Seals and Society

Medieval Wales, the Welsh Marches and their English Border Region

Phillipp R. Schofield, John McEwan, Elizabeth New, Sue Johns, Phillipp Schofield, E. A. New

• Publisher: University of Wales Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781783168736
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European Medieval History
• Index: History

Seals and Society arises from a major project investigating seals and their use in medieval Wales, the Welsh March and neighbouring counties in England. The first major study of seals in the context of one part of medieval Western European society, the volume also offers a new perspective on the history of medieval Wales and its periphery by addressing a variety of themes in terms of the insight that seals can offer the historian. Though the present study suggests important regional distinctions in the take-up of seals in medieval Wales, it is also clear that seal usage increased from the later twelfth century and spread widely in Welsh society, especially in those parts of Wales neighbouring England or where there had been an early English incursion. Through a series of chapters, the authors examine the ways in which seals can shed light on the legal, administrative, social and economic history of the period in Wales and its border region. Seals provide unique insights into the choices individuals, men and women, made in representing themselves to the wider world, and this issue is examined closely. Supported by almost 100 images gathered by the project team, the volume is of great interest to those working on seals, their motifs, their use and developments in their usage over the high and later Middle Ages.

SEALS IN MEDIEVAL WALES AND ITS NEIGHBOURING COUNTIES

TRENDS IN MOTIFS

John A. McEwan

IN 1292 COUNT AMADEUS of Savoy was travelling in the south-east of England, where he bought luxury goods, including two silver matrices.¹ The official keeping his accounts noted their cost, but nothing about the text and images on the seals. This is typical of the written sources from this period, which occasionally identify the artisans who made seals and how much they were paid, but offer little information on what the seals expressed.² To determine what types of seals people wanted, therefore, scholars need to look at the seals themselves. Although medieval seals of the British Isles survive in exceptional numbers, they have not yet been systematically surveyed. Consequently, as Paul Harvey has commented, apart from seals of the English monarchy ‘we have not even the most elementary typology, the simplest chronological outline of their development’.³ Without this information, it is difficult to determine the extent to which the motifs people selected for their seals were dictated by function or by fashion. This chapter surveys the motifs of the approximately 2,500 seals in the SiMeW dataset to establish what motifs were popular and how quickly their popularity changed over time in medieval Wales and its neighbouring counties. In these regions, people used an extremely wide range of motifs, but the favoured motifs gradually shifted. Within this broad history of changes in the fashions in seal motifs in this region, three phases of development can be discerned, defined by the changing role of seals as tools of identification.⁴

The surviving seal impressions from medieval Britain present a variety of motifs. A random sample, such as those listed on the first page of one catalogue of ‘personal’ seals in the National Archives, includes a shield of arms, a griffin’s head, a stylised flower, a man on horseback, a monogram, and a heart.⁵ As seal catalogues usually present the seals surviving in a particular repository, they typically bring together examples from many different locations and times. Although a large number of motifs were used on seals over the course of the Middle Ages, the level of diversity among the seals circulating in a particular time and place may not always have been high. The well-known charter recording an agreement made between Ranulf, Earl of Chester and Lincoln, and a group of his rural tenants in Lincolnshire shows that those tenants favoured certain motifs.⁶ The copy sealed by the men survives with forty-eight of their seal impressions and thus reveals the seal motifs typical of one particular area at a given moment. While one man used a seal with a ‘lamb and staff’ (Lamb of God) motif and another a ‘bird’, the remainder can be broadly characterised as presenting ‘foliate’ motifs.⁷ Cases such as this suggest that in particular times and places, particular seal motifs predominated. The co-existence of such cases with the wide range of motifs on surviving seals of the larger period suggests that the popularity of motifs fluctuated, and fluctuated within a dynamic system.

Scholars have long recognised that people in different periods favoured different motifs. T. A. Heslop has suggested that in the second half of the twelfth century people outside the aristocracy commonly used ‘animals and birds, stylised flowers or an elaborate cross’ and in the fourteenth century representations of various animals, as well as religious and heraldic motifs.⁸ However, such generalisations need to be tested and refined. French scholars have demonstrated the value of quantitative approaches, but attempts to apply them to seals from the British Isles have so far been limited.⁹ Nonetheless, there is a wealth of evidence with which to work. The precise number of surviving seal impressions from medieval Britain is unknown because they have never been systematically counted, but it is significant. Harvey has estimated that the National Archives holds 50,000 examples and that in the nation there could be several hundreds of thousands.¹⁰ Before they can be analysed, however, those seals need to be recorded. As detailed in the introduction, the seals in the SiMeW dataset are associated with locations across Wales and its neighbouring counties in England, including a significant proportion issuing from the English counties of Shropshire (35 per cent), Chester (13 per cent) and Hereford (9 per cent), together with a large group from Glamorgan (20 per cent). The seals are temporally well distributed, as they range from c.1150 to 1550. The approximately 2,500 seals described by the SiMeW project are a fraction of those that exist, but they provide an opportunity to conduct an initial survey to determine which motifs were popular and how quickly their popularity changed.

