Meanwhile, what are probably lions rather than leopards make their earliest appearance in Plantagenet sigillography in the 1150s or early 1160s, on the single-sided equestrian seal of Henry II’s brother, William. On the one surviving impression of this seal, attached to a charter preserved at Burghley House, they are today so badly rubbed that only the lion rampant displayed on the figure’s shield is visible.¹⁰² They are recorded, however, both in an early twentieth-century description of this same charter, and in drawings, by Robert Glover (c. 1597), and in Sir Christopher Hatton’s ‘Book of Seals’, of two other charters of the King’s brother on whose seals William is shown on horseback with a lion rampant on his shield, and with a further two lions or leopards rampant on the front and back of the caparison or cloth that covers his horse, all of these lions facing to the right and in the same direction (see Fig. 2.6).¹⁰³ If Henry II bore arms – and the chronicler Ernoul certainly assumed that les armes le roi d’Engletiere could be carried on the banner of troops serving at Jerusalem in 1187 – no record of them today survives.¹⁰⁴ But lions appear thereafter on the shield of the equestrian side to the seals of King Richard I and John, including two lions passant/couchant facing to the left on the shield of the single-sided equestrian seal employed by the future King John before 1199, today known only from impressions attached to charters issued as count of Mortain, after 1189, but bearing an inscription identifying John as son of Henry II and lord of Ireland, without reference to Mortain, hence almost certainly first used before 1189, perhaps made at the time of John’s knighting in 1185.¹⁰⁵ They appear again (as three lions passant facing to the left) on John’s great seal as King of England in use from the summer of 1199, the three lions or leopards of England thereafter becoming the standard arms of England’s kings.¹⁰⁶

The association between Henry II and the lion is a significant one. It reminds us that Henry is the first English king certainly linked with the newly-emerging science of heraldry. It also explains the appearance of a lion on the only seal other than Henry’s own great or Exchequer seals, known to have been employed in the sealing of the King’s charters. A unique original charter of Henry II, from the archives of the Cistercian Abbey of Le Valasse near Rouen, is undoubtedly authentic, written in the hand of the identified chancery scribe XXXV (‘Master Germanus’). It can be dated between 1170 and July 1178, apparently after the King’s first crossing to Normandy following his adoption of the Dei gratia style, and perhaps before his departure for England in May 1175. It is sealed in natural wax with a single-sided seal impression, approximately 72 mm in diameter, showing a lion passant facing to the left, with elaborately curved tail trailing over the lion’s back, a six pointed flower or star in the ground between the lion’s two front legs, the lion itself with a frog-like mouth or maw, legend entirely defaced.¹⁰⁷

This same seal is elsewhere identified as the first seal of the commune of the men of Rouen, attached to a document now in Paris, witnessed by the King’s bailli of Rouen and by Luke de Donjon, mayor (Fig. 2.10).¹⁰⁸ Since the granting of a seal to Rouen may be associated with Henry II’s award of privileges to the city, itself to be dated to the 1170s, probably to the period after Rouen’s successful defence against the great rebellion against Henry II, and hence after August 1174, this not only narrows the dating criteria for Henry’s charter to Le Valasse but once again emphasises the close connection between the King and the symbol of the lion.¹⁰⁹ Rouen’s lion, almost certainly a royal beast, is unusual amongst civic devices, where it was far more common for fortresses, castles, or in the case of sea ports, ships, to be adopted as the principal image on town seals, very few of which can be found as early as the 1170s.¹¹⁰ Even so, the subsequent appearance of lions on the seals of other Plantagenet royal boroughs suggests that such places did on occasion adopt specifically leonine symbolism.¹¹¹ In the particular case of the seal of Rouen, and given that the King’s privileges for the men of Rouen appear to have been associated with similar grants to the men of Angers and La Rochelle, both of which communities had successfully resisted the rebellion of 1173–4, it is unfortunate that we seem to have no surviving example of a seal for the mayor or commune of Angers before 1482. The earliest surviving seals of La Rochelle date from a century and a half after the events of the 1170s.¹¹² We have very few Norman communal seals from which to draw comparisons, but the Rouen lion is nonetheless perhaps parent to the lion that appears by 1228 on the seal of the commune of Verneuil to which Henry II granted communal privileges before 1172.¹¹³ Before 1216, the reeves and bailiffs of Northampton, a royal borough with close ties to Henry II, had adopted a seal showing an animal ‘gardant’ facing to the right, with right foreleg pointing forwards and with a long tail terminating in a blob, curling across its back. This has been identified as a ‘talbot’ or hunting dog. As pointed out to me by Sandy Heslop, it is in fact a lion, albeit a more svelte beast than that of the Norman seals (Fig. 2.11).¹¹⁴