When Count Amadeus of Savoy visited London in 1292, he went shopping and purchased such things as saddles, gloves, knives, and two silver seal matrices.1Amadeus was a wealthy man who could afford luxuries, but nonetheless the range of his purchases is an indication of the extraordinary variety of goods available in the city. These goods, of course, were all made and sold by particular people. The copious written records from medieval London offer considerable information on the city’s merchants and craftsmen, but it can be difficult to determine how much social standing they had and how profitable their various types of work were.2 The purpose of this paper is to investigate the artisans who specialised in engraving seal-matrices in the period c. 1200–1330.3 Matrices were made from a range of different materials, including bone, ivory or stone, but from the thirteenth century the preferred material was metal.4 People used seal matrices to make seal-impressions, and these survive in significant numbers attached to documents. Despite the considerable evidence for the nature of their work, the artisans who engraved the seal-matrices have received little attention from scholars.5 Although it has been argued that the men who specialised in this work had relatively little social and economic standing, this paper contends that they were often well respected and prosperous.
London offers an ideal focus for an investigation of the business of seal-making. The sigillographic evidence is extensive and testifies to the types of seals in circulation.6 There is also a rich variety of documentary sources that show how Londoners used them. Seals were important in London partly because they were tools of validation and authentication. When a Londoner placed a seal on a document, it demonstrated his or her consent to its contents. An indication of the gravity of this act is the complex rules and processes that the Londoners employed to inhibit the misuse of seals.7 Londoners used seals to validate and authenticate documents, but seals could also serve as status symbols. Kings exploited this capacity of seals from an early date, and they were soon followed by other elites, including London’s leading men.8 Although the importance of seals is easy to establish, it is more difficult to discern how the business of making them was organised. The seal-makers who served the crown are well known, and they were not necessarily representative.9 Fortunately, the written sources, which include civic and royal administrative documents as well as records of property conveyance, provide considerable information on the inhabitants of the city. These records enable scholars to identify less distinguished seal-makers, and to set them in their social, spatial and economic contexts.
The earliest known seal-maker in England is Anketil, who was both a monk and a goldsmith at St Albans Abbey during the twelfth century. He was a skilled metal-worker and is described as aurifaber incomparabilis.10 He was involved in fabricating a shrine for the relics of St Alban, but he was also a moneyer and a seal-maker.11 Indeed, he fell out of favour with the abbot of St Albans when he was suspected of fabricating a seal to use fraudulently.12 For the purposes of this investigation, Anketil’s case is important because it demonstrates that seal-making was a facet of the work of goldsmiths in the twelfth century. Anketil was not a Londoner, but the city too had a notable community of skilled goldsmiths and moneyers.13 Thus at the end of the twelfth century, when a substantial numbers of Londoners were adopting seals, there were plenty of artisans in the city who had the skills needed to fabricate them.14 Nonetheless, it is not until the mid-thirteenth century that London seal-makers start to be mentioned by name in the sources.
Several men based in London and its surrounding area made seals for Henry III in the early to mid-thirteenth century. Walter de Ripa (also known as Walter the Goldsmith) engraved one in 1218.15 There are indications that he was active in the London region. He is difficult to trace in the written records, but there is a strong candidate with a connection to the city.16 Moreover, it has been argued, based on stylistic evidence, that Walter also made a seal for the city.17 In the mid-thirteenth century Edward son of Odo (also known as Edward of Westminster) took charge of fulfilling many of Henry III’s commissions, which included paintings, buildings and goldsmith work. Edward probably had ‘practical working knowledge of goldsmithy’, but his role was largely administrative.18 He was not a citizen of London but rather a resident of Westminster. Yet Lancaster argues that Edward bought most of his supplies through London merchants and recruited labour locally as well. In 1259, Edward was overseeing the fabrication of a new seal for the king himself and asked William of Gloucester to fulfill the commission.19 William was certainly a Londoner, and thus he offers the earliest known example of a London goldsmith involved in seal-making.
