impressions of this common seal consist of only one cake of wax – and therefore witnesses some reduction of technological complexity relative to Canterbury’s third seal (Figs 12.1, 12.2 and 12.4) – its material appearance is still sophisticated: while the circumscription’s postulates the seal’s bodily character, the real wax corpus has only a modest hight of just 7 millimetres.The impressed images on both sides, however, appear in fairly high relief although they hardly project beyond the seal’s surface.
On the obverse (Fig. 12.7), the standing figure of Etheldreda appears as a crowned abbess in a central trefoil arch, assisted by two male figures under similar architectural framework, which is, however, clearly reduced in size and partially in elaboration. To her right appears a king, while to her left a clearly younger, uncrowned man in courtly fashion is shown holding a falcon. Unlike in the Canterbury seal (Figs 12.1 and 12.2) there are no internal legends in the pictorial field to identify the persons represented. Yet the identification of Etheldreada’s assistants might have been possible even for a wider contemporary public due to a widespread propagation of her hagiographical model as a saintly queen living in chastity.43 The key work in this tradition was the Liber Eliensis, a hybrid work written in the 1170s and oscillating between historiography and hagiography.44 Accordingly the two figures assisting Etheldreda most probably refer to her two husbands, prince Tonberht of Gyrwe – who died young – and king Ecgfrith of Northumberland (who reigned 670–85), from whom she later divorced in order to dedicate herself to a religious life. The end of this conversion – supervised by the saintly archbishop Wilfrid of York – is marked by her foundation of a double monastery on the Isle of Ely in 673, which she ruled as the first abbess. Beyond that, Etheldreda was chiefly remembered for establishing a dynastic tradition in the abbey by admitting not only her sisters Seaxburh and Wihtburh, but also their daughters and grand-daughters, who succeeded her in abbacy. Their burial places in the church became the focus of a flourishing cult.45 Hence the imagery on the obverse is clearly dedicated to the memory of Ely‘s foundation. However, unlike the lineage of archbishops on the Canterbury seal, the Ely seal does not promote dynastic succession but rather intends to prove Etheldreda’s chastity by presenting her husbands as witnesses to her ascetic life.
On the reverse (Fig. 12.8), Saint Peter appears in an almost identical architectural framework, where he is assisted by a bishop offering a blessing to his right and, to his left, a king holding a scroll. As on the obverse there are no internal inscriptions to name those figures represented, thus leaving only the Apostle easily identifiable, at least to a modern viewer. However, the tradition compiled in the Liber Eliensis links this composition to the aforementioned re-foundation of the abbey in the later tenth century. The chronicle lavishly commemorates both king Edgar (who reigned Mercia and Wessex from 957, and was king of the English 959–75) and the saintly bishop Æthelwold of Winchester (who held office 963–84), who re-consecrated the abbey under the patronage of Saint Peter.46 These major architects of the monastic revival in Anglo-Saxon England can clearly therefore be identified as the figures assisting the Apostle on the Ely seal.47 Moreover, even the five human figures appearing in a boat in the lower marginal register of the architectural setting might refer to the time of refoundation: the Liber Eliensis illustrates the achievements of the reforming-abbot Byrhtnoth, among which is the violent theft of the relics of Saint Wihtburh in order to incorporate the last missing sister of Etheldreda within Ely’s pantheon of saints. In this episode Byrhtnoth is said to have escaped with his accomplices on a boat over the waterways of the Fens,48 recalling the topos of Ely’s location on an inaccessible insula there. Thus, as in the Canterbury model, Ely’s new common seal enabled the monks to imprint the memory of two milestones in their long history, which were obviously considered to be essential to their corporate identity.49
This finally leads us to the role of the micro-architectural settings in the imagery of this seal. In contrast to the two rather distinct church façades appearing on the surfaces of the Canterbury example, the architectural presentation is all but identical on both the obverse and reverse of the Ely common seal (Figs 12.7 and 12.8). Details such as the trefoil-arcades with their elaborate canopies adorned with crockets and crops testify to an awareness of up-to-date developments in the just-emerging Decorated Style.50 However, similarities between the architectural setting of the seal and contemporary building design are not only limited to details, but rather extend to the superstructure itself. On both sides of the Ely seal, the highly risen, open triple-arcades are crowned by spectacular sets of roofs and towers. They barely resemble the layout of any contemporary church building, but rather suggest the monumental shrine bases and the tombs of great ecclesiastics and lay magnates, erected in the interior of so many thirteenth-century English churches.51 At Ely, bishop Hugh of Northwold (in office 1229–54), rebuilt the old Romanesque sanctuary of the cathedral giving the cult of St Etheldreda and her saintly sisters and nieces a new splendid setting. His intention was to make this church compatible with the flourishing cults of recently canonised bishops in other contemporary English cathedrals.52 Although the new seal’s matrices were carved in the early 1280s when there was no significant construction work underway on the precinct of Ely Cathedral, its micro-architectural settings, however, bear witness to the monks’ knowledge of recent developments in what Nicola Coldstream has called the ‘illuminated architecture’ of the Decorated Style.53
In the Ely example, the overall presence of architecture had the capacity to balance the key roles of Etheldreda and Peter in the hierarchy of Ely’s pantheon of saints. In this regard, the seal became the model for many monastic common seals in the fourteenth century, such as the second common seal of nearby Peterborough Abbey.54 But memorialising the glorious past of Ely cathedral priory was not only a question of images on the surface, but rather one of the seal’s material appearances. Only when the matrices for both picture fields were jointly impressed into the wax, did the seal cover the ‘secrets’ of the church of Ely, as the circumscription around the rim explicitly points out.