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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 08 January 2012
To commemorate Queen Victoria's Jubilee a work on the Great Seals of England by Alfred Benjamin Wyon, who died in 1884, was completed and published by his brother Allan in 1887; both had the special qualification that they held the Office of Seal-Engraver to Her Majesty as their father and grandfather had held it before them; and their work has remained the standard authority on the subject. It seems suitable in the present year to see how much the discoveries of nearly fifty years have added to it.
page 8 note 1 Allan Wyon published also in 1894 Additional Notes upon the Great Seals of England, in Journ. Brit. Arch. Assoc. This and other notes by himself and his brother in the same series will be mentioned below; but I have cited throughout their major work simply as ‘Wyon’.
page 8 note 1 Historical Notes on the Use of the Great Seal of England, 1926Google Scholar.
page 8 note 3 Chapters in the Administrative History of Medieval England, 1920, etcGoogle Scholar.
page 9 note 1 I hope to make further use in another paper of some of the notes Professor George was good enough to give me for the period 1660–88.
apge 9 note 2 The City of Norwich possesses duplicate copies of a Charter of Richard I, each with the Great Seal appended.
page 9 note 3 When this paper was read an impression of the present Great Seal in the new hard material (a cellulose acetate moulding compound known as Cellomold) was shown by the courtesy of the Crown Office.
page 11 note 1 Wyon, pls. XXX, XXXI.
page 11 note 2 Wyon, pl. XLIII.
page 11 note 3 Wyon, pl. LII.
page 11 note 4 p. 47.
page 11 note 5 Foedera, ix (1729), 915.
page 11 note 6 See the text given by Rymer, ix, 901 and 919.
page 11 note 7 See p. 22, note 3, and p. 25, note 4, below. The seal is on a document in the Irish section of the Exchequer, K. R., Accounts at the Public Record Office (E. 101/248/17).
page 11 note 8 The fragments of the legend remaining and legible are Ricardus dei gr.… rex anglie heres … minus hibernie. There is apparently a large fleur-de-lis between the rex and anglie and another between [do]minus and hibernie but practically no space between anglie and heres: Ricardus is the result of certainly one, probably two, clumsy alterations.
page 12 note 1 It might, of course, appear on the seal of a Prince: but I think the possibility is almost certainly excluded by the nature of the fragment under discussion.
page 12 note 2 The deletion of Rex Francie and the insertion of the Heres phrase are actually mentioned in the instructions to the Chancellor of the Exchequer.
page 12 note 3 Rymer, ix, 916.
page 12 note 4 On Duchy of Lancaster, Royal Charters (D.L. 10), no. 392, at the Public Record Office.
page 12 note 5 Wyon, pl. XVI, no. 92.
page 12 note 6 p. 64.
page 12 note 7 p. 63.
page 12 note 8 p. 62: illustrated pl. XIII B, nos. 87 A, 88 A.
page 12 note 9 Wyon, pl. xv, nos. 87, 88.
page 12 note 10 pp. 61 and 158.
page 13 note 1 p. 62.
page 13 note 2 Catalogue of Seals in the Department of MSS. in the British Museum, 1887, etcGoogle Scholar.
page 13 note 3 The so-called ‘French’ Seal; to be mentioned again below.
page 13 note 4 Collection de Sceaux, iii: the first seal he mentions (no. 10045) is Wyon's Fifth and his ‘Second’ (10046) Wyon's Fourth. His ‘third’ is a cast of English provenance which I have not identified. I have to thank Monsieur Courteault, Director of the Archives Nationales, for a note on this subject.
page 13 note 5 I fitted a cast from a seal of Richard III (with the name deleted) to a mould from one of Edward IV.
page 13 note 6 British Museum Catalogue, i, no. 318.
page 13 note 7 Numbered LIII, 9: it is wrongly described by Birch as though the reverse did not show the ‘globe’.
page 13 note 8 Wyon, pl. XIII B, no. 87 A.
page 14 note 1 I am indebted to Mr. G. E. Kruger Gray and Mr. J. G. Mann for notes on this subject.
page 14 note 2 With one exception (which could not be found) all the eighteen examples cited by Wyon have been examined; together with a few others not mentioned by him. I have to thank the custodians of the Collections concerned (twenty in number) for much courteous assistance.
page 14 note 3 The Society of Antiquaries and the British Museum both possess casts similar to that used by Wyon for his illustration of the ‘Third’ Seal. The Museum cast (numbered A. 87: Birch's Catalogue, no. 317) will be the subject of further observation below.
