 I'm going to look at medieval CLMHCs bearing in names of women using data exclusively from the Portugal Antiquity Scheme, so I'm going to have to start, I'm afraid, with yet more comments about our data set. Laura has done a fantastic job in telling you about our whole range of CLMHCs, medieval and post-medieval, but I'm going to, I'm afraid I'm going to hit you with some more stuff about our data. At this point I should also say that I've flipped most, if not all, of my pictures in Photoshop, so you'll see a mirror image of the matrix, which obviously will make the inscriptions easier to read, and I've generally tried to add our record numbers, which should let you find the record. Okay, so start off with this. Most archaeology is rubbish, so it's deliberately discarded things that aren't wanted anymore, like broken pottery and food waste and so on, but portable antiquities scheme items are different, because they're mainly found by metal detectors, and because they are made from metal, they're unlikely to be rubbish, because metal objects can obviously be melted down and made into something else when they're no longer wanted. Now, if our objects are mostly accidental losses, this of course introduces some biases. Objects are more vulnerable to accidental loss if they're small, and if they're routinely carried around rather than kept in a safe place. Losses can obviously be quickly refound if you lose something at home or near to home or in a crowded place. You can find it again, so most of our objects tend to be from lonely places in the countryside, and lastly, rubbish is generally of low worth, but accidental losses can include things of very high worth, very valuable items. Then recovery through metal detecting brings an extra set of biases, and here we see a picture of a conventional archaeological excavation, making the point that it concentrates on small areas of intensively occupied settlement. Most finds are discarded rubbish. Not many seal matrices are found in excavations. In contrast, metal detectors look at large rural areas. They've got machines designed to home in on metal, so they find more of these elusive accidental losses that are thinly scattered across large areas of landscape. The third thing that I have to admit about our database is that it's not designed for seal matrices. It's got to accommodate everything, every kind and data object. It doesn't have the kind of seal-specific fields that sigilographers might like. That's why we tend to recommend that you download our data, perhaps into an Excel spreadsheet and recode it with extra detail. Of course, equally, our recorders have to cope with everything from flint handaxes to muskipalls, so the quality of our records can vary. Our recorders can use whatever words they like to describe a seal matrix, and too much variety, of course, makes it difficult to find what you're looking for. Then, as Laura said, the objects we record are lent to us for recording. Most are returned to their finders. They're not collected for posterity in museums. They can't be consulted again and again as questions change. On the plus side, we aim to replace the object with a record, so we add detail that some other databases lack. For example, nearly 90% of our records of medieval seal matrices have images. Really, we are a fantastic resource for medieval seals, as I'm sure everybody would agree. One astonishing statistic is just how many there are. Seal matrices are the seventh most common medieval metal object. After coins, which are the commonest, and then strap fittings, like buckles, mounts and strap ends, and metal cooking vessels, the next thing down is seal matrices. We've got nearly three in every hundred of our medieval finds being seal matrices. That's the data set, the large-scale data set. Now, how does the data set for women's matrices compare? I'm sorry about this horrible slide, full of numbers, but what it really tells you is that John Cherry first began looking at this. He looked at Suffolk seal matrices in 2007, and he counted up about 20% of matrices with identifiable names with those of women. In the same year in Norfolk, there was a study that found a similar proportion, and then I had a count-up in 2013 of all the Pierre seal matrices with readable names and found a slightly higher number, 23%, but it's roughly one in five. But that, of course, is a bare minimum, because many names have female and marial variants, like John and Joan, or Philip and Philippa, or these ones, Julian or Julianna. Now, on the seals, of course, the names can be abbreviated, so they lose those endings which distinguish male from female. And matrices like these ones on the slide, they're perhaps individually more likely to have belonged to a man. So we often assume that a specific individual seal matrix belongs to a man, unless there's a specifically female ending. But presumably at least a few, perhaps around 20%, of these gender-neutral matrices belong to women. So obviously we're going to be underestimating rather than overestimating the number of women who had seals. Now, I would like to know whether this proportion of about 20% is also found among the aristocracy. I wonder if, higher up the social scale, the discrepancy between the wealth that a man controls and the wealth of a woman might be greater. Lower down, of course, nobody has that much. Perhaps men and women use their seals more equally. Or possibly the view that there are fewer women's seals the higher you go up in the social hierarchy simply comes from our dataset, and it's particular low status bias. Certainly we record very few seal matrices like this one on the slide. But of course, if higher status women aren't sealing so much, then the documentary record, the archival record, which tends to preserve higher status, more important documents, that might have an even greater bias against women's seals compared to the