Hovering somewhere between the offices of sigillifer and spigurnel, a story told by Walter Map reports the complaints of Thurstan fitz Simon, the King’s hereditary dispenser, that a member of the chancery staff, the sigillator Adam of Yarmouth, had failed to issue him with letters setting out Thurstan’s office and duties, letters that Map tells us were customarily sealed gratis on behalf of all officers of the court. On investigation it transpired that Thurstan had earlier refused a request from Adam for two royal cakes (liba de dominicis) with which to entertain guests. The King therefore had Adam sit himself ‘at the bench’ (ad scamnum) with the seal and Thurstan’s writ, and Thurstan appear before him on bended knee, without his mantle, and present him with two cakes wrapped in a white napkin, after which Adam was to grant Thurstan his writ. Master Adam of Yarmouth, a clerk who appears elsewhere in the records of Henry II’s court, may well have been serving as ‘spigurnel’. Certainly his title and duties as sigillator seem to distinguish him from those of the scribe or signator.⁵⁶ Here we can already find a subtle distinction between titles related to the word sigillum (the seal, as in sigillifer or sigillator) that seem already to diverge from those derived from the word signum (such as signator, associated with signing or writing).⁵⁷

Given the role that their bearers played in issuing letters under the King’s seal, the seals of the King’s seal-keepers are themselves of no small interest. Of the men who can be identified as chancellors or seal keepers under Henry II, we have surviving impressions of the seals of Thomas Becket and of Geoffrey Plantagenet, the King’s bastard son and chancellor, both seals later recycled as counterseals to the seals used by Becket as archbishop of Canterbury, and by Geoffrey as archbishop of York.⁵⁸ We also have at least three impressions of the seal of a man named Nicholas de Sigillo, a prominent Southampton landowner and hereditary keeper of the King’s galley, archdeacon of Huntingdon from c. 1164 until his death c. 1192. Nicholas witnessed a dozen or so surviving writs and charters of Henry II, for the most part in England, often in close association with Thomas Becket as chancellor.⁵⁹ He was identified by T. A. M. Bishop as Henry II’s seal keeper, although there is no direct evidence for this other than his name and the fact that one of his private charters is written in the hand of a known chancery scribe.⁶⁰ His seal, of which at least three impressions survive, displays an image taken from a fine classical gemstone, showing a beast of prey, probably a lion, grasping another animal by the neck. The prey was perhaps intended to signify a deer, but could well have been read in the twelfth-century as a dragon or other serpent-headed creature (Fig. 2.7).⁶¹ Such seals, in which one animal preys upon another, were fairly common in and around the royal court, being found for example on the seals of the Redvers earls of Devon, which showed an elephant attacked by a gryphon.⁶² On a much more peaceable note, Walter de Coutances, Henry II’s seal keeper in the late 1170s, may have used a seal showing the Agnus Dei and banner, later recycled as his counterseal as archbishop of Rouen, although there is doubt here as to whether this was a device only adopted after Walter’s promotion as archbishop.⁶³ The seals used by others of Henry II’s seal-keepers, Geoffrey Ridel and Ralph de Varneville, seem not to have been reused as counterseals when these men obtained promotion as bishops and are therefore lost to us.⁶⁴ William Longchamps, chancellor to Henry II’s son Richard both before and after Richard’s accession as King, from 1189 onwards employed a seal describing him as ‘chancellor of the King’, used as an episcopal counterseal. This showed the sun and moon, but can only have been made after the accession of Richard as King and was therefore in all likelihood intended as a homage to Richard I’s first great seal, itself showing two suns and two crescent moons.⁶⁵

Having dealt with the hard evidence for Henry’s seal keepers, let us return to the more speculative question of other seals that may have been used by Henry II, in addition to his great or Exchequer seals. As early as the 1150s, we know that the chancellor, Thomas Becket, was frequently not at the King’s side, during the Toulouse campaign for example, or during Becket’s famous embassy to Paris. This itself would imply the appointment of deputies or vice-chancellors to seal documents in the chancellor’s absence. It might also suggest that the King had means other than the application of his double-sided great seal to authenticate his letters and instructions.

Just such a means, a ‘private’ or ‘privy’ seal, is implied as early as 1191 in Gerald of Wales’ reference to letters of Richard I sealed at Messina ‘with both seals, both large and small’ (una cum regio mandato utroque sigillo, tam maiore scilicet quam minore, munito). As Pierre Chaplais notes, this is far more likely to refer to a privy seal carried with the King on Crusade than it is to suggest the resealing, in England, with the Exchequer seal left behind in England, of letters sent under the great seal from Sicily.⁶⁶ Attempts have been made to identify a signet ring, now in the British Museum, as Richard’s ‘small’ seal, set with a chrome chalcedony intaglio with a figure (?Minerva or Mercury) carrying a brand with the letter N, surrounded by the inscription S(IGILLVM) RICHARD(I) RE(GIS) P(?RIVATVM).⁶⁷ But the object in the British Museum is of extremely doubtful provenance, not least because of the ambiguities of its inscription (S’ RICHARD’ RE’ P’). Richard was precisely the sort of figure to whom spuria, plausible or otherwise, were likely to become attached. So too, of course, was Henry II. We must therefore tread with caution in addressing the evidence, circulating within forty years of Henry death, that he himself had possessed a small seal or signet.

