And so we return from the King himself to his court. The majority of Henry II’s courtiers whose seals have survived employed conventionally episcopal or baronial imagery, in the latter case most often single-sided and equestrian, The equestrian images in such cases are mostly mounted and armed with shield and sword. On occasion, however, as with the seals of the King’s falconers William de Hauville or William of Weekley, or with Stephen de Marçay, Henry II’s seneschal of Anjou (Fig. 2.13), the subject can be depicted on horseback in pursuit of the King’s favourite sport of falconry.¹²² William of Weekley’s seal offers an intriguing blend of secular and pious motifs, showing its owner on one side hawking, but with a counterseal of a four-winged seraph surrounded by the opening words of the Angelus, AVE:MARIA:GRATIA:PLENA (Figs 2.14 and 2.15).¹²³ The juxtaposition here of hawks and archangels surely tells us something of the often grim humour of Henry’s court.

That there was considerable self-consciousness to these seals is apparent in other instances where courtier seals employ puns or mimic the seal of the King. Some seals were canting, as was that of Richard de Lucy, a native of Lucé in the Orne (cant. Juvigny-sous-Andaine), who used the pun Lucy/lucius as the basis for a seal unusual in being vesica (i.e. fish) shaped, showing an image of a large fish, clearly a pike.¹²⁴ Ignored by Pliny and Isidore, the pike or ‘lucius’ is nonetheless described by Henry II’s contemporary, Alexander Neckham, as the ‘water wolf ’, a ‘ravager’ of the aquatic world, from whose gullet there is no escape.¹²⁵ It is particularly significant that Richard de Lucy should have opted for such a device given his own reported outburst against the petty knights of his generation who affected the use of seals even though their ancestors could claim no such privilege, better reserved to ‘kings and great men’.¹²⁶ What may have been the legend of Richard’s seal, lost from the original impressions but preserved in an antiquary drawing, reads SIGILLUM RIC(ARD)I DE IURIS PACE (Fig. 2.16).¹²⁷ If this was indeed the seal’s legend then there may have been a deliberate pun here, depending upon how one translates the words de iuris pace, either (in Latin) as ‘concerning the peace of the law’ or (far more menacingly, in Middle English) ‘from your (or from the law’s) pike’ (Middle English ‘pik/peke’).¹²⁸ That the seal was always potentially humorous is suggested by the counterseal of Richard’s son, Godfrey de Lucy, bishop of Winchester. This shows the head of a pike issuing from water, open-mouthed, holding a bird or other animal in its mouth, behind this a pastoral staff, apparently in acknowledgement of the voracity of Godfrey’s appetite for episcopal office.¹²⁹