 Oh welcome everyone and thank you for joining us for our first online conference on seals and the people of Britain. My name is Paul Drury, I'm president of the Society of Antichrist. We'll be so for the next few weeks to the anniversary meeting. Before we begin, although I'm sure many of you are fellows of the society, I'd just like to say a few words about us. We were founded in 1707 and awarded a Royal Charter by George III in 1751, charged with the encouragement, advancement and furtherance of the study and knowledge of the antiquities and history of this and other countries. At the same time we were given rooms in the Burlington Somerset House that allowed us to house and care for a growing library and museum collection. In 1874 we moved to our purpose-built apartments in New Burlington House. I can't let the occasion pass without mentioning that until 2005 we held this apartment rent-free from government. But as some of you will by now be aware from our public campaign that with the other learned societies around the courtyard we now hold under leases a rents-below market rate but subject to annual review. The dramatic escalation of those rents in recent years means that unless we can negotiate a sustainable long-term basis of occupation we will soon be forced to leave Burlington House and indeed leave central London. But our origins mean that we began collecting actually before the foundation of the British Museum and we've continued collecting ever since. So we have important antiquarian holdings in many fields, not least seals, matrices, seals detached, seals still on the documents and casts, as well as of course manuscripts, prints, drawings and books acquired over three centuries of our existence. I've been conscious as president that we've not been as swift as many similar organisations in making our collections more accessible and available online. So they're not always as well known as they should be. So I'm very pleased to say that our own new catalogue of manuscripts, archives and collections will be launched online shortly, providing I hope a springboard for increasing our digital content online. You can see a preview of what is to come through our collection highlights pages on our website. Today the society is focused on fellowship and the conservation research and dissemination of our work. As a registered charity we are committed to sharing our collections and our work with the public. Our range extends to public lectures and events, exhibitions, scholarly research seminars and publications. Since June last year in response to the ongoing pandemic, we have moved our programme entirely online and have seen a huge increase in attendance with hundreds of people joining us for all our lectures and events and people from all over the world. Today we're joined according to the bookings by 300 people compared with a maximum of 100 which can be seated in our lecture room and in some house. We have some other exciting events coming up through the rest of 2021, including a two-day conference on drowned landscapes and doggiland, a seminar on contested heritage and intertwined legacies and early careers conference in the autumn on revisiting late medieval and early modern British history. I think those few events give you some idea of the scope of the society's interest in the study of the past through its material remains. I personally am looking forward to the resumption of face-to-face meetings as I'm sure many of you are, but to sustain this wider level of engagement we will offer participation in all our future events online as well as when we're allowed to in person. Today's conference has been organised by our fellows Dr Elizabeth New FSA and John Cherry FSA. Our first paper is by Elizabeth New on seals on the people of Britain, a survey of past work and present questions. Elizabeth is a medievalist based at Aberystwyth University and currently is chair of SIGILUM. She has a long-standing interest in the seals and sealing practices of medieval Britain with a particular focus on seal usage in non-aristocratic society. Elizabeth worked on the HRC seals in Medieval Wales project, was co-investigator for the HRC imprint project and currently is using silographic evidence as a principle source for her leaving Chast major research fellowship, identity, interaction and exchange in Medieval England. Before I hand over the screen to Elizabeth, I'd just like to say, if anyone would like to ask a question, please type it in the chat function on Zoom and I'll put the questions at the end of the lecture. Please try to hold your questions until near the end of the lecture so that I don't get lots of questions that the lecturer subsequently answers. So Elizabeth, the screen is yours.