Oe ae eee eT, ee em eS 
On the Seals of the Bishops of Salisbury. . 21 
I was therefore led to examine such seals as were accessible in the 
British Museum and in the Bodleian Library, and formed certain 
general conclusions, which were not difficult to gather, even from 
such a hurried and partial survey as I then had time to make. Now 
I am glad to find that my friend, Mr. W. H. St. John Hope, 
Secretary of the Society of Antiquaries, has collected a much larger 
store of information, and drawn much more precise and practical 
conclusions from the fine series of seals in the possession of that 
Society, formed, I believe, by the late highly-esteemed Albert Way. 
Mr. Hope’s paper was read in two divisions on February 3rd and 
10th, of this year, and has been recently printed in the Proceedings 
of the Society. To that paper all succeeding enquirers will naturally 
refer, and it has been of the greatest possible service to me in the 
memoir which I have the honour of putting before you now. 
I do not think that he makes any comparison between our seals and 
the corresponding Scottish series, but in most respects his work 
seems to be very complete. 
The interest of the subject to which I desire to direct attention 
is in itself considerable. As works of art illustrating the improve- 
ment, the decay, and the caprices of public and private taste, seals 
yield to few of the smaller monuments of the class to which they 
belong, and they have the great merit of being subject to strict 
classification, in order of time, and of forming an almost continuous 
series if we examine a sufficient number of examples. Mr. Hope 
appears to have had before him one hundred and sixty-eight examples 
of pre-Reformation seals. His words are “ From Osbern (Exeter 
1072) to Stephen Gardiner (Winchester 1531) inclusive, there ought 
to be at least eight hundred and seventy-two seals, but we only 
in Soden-Smith’s catalogue, pp. 16, and 17. Dodsworth’s Salisbury contains 
plates of the seals of Joceline and Ri. Poor, and Benson and Hatcher's Salisbury, 
pl. i, 1848, that of Bishop Neville. I have not yet seen Mr. W. de G. Birch’s 
Catalogue of Seals in the British Museum, of which vol. i. has just been 
published (1885). I learn from the Rev. J. Charles Cox that “‘ Among the 
Lichfield Capitular muniments is a book that contains on consecutive pages all 
the episcopal seals from Bishop Hackett (A.D. 1661) downward to the present 
day. It is the assent of each Bishop to the statutes.” 