A description of this object occurs in a monastic (almost certainly English, perhaps Cistercian) collection of the early thirteenth century, the so-called Distinctiones Monasticae, known from a single manuscript, once at S. Nicolas Angers, now in the Bibliothèque Mazarine at Paris.⁶⁸ The passage in question was first published in the 1850s, its significance being immediately apparent to its editor, J. B. Pitra.⁶⁹ Léopold Delisle drew further attention to it in notices published in 1856 and 1857.⁷⁰ However, since Pitra’s edition was of bewildering confusion, with no clear indication of the date or reliability of his source, the passage itself has tended to be politely noted but just as politely dismissed by all subsequent authorities.⁷¹ As published by Pitra, and below checked against the Paris manuscript, the passage in question occurs as part of a commentary on the word ‘currus’ for chariot. Here, the author of the Distinctiones notices various allegorical meanings attached to the word, including the fact that currus was associated with the classical idea of the triumph, the most glorious of which was in a chariot laureatum:⁷²

Unde priuatum sigillum H(enrici) filii comitis Andegauensis et Matildis imperatricis quondam regis Anglorum sculptos habebat in iaspide currum et serpentem trahentem currum cum superscriptione hac in metallo:

Signum signo meum signo signante tropheum. Quod prudenter ago, signat serpentis ymago

The chief reason to doubt the authenticity of this description is the length of the hexameters, that one might suspect were too long to have been inscribed on a signet. Yet we have other twelfth-century counterseals on which two concentric circles of inscription allow the insertion of even longer legends, for example that (in both Latin and French) on one of the counterseals used by Hugh earl of Chester c. 1170.⁷³ As to the image itself, the serpent drawing a chariot fits perfectly into the tradition of reusing classical intaglios as counterseals. What was surely an even more bizarre classical image, an abrasax-stone (of gnostic origin) showing the mystic divinity Abrasax with the head of a cockerel, the body of a man and the legs of a serpent, carrying a shield and a flail, was employed, albeit recorded only once, as legendless counterseal to a charter of Louis VII of France issued in 1174 (Fig. 2.8).⁷⁴ In the following year, 1175–76, Louis employed another classical gem as counterseal, showing an image of Diana with bow and quiver, and the legend +LODOVICVS REX.⁷⁵ There is no clear indication whether Henry II’s ‘privy’ seal was used before or after his accession as King, perhaps even as early as the 1140s when, as we have seen, Henry presumably possessed a seal used to authenticate his letters and charters before his accession either as duke or later as King. But as Pitra noted, there as at least some evidence for a family tradition here, linking the seal described in the Distinctiones Monasticae and the classical gem stone known to have been used by Henry II’s son, the future King John, prior to his accession as King.⁷⁶ This appears as a counterseal to his seal used as lord of Ireland and count of Mortain, bearing an image of a (?male) head and carrying the legend SECRETVM IOHANNIS.⁷⁷

If we turn to the iconography of the object described in the Distinctiones, there is at least one rather intriguing aspect of this story not previously noticed. Henry II’s supposed device, a chariot drawn by a serpent, is strikingly reminiscent of the drakones which are said to have drawn the flying chariot of Medea. This was a classical symbol that might be thought to have uncomfortable associations with sorcery. In reality, such associations, far from being repellent, might have appealed to the Plantagenet family with its supposed descent from the she-devil Mélusine. As early as the 1150s, St Bernard is said to have declared of the future King Henry II, ‘From the Devil he came, and to the Devil he will surely go’, whilst the future Richard I positively revelled in his family’s sulphurous reputation, referring to himself with pride as Mélusine’s heir.⁷⁸ Medea and her drakones were widely known in the Middle Ages, chiefly through Ovid (Metamorphoses, 7.217–41, 350–6, 391–401). They are not included amongst the stories told of Medea in Benoît de Sainte-Maure’s Roman de Troie (c. 1160), a work assumed to have been written under the patronage either of Henry II or Eleanor of Aquitaine, in which Medea is accorded a particularly prominent role not just as noble heiress to her father’s kingdom but as a sorceress.⁷⁹ Benoît nonetheless makes much of a magic gold ring that Medea gave to Jason to protect him from the serpent’s bite, whilst the story of Medea’s children by Jason and her flight by chariot following their murder is clearly implied in Benoît’s references to Medea’s subsequent revenge upon her betrayer.⁸⁰