We have already encountered the King’s dispenser, Thurstan fitz Simon in the writings of Walter Map, obliged by the King to go on bended knee to present another court official with a royal ‘cake’ as peace offering. What may well be this same cake was adopted as the device on the seals of Thurstan and his son, both of which show a cake or loaf displayed on an elaborate dish (Figs 2.17 and 2.18).¹³⁰ Robert Belet employed a seal that showed him seated on a wine barrel with a knife in either hand: a reference to his office as hereditary butler to the court of Henry II, yet also a deliberate and irreverent imitation of the majesty side of the King’s great seal, here replacing the throne with a barrel, and the orb and sword with the tools of the butler’s trade.¹³¹ A similarly mimetic image appears on the seal of Thomas fitz Noel, sheriff of Staffordshire in the 1180s, that today survives only in a defaced state but that appears to show Thomas seated, arms outstretched, with a ball or cup in each hand (Fig. 2.19).¹³² Thomas Basset (d. c. 1182), sheriff of Oxfordshire and royal justice used both a standard equestrian baronial seal and a smaller classical seal, apparently impressed from a Roman gemstone (Fig. 2.20). This showed a seated semi-naked classical warrior, with shield and ?spear, perhaps intended by Thomas to represent largesse or justice enthroned.¹³³ Henry d’Oilly II (d. 1196) used an oval seal, impressed from a classical or classicised gemstone showing a mounted warrior riding from right to left. Since its legend reads merely +SIGILLVM HENRICI DOLI it could in theory have been inherited from his father, Henry d’Oilly I (d. 1163), sheriff of Oxfordshire and constable at Henry II’s court.¹³⁴ At the opposite end of the spectrum from the classicising pretensions of Thomas Basset or Henry d’Oilly, we find the seal of Osbert de Capella, King’s servant (seruiens), a remarkable object without any legend (Fig. 2.21), distinguished merely by three regular and deeply impressed indentations. Assuming an identity between Osbert de Capella and Osbert clerk of the King’s chamber, these indentations were perhaps made with the ends of the keys that Osbert had in his custody as keeper of the King’s most precious itinerant treasures.¹³⁵

Humour can be found not only in the images but the legends of courtier seals. Stephen of Thurnham, one of the King’s enforcers, employed a conventional round equestrian seal, but complemented it with a counterseal bearing the legend DEVS SALVET CUI MITTOR.¹³⁶ The nineteenth-century cataloguer of this inscription translated it with fine chivalric sentiment as ‘God save her to whom I am escort’. To contemporaries, only too aware of Stephen’s potential to harm them, it might more readily have been interpreted as a warning: ‘God save him to whom I am sent!’¹³⁷ I have argued elsewhere that such seals supply what early modern historians would term a ‘hidden transcript’, revealing the gulf between the majesty projected in Plantagenet self-representation and the underlying sense that the Plantagenet dynasty was an upstart phenomenon, with violence and repression as its chief sustaining characteristics.¹³⁸

Let us end this survey with yet further evidence of self-consciousness. Whatever we make of the idea of nationalism before the nation state, it is clear that there was competition amongst princes in their choice of symbols, and that heraldic devices only intensified this competition. The leopards or lions of England, first recorded in the 1150s or 60s, were directly challenged by the fleurs de lys of France, themselves incorporated into the counterseal of Philip Augustus from the 1180s onwards, ubiquitous by the early thirteenth century when Gerald of Wales could mock at King John and his allies as pards and lions fleeing from the very scent of the flower of France.¹³⁹ That other sovereigns used similar symbols is not in doubt: by the thirteenth century, the kings of Castile were sealing their more solemn charters with a lead bulla that showed on one side a canting towered castle (for Castile) and on the other a lion rampant (for León).¹⁴⁰ Equally intriguing are the instances in which rivals of the kings of England were provoked into challenging English hegemony. One such instance is relatively well known: from only a few years after the introduction of the DEI GRATIA formula to the seals of kings William II and Henry I of England, the rulers of Scotland chose to incorporate within the legends to their seals a claim that they were RECTORE DEO REX SCOTTORVM.¹⁴¹ A related instance seems never before to have been noticed, but is particularly appropriate in the present context, in an essay contributed to a volume first inspired by the cataloguing of seals surviving in Wales. It concerns what appears to be a unique record of the seal of the Lord Rhys, prince of South Wales (d. 1197).

On the tomb effigy attributed to him in St David’s Cathedral, Rhys is shown in full armour, his head resting on the body of a lion with a lion rampant displayed on his breast. There is no doubt, however, that this tomb is a much later monument, either to Rhys or to another knight, probably of the late fourteenth century.¹⁴² Previously unnoticed, in the College of Arms, however, there survives a description c. 1600, without illustration, of a seal attributed to the Lord Rhys, preserved on a charter then belonging to the Talbot family.¹⁴³ That there was a deliberate honouring of the memory of Rhys ap Gryffyd by the Talbots is well known. Indeed, the tomb at St David’s has been tentatively attributed to Talbot family patronage, and its heraldry (‘a lion rampant within a bordure engrailed’) is identical to that used by the Talbots themselves as their coat of arms from at least 1301.¹⁴⁴ The seal described from the Talbot deed, however, showed not a lion but a conventional equestrian warrior. What is much more intriguing, its counterseal is described as showing a horse ‘passant’, with flowing mane and tail, with the legend: SECRETUM RESI.¹⁴⁵ The significance of horse symbols to the ‘Celtic’ world is well known. It places Rhys in that same milieu as Gerald of Wales’ account of the ‘inauguration’ ritual of those kings of Ulster, said to have bathed themselves in freshly slaughtered horse-meat.¹⁴⁶

The Welsh seal suggests that competitive symbolism may have extended from Henry II’s chief enemies in the south and east to those on his most westerly frontiers. Even if our report of it is merely a much later attempt to assign heraldic symbolism to a Welsh prince himself with no real interest in such things, it reveals the longstanding desire to supply each nation with its appropriate zoomorphic symbolism. Henry II already had the lion. If the Distinctiones Monastici are to be believed, he also had the dragon or the serpent. In this environment of competing symbols, Henry’s reported dispatch of a ‘panther’ to his son-in-law, the King of Castile, could be interpreted not only as proof of his own leonine pretensions but as a deliberate reference to Castilian rivalry with the neighbouring kings of Lèon, themselves now represented by the lion. In such circumstances, what more natural development than that the Welsh should seek to appropriate the symbolism of the horse?

In all of this, the seals of Henry II, his courtiers, friends and rivals, mirror far wider concerns of twelfth-century kingship. They revel not just in humour but in provocation, not just in family but in much more ancient classical associations. They combine wit with boastfulness, innovation with deep reverence for the past. They are, in short, fit symbols of a dynasty and court poised between soaring ambition and bottomless self-doubt. In any discussion of Plantagenet court culture they should henceforth play a significant part.