Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 July 2015
The equestrian effigy parallels in size and design that found in a number of contemporary magnate seals. The ‘leaping’ posture of the galloping horse is reminiscent of the first seal of Earl William de Mandeville of Essex, also, one assumes, a design of the later 1160s, though here the rider's sword arm is tighter to his body and the sinuous curve of the trunk resembles more the ‘third’ seal of King Stephen of England. This was a design that would colonize the equestrian seals of the next decade. There is a partial legend on the one surviving impression (no. 6): + sigill[vm] . . .
1 National Archives (PRO), E42/231. For Stephen's seal, T.A. Heslop, ‘Seals’, in English Romanesque Art, 1066–1200, ed. Zarnecki, G. and others (London, 1984), 303, no. 332.Google Scholar
2 Vincent, N., ‘A census of Magna Carta manuscripts’, in The Magna Carta (Sotheby’s, 2007), 63 (no. viii)Google Scholar, from, Bodl. Libr., MS Ch. Gloucs. 8. My thanks to Professor Vincent for a discussion on this. He points out that a cast of an impression of the Marshal seal once said to have been attached to the Magna Carta issue of 1216 (but now lost) survives in Durham University Library (ibid., p. 60, no. v).
3 Heslop, T.A., ‘The seals of the twelfth-century earls of Chester’, in The Earldom of Chester and its Charters, ed. Thacker, A.T., Journal of the Chester Archaeological Society, 71 (1991), Plate xii, 194–195Google Scholar.
4 Johns, S.M., Noblewomen, Aristocracy and Power in the Twelfth-Century Anglo-Norman Realm (Manchester, 2003), 128–130CrossRefGoogle Scholar.