Evaluating the importance and place of seal-making in the economy of London as a whole is difficult. The artisans who specialised in it never organised themselves into a formal craft.⁹⁰ Without a strong corporate identity, they were not able to control the business and thus foster favourable economic conditions for themselves. Moreover, metal-workers in this period tended to focus on a particular material, rather than a type of object. As seals could be made from a wide range of metals, the sealers faced competition from other metal-workers, most notably the goldsmiths. Indeed, the boundary line between ‘sealer’ and ‘goldsmith’ was porous. Certainly goldsmiths regarded seal-making as a normal, if occasional, part of their work, while the artisans who specialised in seal-making (the sealers) may occasionally have accepted commissions to make other types of objects normally produced by goldsmiths. Surviving blank seals and moulds for casting seals demonstrate that sealers or other metal-workers (such as pewterers, coppersmiths, or brassmakers) sometimes used techniques of mass production in the making of seals.⁹¹ Nonetheless, the seals used by the sealers themselves suggest that this was not a polarised market with high-quality seals fabricated exclusively by goldsmiths and low-quality ones by sealers. Given the many gradations of wealth in civic society, sealers such as Henry de Keles [A] and [B] and Robert Newcomen probably served the city’s prosperous merchants and craftsmen who wanted seals made from less costly materials yet with high-quality engraving. Indeed, the sealers may have left the bottom end of the market to other metal-workers. Therefore, although only a small number of artisans specialised in seal-making at any point in time, this did not reflect limited demand for their products. On the contrary, the existence of sealers as an identifiable occupational specialisation, in the face of competition from other metal-workers, testifies to strong demand for seals in London.

Seals are a significant part of the visual and cultural legacy of medieval England. People used them as identifiers and status symbols, but each one was made by a particular artisan. Although seals survive in significant numbers, the identity of their makers is not easy to establish. The thirteenth century witnessed the emergence of seal-making as an occupational specialty. The survey of the records conducted for this paper has added a few more men, and perhaps one woman, to the list artisans who specialised in making seals. More importantly, they have been set in their social, spatial and economic contexts. The sealers were not far removed, in many senses, from the goldsmiths who were the city’s most prestigious metal-workers. The sealers and the goldsmiths lived and worked in the same area of the city, were socially connected, and had a similar level of economic standing. In effect, the artisans who specialised in engraving seals were a type of specialist goldsmith.⁹² However, the production of seals in London involved a broad range of the city’s metal-workers, including many other types of metal-workers. The establishment of seal-making as an occupational specialty in London reminds us that this was a society in which seals had a central cultural and judicial significance.