An Eclectic Collection of Cloth Seals

CNG 109, Lot: 1094. Estimate $3000. Sold for $2500. This amount does not include the buyer’s fee.

A collection of two-hundred and thirty (230) lead seals. Mostly English, circa 16th-17th centuries. An interesting array of late medieval and early modern merchant seals, mostly cloth seals for marking textiles, although lot also includes a couple Dutch butcher’s seals with Hebrew inscriptions (one with a chicken bone still attached!). The majority of the lot is comprised of English seals, many of which were reportedly found along the River Thames between Southwark Bridge and the vicinities of Bull Wharf and Brooks Wharf. Also represented are a number of Dutch and Spanish seals, as well as a smattering of Russian, French, and eastern European, among others.

In addition, lot includes the collector’s detailed notes and his personal inventory of the collection (with Egan numbers when applicable), as well as the following references on the subject:

Baart, Jan, et al. Opgravingen in Amsterdam: 20 jaar stadskernonderzoek. (Haarlem: Fibula-Van Dishoek, 1977).

Egan, Jeff. Lead cloth seals and related items in the British Museum. (London: Dept. of Medieval and Later Antiquities, British Museum, 1995).

Girling, F.A. English merchants’ marks. (London: Oxford University Press, 1964).

Harvey, P.D.A, and McGuinness, Andrew. A guide to British medieval seals. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996).

Sullivan, John. Russian cloth seals in Britain: Trade, textiles, and origin. (Oxford: Oxbow Books, 2012).

Average seal is Fine to VF, although a number are significantly better. Many are damaged or broken in some way, as is typical considering their soft metal. Books with some minor damage to spines and/or jackets. An excellent lot for the academically-minded collector.

From Egan (p. vii): “Stamped lead seals were widely used in the European textile industry during the late-medieval/early-modern period. They were attached to individual cloths as part of a system of industrial regulation and quality control. In England seals of this type were current from at least the late fourteenth to the early nineteenth centuries. The survival of large numbers of the seals, many dating from the period that was crucial to the development of the new draperies, was not widely appreciated until recently, even among textile historians. Excavation and chance finds...have provided a great deal of new information, from which it is possible to learn significant details about the commodity which became England’s single most important manufacture.”

The marking of textiles with seals was a somewhat complex process: first, the maker would mark his own product and, subsequently, an inspector would mark the product to indicate that it had met certain established criteria. Other markings might be added as well, for example, to signal the payment of taxes or the modification of the product by another craftsman (e.g., a fuller or dyer). Egan (p. 4) notes that “a single cloth might, theoretically, have upwards of half a dozen seals by the time it reached the market stall.”