archaeological record. Now, the sample of women's seal matrices that I've used for this talk, the number in total is 446. And so I'll go on to tell you what they're like. I'll start off with the shape. As you would expect, they're more likely to be pointed oval than circular. So over two thirds of them are pointed oval, just over a quarter of a circular and a few other shapes. Now, to compare the men's matrices, I took a kind of roughly the same size sample of men's. And in that sample, there are far fewer pointed oval matrices, but still nearly half of men's seals are pointed oval. So that shape, per se, doesn't denote femininity. And then you can see that just over half of the men's matrices are circular. Men are also more likely to have a tall conical handled matrix than women. But any kind of named conical matrix is relatively rare. Conical matrices tend to go along with the anonymous seals of the 14th century. Looking at material, women's seals are overwhelmingly of lead. For men's seals, again, there's a predominance of lead, but it isn't so overwhelming. By the way, Robin Lawyer's higher rate of copper alloy is because they include all of the seals, including the anonymous ones, which are much more likely to be made from copper alloy. And obviously, I'm only looking at the personal ones. Then looking at decoration on the reverse, quite a lot of women's seal matrices have this relief decoration cast onto the reverse. It appears on both the circular and the pointed oval ones, but only on those made from lead. And at first, you think, well, there looks like there's much less cast relief decoration among men's matrices, but that's also because there's much less lead. When you look just at men's lead matrices, the proportion with relief decoration is pretty close to that of women. So, again, that's not a female signifier. There's many different designs. On this side, you can see chevrons and perhaps a double barge cross and what might be clasp tans below. But the commonest design is the fleur de lis, which you might think is used as a symbol of the Virgin Mary, so maybe femininity in general, except that it also turns up on men's seals. And, of course, the fleur de lis is also found on the other side of the matrix as a central motif. It's the commonest motif on women's seals. It makes up about a third of all central motifs on women's seals, but about a fifth of men's seals have it too. So here we have two women on the left and two men on the right. Here are the figures. The most common motif for women is the fleur de lis and the second most common is radial motifs, so together those two comprise over half of all matrices. For men it's much the same. Their commonest is the radial, fleur de lis comes second, so together those comprise nearly half of all men's matrices. For women there are also a lot of quadrufoils, possibly that could be seen as a subset of radials, twice as many as are found with men, and all other motifs are found on 5% of women's matrices or fewer. For men there are a lot of birds, again twice as many as are found with the opposite sex, and again all other motifs are found on 5% of men's matrices or fewer. So are there any motifs that reliably distinguish women? Well our stereotypical central motif for a woman's seal is the standing female figure, but we've just got ten of those recorded on the PAS database, mostly on copper alloy matrices. Now some are quite grand, as are two here with shields of arms or bitris at the top right who's got a hawk with jesses, but others are less grand. At the bottom we have a lead matrix, and then the one at the top right that's really got rather duff workmanship. I do like Catherine as standling, she's rather charmingly holding a squirrel rather than a hawk, which I feel is a bit less grand. So these are women with our standing figures, but we also have some very similar standing figures on men's seals, and on monks or clerics seals with some examples here. The women's seals also have a few motifs of the devotional type, which show figures praying to a saint. This slide though pretty much shows you all of them. On the left we've got a figure kneeling within the main field, praying to a standing figure in a long dress who's holding a wreath of flowers. Elizabeth New has found a large number like this among London seals, but this one is from Warwickshire. A note that it is one of the rare women's conical matrices. The two on the right are more conventional. We've got the Virgin Mary and the Christ child with a praying figure below within an architectural frame, and we've also, I really like these, we've got a couple of figures apparently reading books. So I've shown you quite a few fairly complex designs. These really are the exceptions. Women's seals in general have simpler designs, more formulaic designs. It does seem from our material that women's seals are perhaps more restricted than men's in what they can show. It is possible to glimpse a few real differences between the motifs on men's and women's seals. To put it simply, men can have everything a woman can have, and they can also have some extras on top. Several motifs don't appear in the sample of women's matrices at all, but are found among the men. The commonest is the merchant's mark, but there are also ships, fish, stag's heads, dragons or wyverns and hunting scenes. Not only that, but in these two samples of men and women that are similarly sized, the men have 20 times the number of lions with nice fluffy tails, four times the number of shields of arms, three times the number of annuals days, and double the number of pelicans and squirrels. So there do seem to be some motifs that are more appropriate for men than for women, and these are perhaps unsurprisingly headed by merchants, marks, lions and heraldry. But in common with anybody else who's ever looked at women's sealed matrices and impressions, I haven't been able