William was a prominent, successful and socially well-connected Londoner.20 He married into an established London family: his wife was Joan, daughter of Michael de St Helena (sheriff of London 1231–32 and alderman of Aldersgate ward within the period 1217–40).21 Lancaster has summarised the history of William’s association with the Crown. He contributed to many of the king’s projects in the 1250s and 1260s, and his importance was recognised by his appointment as ‘king’s goldsmith’.22 Moreover, he also offered some administrative assistance to the Crown, which included overseeing minting. Nonetheless, he remained identified with the city. For example, he was part of a delegation of Londoners sent by the city to the king in 1265.23 His property holdings included land in the parishes of St Michael le Querne and Nicholas Shambles.24 William’s predecessors in the property in St Michael le Querne included Ralph de Frowic, goldsmith, and Thomas of Canterbury, goldbeater. The established association of the property with goldsmiths suggests that this could have been where William operated his business.25 Certainly this was a part of the city where people expected to find goldsmiths. Immediately to the east was an area known as the ‘aurifabria’, or goldsmiths’ quarter.26
Seal-making was an occasional activity for William. As a goldsmith, he specialised in making goods from precious metal. The king commissioned him to make not only a seal, but also plate, censers and chalices. Thus seal-making was part of a prestigious goldsmith’s activities, and the same was likely true of goldsmiths more generally.27 For example, in 1354–55, the goldsmith Henry Lyrpol was accused of using ‘false metal’ to fabricate a girdle, a seal and two small plates for cups.28 Notwithstanding his fraudulent attempt to pass off his creations as silver, amongst the items was a seal. Also indicating that seal-making was an important part of the work of goldsmiths are regulations of the craft, set down in the fourteenth century, which mention ‘engravers of seals’.29 However, the goldsmiths focussed on working with gold and silver, and there were many people who could not afford a seal made from these materials.30 Indeed, seal matrices recovered in an archaeological context show that many were made from less costly metals, such as bronze, brass, pewter or lead.31 Thus there was a market for less costly seals, and the goldsmiths probably left much of this work to other artisans, who were probably members of a variety of other crafts. Elspeth Veale has argued that, in the fourteenth century, craftsmen who worked with non-ferrous metals normally made a wide range of different types of objects, including both simple and complex ones.32 Therefore, there are a number of groups of craftsmen in London that could have been involved in seal-making, such as coppersmiths and pewterers, and it is probable that they also made a significant contribution.33
Although goldsmiths and other types of metal-workers made seals, from the thirteenth century there were craftsmen who are identified specifically with this activity.34 Adam the Sealmaker (factorem sigillorum) is mention in a judicial record of 1252–53.35 A deed recording an exchange, dated February 1270, includes Peter ‘Sigillarius’ in the witness list.36 Henry de Keles ‘Sigillarius’ was party to an exchange which occurred in 1277–78.37 One way to compare them to the goldsmiths is to consider their economic standing. Tax records from 1292 and 1319 survive and they offer scholars one way to evaluate the relative wealth of different groups of craftsmen.38 Based on this information, Derek Keene has proposed that c. 1300 the metal-workers were stratified into different groups of varying economic standing. He distinguishes four levels, which he asserts reflect the value of the metals used by the craftsmen, their capacity to add value to them and the role they played ‘in coordinating different productive processes’.39 Keene contends that the sealers fit within the least wealthy group, together with the plumbers, spurriers, smiths and wire-drawers. As he locates the goldsmiths in the most wealthy group, this suggests that the business of seal-making was shared between at least two groups of craftsmen with contrasting levels of economic standing. However, the number of sealers that have been identified in the tax rolls is small, and consequently their assessments may not be representative.40 To determine where the sealers fit in the economic hierarchy, the lives of the artisans who specialised in making seals need to be investigated in detail.
The careers of several late-thirteenth and early fourteenth-century sealers can be traced. The seal-maker Henry de Keles [A] was active until c. 1282, and was thus a contemporary of William of Gloucester.41 Henry had a wife named Alice, and he held land in at least two parts of the city: in the parish of St Botolph without Aldersgate, and on Old Fish Street, adjacent to the bell-tower of St Paul’s Cathedral on the western side of the Cathedral’s precinct, in the parish of St Martin le Querne.42 Henry acquired the latter plot of land in 1269, when it was described as a vacant area where a shop could be built.43 This was an appropriate place to sell seals, for it was only metres from Cheapside and the ‘aurifabria’ where people looking to buy fine metal-work congregated due to the concentration of goldsmiths’ shops.44 Moreover, the cathedral was a place associated with document production.45 In 1283, following his death, the dean and chapter of St Paul’s leased a house, described as abutting the bell-tower and once held by Henry, to his wife Alice.46 The legend on the seal she applied to the document recording the lease describes her as: ‘[AL]ICIE [L]E SELLER’ (Fig. 5.1).47 Thus, she may well have continued Henry’s business. Henry de Keles was less prosperous than William of Gloucester, but the size and location of Henry’s property holdings suggests that he was a man of considerable economic standing.