page 14 note 4 A. 88: no. 323 in the catalogue.
page 14 note 5 Here reproduced.
page 15 ntoe 1 Wyon's ‘Fifth Seal’.
page 15 note 2 A. 87: see Catalogue no. 317.
page 15 note 3 Cott, Ch. v, 9: Catalogue no. 315.
page 15 note 4 I have actually placed a mould of the Ric from the obverse of an original at the Public Record Office on the cast of the reverse in the possession of the Society of Antiquaries which is apparently the same as that used by Wyon: and it fitted, considering that the cast is a sulphur one, quite well.
page 15 note 5 A comparison of Casts A. 87 (Edward IV) and A. 88 (Richard III) in the British Museum to my mind proves the point. The numbers in the Catalogue are 317 and 323.
page 15 note 6 Wyon, no. 92: compare the details in this also with those in British Museum A. 88.
page 16 note 1 Pl xxxv. See also a note by Wyon, Allan in Journ. Brit. Arch. Assoc., 1, p. 142 (1894)Google Scholar.
page 16 note 2 On a grant dated 18th September 1649.
page 16 note 3 Bodleian Library, MS. Clarendon 37, f. 94.
page 16 note 4 Vol. i, p. 199.
page 16 note 5 19th October 1911.
page 16 note 6 The use of a Special Set Hand in the Chancery (and in other Courts) was abolished by Parliament in 1650 but reintroduced at the Restoration.
page 16 note 7 Wyon, pls. XXIV–XXIX.
page 17 note 1 Wyon, pls. XXVII–XXIX.
page 17 note 2 It reappears in a number of post-Restoration Seals: it was also used in the Cromwell Seals.
page 17 note 3 Wyon, pl. XVIII, no. 100. It figures thereafter in the third Seal of Henry VIII and in the Seals of Edward VI, James I, and Charles I and reappears in the first post-Restoration Seal of Charles II.
page 17 note 4 Wyon, pl. XXXVI.
page 17 note 5 See Wyon, pls. XXVII, XXIX.
page 17 note 6 Wyon, pls. XXXVII and XXXVIII.
page 17 note 7 This remark applies only to the Great Seal properly so called. In certain Departmental Great Seals, which I hope to describe elsewhere, the medieval element lingers to a later date.
page 17 note 8 Cited in Bodleian Quarterly Record, loc. cit.
page 18 note 1 Archaeological Journal, ii, 14.
page 18 note 2 Ibid., p. 21.
page 18 note 3 P. 25.
page 18 note 4 P. 10, note 2.
page 18 note 5 See the Public Record Office Close Roll volume, p. 88: cf. similar evidence for the year 1260 in Calendar of Patent Rolls, p. 67.
page 18 note 6 P. 156.
page 18 note 7 I am indebted to Mr. Stamp for a note on this subject.
page 18 note 8 Historical Essays in Honour of James Tait (Manchester, 1933), p. 309Google Scholar.
page 18 note 9 Pp. 33, 34.
page 19 note 1 The engraving of what Wyon describes as the ‘second Seal of Absence’ was presumably due to the same reason as that of the third ‘Seal of Presence’—the adoption of the title Rex Francie.
page 19 note 2 Wyon (p. 42) would make it five, for he includes the bulla of goldsmiths' work used by Henry VIII in 1527 for his Treaty with Francis I.
page 19 note 3 P. 42: it was used to seal an acknowledgement of the payment of part of the Queen's Dowry.
page 19 note 4 Wyon, p. 47.
page 19 note 5 Wyon, pl. XIII A and B, nos. 79 B to E and 80 B to E.
page 20 note 1 Oxford edition, p. 107.
page 20 note 2 Chapters…, i, 148, 149.
page 20 note 3 I cannot agree with Tout in identifying this positively with the second seal mentioned by the Dialogus as being kept at the Treasury: under Henry II this was apparently as close a copy as possible of the ‘deambulatory’ seal.
page 20 note 4 See Tout, , Chapters…, i, 149Google Scholar; with the passages cited from Patent Rolls of 1230, 1242, and 1253. See also on the Patent Roll of 1254 (Calendar, pp. 384, 386) mention of grants, ‘by the Seal of England’.
page 20 note 5 See, in fact, upon this point Tout, , Chapters…, ii, 64, 68, 301Google Scholar.