to find any central motif that's only appropriate for a woman and isn't found with plenty of men. The only exception is these two rather lovely things, both women, both found in Sussex about 12 miles apart, and I think of these as being exceptionally literate. The engraver has spurned the merely pictorial in favour of words, and it's a real pity that the one on the left doesn't clearly say Ave Maria, but it does seem to be what it's driving at. The other one is a place name, it's New Timber or Night Timber, annoyingly both of those are places that occur in Sussex, meaning a new building. Oh and by the way, the image with the black background you'll occasionally see on PAS records, it's been put into negative, what Photoshop calls inverted, and that can make some difficult images easier to read, that's a handy thing to know about. Now these two, there's nothing to compare with these among our men's seals, and of course they have been found very close together, and so might suggest that there are regional variations in the motif chosen, but as yet I haven't done any work on this either, it's a wide open field for everybody to get involved with. Right, I now want to turn to the names on women's seal matrices, out of the over 400 are fairly well readable, and there are 79 different first names. The top five, Alice, Agnes, Margaret or Marjorie, Matilda and Emma, they were used on half the matrices, and this interestingly mirrors David Postle's work on the names of 19 noble women who were alive in 1185. Half of his women used exactly the same set of first names. He had many more Matildas and slightly fewer of all the other names, but otherwise it's the same set. So although women's matrices on the PAS database look largely low status, the names are very similar to those of noble women a generation or two before. So those are the commonest names. There's also an interesting range of names. We've got several of the exotic names that are typical of the 13th century. Over half the women in the sample have names that only crop up once or twice in the dataset, and there seems to have been more variation among the women's names than among the men's. Moving on to by names. Now I find these much more interesting on first names. They give the seal owner a context of descent or marital status or location or occupation and so on. Because they're more variable in the first names, they can be more difficult to read, and also they can not always be reliably classified because it's possible for them to have several meanings. But there are over 350 classifiable by names in the sample, and the largest category is surnames of relationship. You can see from this slide that patronymics are the commonest, with over a third of classifiable by names being patronymics. I've written over a third, but I can see it's 31%, and I don't think that's the same, but let's say it's nearly a third. Matronymics, where the mothers named, are far rarer, but this is probably again an underestimate. We may fail to recognise these matronymics because the names are abbreviated, so again, the masculine or feminine endings are lost. But in my sample of men's seals, there seem to be even fewer matronymics. There's just nine men's seals with the mother's name mentioned. Here are a couple of wives. We've got 35 matrices which describe the seal holder as a wife and 11 which describe her as a widow. The wives are mainly described as ex-wife of y. In one case, Juliana, as we see here, the person simply described as wife, we don't know of whom. In a third of examples, the husband is also given a by name, but a wife is never given her own additional by name. Now, one wonders what the precise date of these matrices might be. It seems that the legal status of married women declined through the 13th century to the point where, towards the end of the century, they could apparently not make their own contracts. I've got one, a couple of widows as well, similar in design, most simply saying seal of ex widow of y. Again, a substantial minority give the husband's by name. Now, Susan Johns has pointed out that attached documents can show a different marital status at the time of sealing to the actual seal, and it may be that the seal in fact reflects the importance of one particular relationship in the woman's life, even if that's a former husband rather than the current one. And by the way, in case you're wondering, the spousal relationship is never mentioned among the men. I don't think any seal matrix with ex husband of y has ever been recorded, and there certainly isn't one among PAS seals, more so pity. The next biggest category of by names is place names. We've got 65 specific place names and 17 kind of more generic places like Mabel Holloway here. Then come nick names like my own name geek, and occupation names. And here are some of the occupation names. I've divided them into what you might call the conventional feminine occupations on the right, and the more improbable occupations on the left. But of course, women actually did do most jobs, including such macho pursuits as smithing and stone breaking and satching, both before and after marriage. But Hemriot Eliza has pointed out that the work is usually casual rather than permanent, and women weren't as defined by their employment as men. But still, we have a great range. Are these personal by names? Are they inherited family names? Are they what we would understand as surnames? I will leave that question hanging, and I will move on to the double sided matrices. We've got 38 of these on the PAAS database. Six named two men, four named two women, and in 11 cases, they're man and woman. Of the 11 man and woman matrices, on only two are the people described in terms of their relationship to each other, and both are husband and wife. Now, on this slide, we've got two kind of random examples. These couples have got similar central motifs, but