The first step in the analysis is to organise the seals into temporal groups. Each seal matrix was made at a particular date and then used for a period of time. The date of fabrication of a given seal is generally not recorded, but the period of its use is revealed by its surviving impressions, for these are attached to documents that can normally be dated precisely. These impressions therefore offer a terminus ante quem for the manufacture of the seal matrix. Yet since an individual could use a single seal matrix throughout his or her life, the date of the earliest surviving impression can be later than the date when the seal matrix was made; if a man acquired a seal matrix in December 1299, he might continue to use it well into the fourteenth century. As the date of each seal’s fabrication is difficult to infer with precision, it is appropriate, for the purpose of analysis, to group together seals from the same period. For this discussion, the seals are organised into seven temporal groups, ranging from c.1200 to c.1500. Each temporal group is defined as the seals whose impressions are first recorded within twenty-five years of the group’s titular date; thus the c.1300 group includes seals attached to documents dated 1275 to 1324 (see table 1.1). For this analysis seals from the SiMeW dataset whose dates set them outside these temporal groups have been discarded, leaving only those from 1175 to 1524.

The seals analysed here have also been selected according to social criteria. The seals of popes, bishops, kings, earls and corporate bodies, such as monastic houses and cathedrals, together with their officials and obedientaries, reveal a distinctive set of purposes in the selection of their motifs.¹¹ Corporate institutions could retain the same seals for decades – if not centuries – as a sign of their continuity. Similarly, kings normally acquired seals with the same motifs as those of their predecessors in order to underline the legitimacy of their succession.¹² Furthermore, the seals of institutions and the elite are overrepresented in the historical record because they were appended to important documents that their recipients were especially likely to retain. By contrast, the seals of more humble people are comparatively underrepresented, for only a fraction of the millions that were probably once in circulation survive.¹³ Nonetheless, there are still many examples and they have been largely overlooked by historians.¹⁴ Excluding the seals of the corporate bodies and the most elite members of society enables us to focus on the seals associated with the remaining members of society. Thus the seven temporal groups include 1,955 seals, which constitute more than 78 per cent of the total number in the SiMeW dataset.

Table 1.1: Total number of cases by period

Group	Period	Cases
1	c.1200 (1175–1224)	136
2	c.1250 (1225–1274)	242
3	c.1300 (1275–1324)	309
4	c.1350 (1325–1374)	387
5	c.1400 (1375–1424)	308
6	c.1450 (1425–1474)	300
7	c.1500 (1475–1524)	273
		Total = 1955

Source: SiMeW dataset

Before the motifs on the seals can be analysed quantitatively, they need to be classified. Medieval seals are typically a few centimetres tall and include a band around the outer edge reserved for text. Consequently the area available at the centre of the seal for visual content is minimal. It was into this restricted space that medieval artisans inserted a motif that could serve as a distinctive and identifiable mark. These physical constraints encouraged artisans to design seals with a single clearly expressed motif, which makes them amenable to classification. The International Council on Archives sigillography committee’s typology is perhaps the most authoritative.¹⁵ Although it is not a formal classification system, it offers a set of categories. This typology reflects the traditional priorities and concerns of seal scholars, who have focused on the seals of the upper levels of society. Thus, for example, the typology includes three separate categories for representations of men on horseback – a motif often used by members of the social elite. However, the typology does not provide specific categories for most of the motifs favoured by people of lesser standing, yet these are the motifs that most commonly appear in British collections. Thus the typology is not appropriate for this study, which requires a system that can sort with some precision the typical seals in British collections.

Instead, this analysis employs SiMeW’s classification system, which is based on the general nature of motifs at the primary level of meaning.¹⁶ Visual materials do not necessarily have precise linguistic equivalents, so there are often several ways in which a motif can be described. A description can be general (a lion), or it can include additional qualifiers that indicate the motif’s particular features (a lion facing to the left with foliage behind). A further complication is that any visual content can be described on a number of levels. Panofsky has argued that any visual resource has a ‘primary’ (or natural) subject matter.¹⁷ A description of a visual resource at the primary level is factual: this is a pain...