page 21 note 1 d'Arcq, Douet, Collection de Sceaux (Paris, 1863)Google Scholar, lists (nos. 55–99) one or more examples for every reign except one, from Philippe de Valois to Henri II.
page 21 note 2 e.g. Morel, Octave, La Grande Chancellerie Royale … 1328–1400 (Paris, 1900)Google Scholar.
page 22 note 1 See the Record Office Patent Rolls, 1225–1232, p. 340.
page 22 note 2 In the time of the Dialogus the Scaccarium was still only an occasion—it had not yet become a place—and the second seal was kept in the Treasury.
page 22 note 3 At the time this paper was read I gave a very brief sketch of the history of these other seals: I hope to expand this in an article to be printed in Archaeologia; though even that will be only a first exposition of this neglected subject.
page 23 note 1 Perhaps also the mysterious other one which Wyon (p. 23) ascribes (though he does not say on what evidence) to the earlier part of Henry III's reign. Wyon does not reproduce this and the only evidence he gives for it is from a pair of casts in the British Museum (li, 18 and 19) of unknown origin: but according to the British Museum Catalogue (i, p. 17) this is to be equated with a fragment described by Douet d'Arcq (Collection de Sceaux, 10013) as belonging to the year 1263; concerning which date see note 3 below.
page 23 note 2 1242 and 1253: see the Calendar of Patent Rolls for those dates, pp. 290 and 210.
page 23 note 3 Tout, i, 304.
page 23 note 4 For instance in 1253 (see Calendar of Patent Rolls already cited): also again much later—in 1320 (see Tout, ii, 301 and documents there cited).
page 23 note 5 Tout, i, 293; and documents cited.
page 23 note 6 Tout, ii, 68, note 5.
page 24 note 1 See Tout, iii, 80, 81, 152, 164; and documents there cited.
page 24 note 2 Tout, iii, 283.
page 24 note 3 See, in addition to the pages already cited, i, 141, 303 (where he says that Henry III's small seal was ‘demonstrably’ the first seal of absence), and 306; ii, 2, n. 5 (‘the king's son, like the king, had now his “seal of absence’”); and iii, 153, 166, and 222 (‘the bag in which the seal of absence was enclosed’).
page 25 note 1 He is named so early as 1199 in a Royal ordinance.
page 25 note 2 Cp. Stamp, A. E., loc. cit., pp. 309, 310Google Scholar.
page 25 note 3 See an article in Antiquaries Journal xi, 229.
page 25 note 4 The earliest known copy of the Registrum Omnium Breuium was sent over in 1227 for the information, apparently, of an established Irish Chancery: see Maitland, F. W., in Select Essays in Anglo-American Legal History (Cambridge, 1908), ii, 563Google Scholar.
page 25 note 5 Tout, i, 293: but see also Bémont, Charles, Rôles Gascons, i, Supplément (Paris, 1896), p. xixGoogle Scholar.
page 25 note 6 Cf. Sections 10 and 11 as set out in Rymer, ix, 898.
page 25 note 7 P. 51: pl. XIII A, nos. 79 B and 80 B.
page 25 note 8 See for descriptions of this and the French Seals subsequently mentioned the British Museum Catalogue of Seals, v, nos. 18099 and 18109; and Douet d'Arcq, loc. cit.
page 26 note 1 Wyon, pl. XIII A, nos. 79 c and 80 c.
page 26 note 2 He notes one example only of the ‘First’ and six of the ‘Second’ Seal for the period between 1422 and 1440.
page 26 note 3 Wyon, Great Seals, mentions this in the case of the ‘Fourth’ Seal only: for the other see an earlier article by A. B. Wyon in the Journ. Brit. Arch. Assoc. for 1884; to be mentioned again below.
page 26 note 4 Wyon, pl. XIII B, nos. 79 E and 80 E.
page 26 note 5 Wyon, pl. XIII B, nos. 79 D and 80 D.
page 26 note 6 Wyon's description omits the word magni: but the space over which the legend is missing requires it.
page 27 note 1 Wyon, p. 66: pl. XVII, nos. 95 and 96.
page 28 note 1 Journ. Brit. Arch. Assoc., xl, 275.
page 28 note 2 Vol. i, p. 41.
page 28 note 3 Ibid., pp. 32–5.
page 28 note 4 This is the seal of the Duke of Burgundy mentioned above.