their by names are different. They may have been married to each other, but their seals don't say this. In the four cases where both the seals are of women, two pairs, these two, seem clearly related. One pair shares the same father's name, same patronymic. Another pair shares the same nickname by name. But in most cases of man and woman seals, like these ones, the woman's got her own by name, and there's no mention of a relationship to the man on the other side of the seal. These are the kind of extreme ones. The relationship between the two people on the seal matrix is entirely opaque, including this pair of men at the bottom with different patronymics. Right, I'm going to leave you with my last slide, which is Christina and Norman Shepherd. I have always thought they're a couple who sound more 1970s and 1270s, while I go through a couple of kind of conclusions. What we've seen is that women's matrices from the PAS database tend to be commonplace and low status objects. They differ from men's matrices in that more are flatter made from lead and slightly more appointed oval. But other aspects don't seem to distinguish women's seals. Decorative aspects aren't hugely different, so that suggests that even in the highly gendered medieval world, gender doesn't need to be expressed on seal matrices. Perhaps the difference in material and shape is due to a difference in the status of these women, or in the date of the matrices, or perhaps both, but perhaps those two things are more common than gender. In terms of date, flat seal matrices tend to be earlier. We think being joined by conical matrices in the 14th century, we've got very few conical matrices of women's names. Might it be possible that a decline in the status of married women caused a decline in the need for seal usage by these women? Or might women have continued to seal, but might they have started to hide their gender behind anonymous seals earlier than men did? In terms of social status, lead is obviously cheaper than copper alloy. Lead matrices tend to be less well made, and most of our women's seals look cheap and utilitarian. Now, two questions arise from this. Firstly, why do poor or middling women seem to have greater access to sealing than rich women? And secondly, if seal matrices are used to advertise aspects of identity, why aren't they used as a focus for investment? Why aren't they being used to aspire to a higher status? Now, one possibility that's been mentioned by Laura and has been suggested by both John Cherry and Elizabeth New, and I find very, very interesting, is that low status seal matrices might have been commissioned for a specific act of sealing. And that might be particularly true of those using double sided matrices. They could be together for the sealing of just a single document, or it might also be appropriate for widows whose status might be temporary. And this might go some way towards explaining that huge number of low status matrices. They could be almost disposable in a way that frequently used aristocratic or official seals weren't. So hither to most work on women's seals has looked at aristocratic seals, or seals which survive on documents, and it's drawn conclusions about seals as a language of power of authority of identity. If we look at this brief flowering of low status women's matrices, we get quite another picture, cheap utilitarian almost disposable items. I think the story they tell us is different, but it's no less worth hearing. Thank you, and I will now attempt to stop sharing my screen and hope it goes better than the start. Thank you very much indeed Helen. Again, another absolutely fascinating and very exciting paper. We've got a couple of questions. You've sort of half answered Laura's question comments that with the double sided matrices, could it be for a particular occasion, but she also asks, could we be seeing reuse? That is a very interesting question. There is one that I know I've, I've, I kind of have discounted because it seemed like it wasn't a proper double sided matrix. It's a normal matrix on one side, and then someone's had to go at scratching their name on the other side. Laurie, you'll probably be able to find it. That is, is a, that's a particularly interesting one that deserves more, a thorough look at. Thank you. From Philip Saunders, are made seals less likely to be found by metal detectors, so therefore skewing the beta in favour of men? I don't think so, no. I think, I think they're just as easy to recognise as something important. They're also often much easier to read, so I don't think that's the case, no. That is, that is interesting. An anonymous question, have any of the found seals been connected with known documents? No, that is the Holy Grail. We've, we've come close to it with Chris Whittic in Sussex working very closely with our FLO. He's been checking documents, but no, as far as I know Laura might know better, but as far as I know nothing yet, no. I would also say no, although I did manage to get a document that named the person whom I'm certainly in the seal, but the seal on that document was different, annoyingly. That was the closest she had an unusual name, it was an unusual place, and we had a husband's name, but yes, that's the closest I've got. Yeah, and I think your point about accidental loss is very important when we're, this particular part of the discussion, about connecting surviving matrices with surviving impressions. Yes, yes. I do think that that is the real great strength of our data that it is accidental loss. Yup. I think that's it, and I think Laura has actually answered several of the questions in chat, so if anyone wants to look there, I will restrain myself because I have so many things on to ask you all delay, all delay matters, but I'd like to thank you very much again for that, absolutely fascinating, so much potential there for so many more things to follow up.