XIII. Henry d’Étoutteville (Fig. 3.20)
Henry was a leading baron of the Pays de Caux and also held substantial lands in England before 1204, some of which he later recovered.99 The mould of his seal shows that it bore arms of barry, a lion rampant facing sinister.
XIV. Ralph Taisson (Fig. 3.21)
Ralph Taisson was one of the chief barons of western and central Normandy and a former chief seneschal of the duchy; until 1204 he had held lands in England.100 His seal bears an ornate shield with arms of barry of six cotised and diapered.101 The shield is between an estoile and crescent moon, and also, more unusually, a capital R and T to represent the sigillant’s initials.
XV. Henry de Ferrières (Fig. 3.22)
Henry, a cousin of the Ferrers earls of Derby, had his lordship around Ferrières-Saint-Hilaire, Chambrais (now Broglie) and Bourgthéroulde in central Normandy, and had held several manors in Rutland and Gloucestershire until 1204.102 The horseshoes on his seal and counterseal are the only ‘canting’ devices amongst the seals on the Rouen declaration. Although, as we have seen, seals with canting symbols had been used in Normandy for at least 40 years, Ferrières’ example is one of the earliest Norman heraldic seals with canting arms.103
XVI. Robert de Courcy (Fig. 3.23)
Robert de Courcy was the head of the ‘Norman’ branch of one of the oldest and most renowned families from central Normandy, and had lost lands in Hampshire and Kent in 1204.104 Robert had an equestrian seal; beneath the horseman was a small four-legged creature filling the curve of the seal, too damaged by 1863 to allow certain identification.105
E.–F. Lost seals known from other examples
Three other seals can be described from elsewhere, although only the first was certainly being used by its owner in 1205.
XVII. Renaud, count of Boulogne (Fig. 3.24, a, b) Renaud de Dammartin was the most powerful of the barons at the inquest at Rouen, one of the most ambitious, and arguably the most notorious.106 Not surprisingly, at 80 mm across his seal was the largest by a considerable margin. It represents an early example of a pair of designs that would become very common in the thirteenth century but which was still almost unknown in Normandy in 1205, namely an equestrian obverse with a heraldic counterseal.107 On the obverse, the rider’s arms were clearly displayed as those of the counts of Dammartin, barry of six within a bordure: the counterseal depicts a shield with the same arms.108
XVIII. William de Serans (Fig. 3.25, a, b)
While no examples of the seal of this knight, who hailed from the district of Argentan, survive today, one existed in the Archives de la Manche until the Second World War. Demay’s inventory of Norman seals describes it as equestrian but provides no details except the inscription; an early twentieth-century photograph, now in the Archives du Calvados, reveals that the horseman did not bear a coat of arms on his shield, while Demay’s moulage in the Archives Nationales indicates its size.109
XIX. John de Rouvray
John, a knight from Rouvray-Catillon in the Pays de Bray, had joined Philip Augustus as early as 1194, and in 1204 he had negotiated the surrender of Norman castles with John de Préaux on King Philip’s behalf, at a time when each had a brother defending Rouen for King John.110 A seal of his survived in 1857 on an act of 1229, but is now lost: it had a shield bearing barry, a lion rampant,111 and these arms were used on the seals of his descendants.112 It is plausible that John was using the same seal in 1205: if so, he had already added a lion to the barruly arms borne by his elder brother Osbert, whose seal design is known from a Gaignières drawing.113
G. Unknown seals
The seals of the remaining three sigillants are not known from any extant examples.
