The orderly arrangement of these seals and the principles underlying it give an indication of the motives for their inclusion which, to a degree, apply elsewhere on the Plan. Immediately to the left of the two-sided common seal are grouped those of three of the Norwich friaries, the Carmelites, Franciscans and Dominicans, also apparently from a similar period (Fig. 13.22).41 Blomefield’s interest in these places as part of the social fabric of the city, receiving donations and accommodating burials, shows the historian in him at work, transcending his own Anglicanism to recuperate pre-Reformation institutional organisation. As Blomefield recognised, since he analyses it in detail, the most remarkable of the seals shows a miracle of St Dominic in which a book refuting heresies is dropped into a fire by the heretics he is seeking to convert and is retrieved, or indeed ‘jumps out’ undamaged (Fig. 13.23). Although he does not comment on the reason for this choice of subject, it is hard not to associate it with the burning of the Dominican church in Norwich in 1413, a time of increasing anxiety about the Lollard ‘heresies’, and the subsequent rebuilding of the church using elements that were saved undamaged from the flames, but with major new elements paid for by the Cliftons, among others.42 The fact that from 1401 being burned alive was the punishment for relapsed heretics would have added a further dimension to this story.
The inclusion nearby of the seals of Bishop Walter Suffield (Fig. 13.24) and the Hospital of St Giles (Fig. 13.25), of which he was the founder, indicate Blomefield’s interest in medieval charitable foundations, but in this case one that survived the Reformation and indeed is still functioning today, and known after its refoundation in 1547 as the Great Hospital.43 A similar motive probably explains the choice of the (counter)seal of Bishop John Salmon (Fig. 13.26) who founded the College of St John the Evangelist, now largely famous for the survival of its so-called Carnary Chapel, which today is part of Norwich School. The College had an educational function at least by the early fifteenth century but also developed legal and gild functions, thereby tying the cathedral more closely to the life of the city.
The largest seal on the Plan (Fig. 13.27) can be fitted into this picture of charitable donations and continuity across the Reformation. It belonged to Matthew Parker, archbishop of Canterbury from 1559–1575, who was born and raised in Norwich and shows an ambitiously detailed image of the Last Judgement, with Christ enthroned as the dominant figure.44 It is placed near the image of the silver-gilt ewer donated by Parker to the city. In addition, the archbishop created six annual scholarships at Cambridge for young men from the city and was instrumental in removing some of the heat from arguments between conservatives and reformers in the cathedral chapter.45 If that were not enough to recommend him to Blomefield, Parker’s formative role in the Elizabethan settlement, linking the English Church of his day to its early Anglo-Saxon ‘origins’ would probably have clinched it. Displaying Parker’s seals (the signet is there too) adjacent to the charities set up by Thomas Gooch to support the widows and orphans of clergymen was perhaps a piece of flattery but possibly also exhortation to him to go further in emulating one of the city’s most famous sons.
However, Parker’s seal is not the only reference to Canterbury, for also depicted is the sigillum commisarii prioris cantuarie explained by Blomefield as used by the ‘Guardian to the See during its vacancies’ (Fig. 13.28). It is placed immediately below what is, in many respects, the most surprising inclusion: the seal of Anthony Bek, bishop of Norwich from 1337–43 (Fig. 13.29). Bek, a papal appointee to the See, had a poor reputation, and Blomefield repeats the story that he died as a result of being poisoned by one of the monks.46 He made, however, one notable move, contesting the archbishop of Canterbury’s right of visitation of the monastery and diocese of Norwich. As a result, Archbishop Stratford placed Bek and his diocese under Inderdict, but too late as Bek had already appealed to the Pope. As a result Stratford found himself on the back foot and the case was not resolved as he would have wanted. Though it is unlikely that Gooch, Master of Caius College, Cambridge and successively bishop of Bristol, Norwich and Ely needed any lessons in politics from Blomefield, the purpose of including this minor victory was perhaps to show a necessary balance between local and national authority, and to remind future bishops of Norwich that the metropolitan’s involvement in the diocese could be beneficial but also a threat.47
Easier to understand than Bek’s presence is the twelfth-century conventual seal of St Benet’s Abbey at Holm (Fig. 13.30). Founded as a Benedictine monastery in 1019 during King Cnut’s reign, it had been transferred to the bishopric by Henry VIII, making the bishop titular abbot. Along with certain furnishings and fittings, this brought ownership of the Abbey’s swans, and the captions to the recorded swan marks on Blomefield’s Plan make this point specifically, adding ‘now the Bishop’s’ to those formerly belonging to the Abbey and its cellarer. There is much more that could be said about the ways in which the seals on the map function as micro-narratives of continuity in the history of the city and its cathedral, and of its author’s motives. But we hope that it is already clear that the seals on Blomefield’s Plan are far from a random collection, or just what happened to be available. They are a partial selection, in both senses of the word, designed to combine a tone of historically based moral direction with a necessary nod to authority. There are many details still to be established, such as how images of the seals and their appropriate positions were conveyed to the engraver, and how far it is demonstrable that Blomefield himself knew the information that we are suggesting underpinned his selection. But whatever the outcome of further work through the survey of Norwich seals, we are already in a position to marvel at the ambition and flair demonstrated by Francis Blomefield in putting these seals on his map. As so often the case too, several of these engravings remain to this day the only published images of the seals’ appearance. Indeed in a few cases where the matrix is lost and no impressions or casts are known, Blomefield’s Plan provides the only evidence that such a seal once existed. For this reason too, the work of Blomefield and that other antiquaries of the early modern period will always be a fundamental aspect of the study of seals.
Abbreviations:
NCM – Norwich Castle Museum
Colman – Colman Cast Collection
E Norwich – Norwich Ecclesiastical Series
Neville-Rolfe – Neville-Rolfe Cast Collection
C Norfolk – Conventual Norfolk Series
L Norfolk – Local Norfolk Series
Blomefield – Blomefield, F. and Parkin, C., An Essay Towards a Topographical History of the County of Norfolk: Containing a Description of the Towns, Villages, and Hamlets, 5 vols (Fersfield, 1739–1775) 2nd edn., 11 vols. (London, 1805–10).
De Gray Birch – De Gray Birch, W., Catalogue of Seals in the Department of Manuscripts in the British Museum, 6 vols (London: British Museum, 1887–1900).
The following table includes extant matrices, impressions and casts of the seals mentioned on the plan, representing the progress to date on the survey of the sigillographic collections in Norwich Castle Museum.
