The other thirteenth-century seal made for the city and included on the Plan is the Statute Merchant seal and its small counterseal (Figs 13.13 and 13.14). An extensive memorandum on the dorse of the Treasurer’s Remembrancer’s Roll for 1298 records the circumstances of its manufacture and delivery.²⁹ The purpose of these seals was to ensure the security of debts and they were first made in 1283 for major cities. Apparently in 1295 Norwich petitioned to be included in their number and three years later the two matrices were ready for collection in London and were delivered to two citizens of Norwich, the larger seal to William But, one of the city’s four bailiffs in the late 1280s and early ’90s, and the small ‘clerk’s’ seal to John de Kirkby. The design of the obverse was standard, but the counterseals were sometimes specific to their cities; London’s had a half-length image of St Paul, and Oxford’s an ox.³⁰ The engraving on Blomefield’s plan does not well depict what was provided for Norwich: a half-length figure of Christ rising from within a walled enclosure (Fig. 13.14). This was intended to represent the Resurrection and followed in broad terms the seal made for Norwich Cathedral chapter in the second quarter of the twelfth century.³¹ It is one of a number of indicators that the Resurrection was a major devotional focus in the city, one which persisted into the sixteenth century (see below). From the misrepresentation of the subject matter on Blomefield’s Plan it seems certain all that was available was a weak impression rather than the original matrix or a cast from it (Fig. 13.15). Indeed, the loose impression now in the British Library was almost certainly the source. This impression is one of a large collection made apparently by Peter Le Neve, whose handwriting appears on several of the parchment tags.³² This body of material seems to have passed to Thomas Martin, which would explain how Blomefield knew it. These loose seals provided the basis for about half the other seals engraved on the Plan. When it came to the obverse of the Statute Merchant seal, however, Blomefield apparently had direct recourse to the matrix, which he describes as ‘exceedingly fine’ and as being kept in the Norwich Guildhall.³³ It was apparently still extant in 1895 when Jewitt and Hope wrote the account of the Norwich civic regalia and described it as ‘of silver’ while commenting that the small counterseal was ‘now lost’.³⁴ What has become of it in the interim is an unresolved question.