XX. Philip de Vassy
Philip de Vassy was a prominent baron in the diocese of Bayeux. At least one original act of his survives, but without its seal.114
XXI. Odo, castellan of Beauvais
The castellans of Beauvais had once been powerful in the city and diocese of Beauvais but had had their wings clipped in the twelfth century by the king of France and bishops of Beauvais.115 Despite his non-Norman title, Odo had been involved in Norman affairs long before 1193, and so was certainly eligible to state the customs governing the Norman church under Henry II and Richard I.116
XXII. Thomas de Pavilly
Thomas was the head of the ‘Norman’ branch of a prominent Anglo-Norman family; he also held lands in Hertfordshire and Norfolk until 1204, and his three sons would recover these in the 1230s.117 An act that Thomas granted to the abbey of Beaubec survives but has lost its seal.118
Paul Harvey and Andrew McGuinness have written that documents with multiple seals ‘provide a valuable snapshot of the seals that were in use by a particular group of people’.119 On that basis, the diversity of designs and sizes on the seals attached to the declaration of 1205 is very striking. Within a group of 19 seals, we find traditional equestrian seals, newly fashionable armorial ones, symbolic, and Classical (or classicising) seals; large and small, single- and double-sided, oval and circular; ‘great’ and ‘privy’ seals. Some fall into a common pattern from their lineage, others depart radically from the seals of their kin.
The wide range of designs contrasts strongly with the similarity of the sigillants. It is true that there were big differences in social status, ancestry, ambition, power, and geographical concerns between the count of Boulogne or the representatives of ancient Norman lignages such as Courcy and Ferrières on the one hand, and the novi homines Nicholas de Montagny and John de Rouvray on the other. The Capetian clerk who categorised the magnates of the realm into ‘counts’, ‘barons’, ‘castellans’ and ‘vavassors’ placed members of the Rouen group in all four categories, and omitted eleven of the 22 sigillants altogether.120 Despite these social distinctions, the jurors shared a common status as a large part of the élite of the new Capetian Normandy. Eighteen of them or their heirs would be numbered amongst the 60 knights-banneret of Normandy listed in the Registers of Philip Augustus a few years later.121 Their statements at Rouen in 1205 represented the Norman aristocracy’s collective response to the Capetian takeover, and so the social differences between them mattered much less than their joint action.
The document of 1205 catches a unique stage in Norman history, and the seals in their turn catch a particular moment in the history of Norman seals when a number of different artistic traditions rubbed shoulders with each other. The seals attached to the document were much more diverse than Norman seals 30 years earlier, which were mostly symbolic or equestrian. They were also much more varied than Norman seals 30 years later, which were mostly armorial or, to a lesser extent, equestrian at the upper end of the social scale, and symbolic at the lower end. By then, the revitalised office of vicomte was leading to the introduction of small, symbolic (usually floral) seals for the many acts of these Capetian officers, which became one of the dominant forms of validation of transactions by 1300. The vicomtes’ seals had their ecclesiastical counterpart in the small seals which the diocesan officials increasingly adopted. Hence the seals of the declaration of 1205 stand as one aspect of a flowering of diplomatic innovation and experimentation that replaced earlier traditions in a much more oral society, and which would be superseded in turn by a more formal culture with more standardised legal conventions and documents.
Many of these conclusions apply to the broader sealing culture of much of Latin Christendom at the beginning of the thirteenth century. As we have seen, of the 22 sigillants of the Rouen declaration, 16 had held lands in England before 1204, and four of them, Renaud of Boulogne, Henry d’Étoutteville, William de Préaux and Robert d’Esneval, would actually recover or acquire English lands after 1205, as would Thomas de Pavilly’s sons. Of the six who had not been English landowners,122 Roger de Meulan and John de Rouvray came from families which had held property in England until 1204.123 Conversely, four of the jurors (the count of Boulogne, the castellan of Beauvais, John de Rouvray, and Roger de Meulan) had lands in other parts of France. The seals came from a much wider Anglo-French political, diplomatic and sigillographic context. Although the legal contexts of England and Normandy diverged significantly after the Capetian conquest of Normandy in 1204, with consequences for other features of sealed charters such as witness-lists and dating clauses, Norman seals developed in patterns similar to neighbouring parts of Europe. The seals attached to the declaration concerning the Norman Church in 1205 represent a cross-section of the Norman lay aristocracy at a turning-point in the duchy’s history, but they also can be taken as a representative sample of aristocratic seals in western Europe at a crucial stage in the development of the use and design of these fascinating objects.