Royal seals offer vivid insights into the interests and aspirations of historical kings and queens, highlighting their cultural influences and the ways that they presented themselves to the wider world. In England, just three wax impressions from a monarch’s seal pre-dating the Norman Conquest are known to survive, all belonging to Edward the Confessor (r. 1042-1066). Two of these, preserved on writs of 1052-1066 (in the British Library) and 1062-1066 (in Westminster Abbey) are only very fragmentary, but the third is almost complete, with its imagery and inscription still clear. Known as the Saint-Denis seal, it was originally attached to a writ of 1053-1057, before being transferred to a diploma of 1059, granting lands at Taynton, Oxfordshire, to the Saint-Denis monastery in Paris. This latter manuscript remained in the religious community’s collections until the Archives nationales were founded in the 1790s. As the only intact – and possibly the earliest – example of an Anglo-Saxon royal seal, the impression’s historical significance has long been recognised – but in the 1980s it became disconnected from its associated documents and was registered as missing, presumed lost. Some four decades later, however, the seal has come to light once more.
The artefact was held in the detached seals (sceaux détachés) section of the Archives nationales, whose collections include a wide variety of historical seals that have become separated from their original manuscripts, ranging from well-preserved examples to fragmentary and unidentifiable pieces, issued by individuals from across the social spectrum. In 2021, the collection’s curator, Clément Blanc-Riehl, and Dr Guilhem Dorandeu, who was conducting a review of the detached seals as part of his PhD research, rediscovered the long-lost Saint-Denis seal. It had survived in the distinctive form of a well-preserved circle of brown wax bearing an image of an enthroned king on both sides.
Realising the importance of the discovery, Guilhem contacted several experts in the field, and in 2025 he was put in touch with Professor Levi Roach at the University of Exeter’s Department of Archaeology and History. The pair have collaborated on studying the Saint-Denis seal ever since, and have now co-authored a paper that was recently published in the journal Early Medieval England and its Neighbours, announcing the artefact’s rediscovery and using this development as a springboard to explore its iconography and its association with an innovative form of 11th-century charter. As Guilhem and Levi note in their research (open-access online; see ‘Further reading’ below), the seal suggests that Edward the Confessor consciously drew on ideas from continental Europe, and particularly the Byzantine Empire, to create a new way of presenting English royal sovereignty and his own dynastic ambitions.
