 Elizabeth and I would start by saying thank you both to Elizabeth and to John Cherry for organising this conference and inviting us to speak. As you said, it's a joint talk to myself and Rob Webly. I'll be doing the talking at this point, but it is here if there are questions later. And we hope really our talk will be an introduction to the work of the Porta Plan Tickety scheme and that hopefully will provide kind of a general background for some of the talks from Helen Geek later today, but also to talk by Malcolm Jones next week, for example. So I'll just get our talk up. So I should say also Rob Webly and I no longer work for the Tickety scheme, both of us did for many years, probably over 20 years between us. But we're both currently on projects, but we're still quite involved in doing things like training with the scheme and involved in working that material. So the Porta Plan Tickety scheme, as Elizabeth mentioned, is a national scheme across England and Wales to record objects found by members of the public. It's voluntary for you to record things apart from the case of treasure cases. And the Porta Plan Tickety scheme records things from everyone, but obviously a lot of the metal finds come specifically through mesh detecting. And I would say right at the beginning that the kind of information we are able to pull out, the pictures we can share with you, the data is all built on the work of all those hardworking flows of another country and volunteers who work with them and also of those who offer for their finds for recording. And I think, you know, that that thanks has to be there right at the beginning to kind of provide about data, which we can then use. So as you said, finds recorded through the Porta Plan Tickety scheme are stratified finds which lack a kind of vertical context within a site, but retain a horizontal context within the landscape. The pre-circulated summary we sent out gave some details of numbers. So if you want to know more about the scheme, do have a look there. But to summarise, the Bias has recorded over 7,700 seal matrices, as well as quite large quantities of cloth and product seals, bullet and seal rings, which will also be of interest to syglobrophers. One feature of the Porta Plan Tickety scheme is that every find, as well as having a detailed record, for example, here, one for April 1, is that they have a precise find spot accessible to registered users. So this concentrised national publicly available data is the PSA's real mainstream and allows both a kind of detailed approach to individual matrices through the good photographs, or small groups of matrices, or a kind of big data approach. And that's the approach we're really taking today. As the map on the left shows, which is a density of all medieval finds recorded through the Porta Plan Tickety scheme, there is some variation across the country. But as you can see from the map on the right, we've got map, the medieval and post medieval seal matrices. There are examples from across the country. There's no area without them. But this kind of variation, there is some variation in the density. And think about areas where work could happen. There is quite a lot of opportunity there for local and regional research and regional comparisons of both the adoption of kind of seals and general seal practices, but also in particular features for seals. You've done some work on the kind of adoption of the marrying cult things like the existence of lilies and so on and looking at that kind of regional variation would be something that could be done through the Porta Tickety scheme reasonably easily and conveniently from home, which is always useful during a pandemic. So like I said, there's a lot of opportunity there to look at variations between the matrices across the country and that regional variation. And one reason we really want to give this talk is to hopefully kind of inspire more people to use the data, to use this and to use it in their research and encourage their students to use it as well and enhance our knowledge in that way. So before going into kind of more statistical analysis, the Porta Tickety scheme, seal matrix data in comparison to other resources, we want to talk about some specific objects recorded by the PS and how they give an insight of the life cycle of seals. So starting at the end of that life cycle with the production, with the creation. And the evidence of this includes moulds such as the one here on the left from Lincolnshire, a multi-section copper and iron mould for a pedestal type seal matrix. But we can also look at the matrices themselves where there are clear design links between matrices. On the right you can see two examples from Kent. They've got an unusual back design. Interestingly, little in detail, they're not necessarily from the same mould, but they're obviously a very unusual time, which is presumably the mark of that particular producer of the seal matrix, Blank. And the, so I'm just going to make it so you can just see one picture of me, hopefully carrying less bit. So and that kind of looking at back designs, using that to link different makers together, is something where there's really quite a lot of potential I think for further work. I know Helen also talks a little bit, her geek talks a little bit about backmarks in her session, but I'd say this scenario that could be looked at. We have tried to find links for many of the objects we're showing on our pre-circulated summary. So I think they were originally as direct links. I'm not sure those links are always working, but if there's something you see, an object you see here that you want the link for and need help finding, then do get in touch with us. So you've got your basic kind of matrix and the next stage of production is the kind of engraving of the matrix with design and legend. And one of the strengths of the PS data is that we now have a really good range of partial engraved but uncompleted matrices. And obviously this is the sort of thing that we don't really see perhaps often in archive, seeing impressions, or in museum collections. And knowing now that there's this kind of large number of unengraved and incomplete matrices suggests perhaps there was often quite a reasonable gap between the casting of the matrix and engraving them, particularly the lead alloyed personal matrices of the 13th century. And that the partial engraved seals and the discarded again suggests that these have been done not where the people are originally casting matrices, where they have access to furnaces for recycling material, but in a later stage and separately. It's been suggested by a few authors that based on seal impressions that come from seals made by the same hand, that simple cheaper seals may produce particularly for the signing of one document, I think an example particularly from Hideout in Winchester here. And given that kind of thought could we go further built on the data we've got here and suggest that legends and designs on some of these simpler easily cut lead alloy seals might even be the work of more generalized class rather than specialist seal makers. Perhaps lead alloy blanks were kept to hand and cut as needed. This obviously is kind of a speculation, but builds on the suggestion perhaps of John McKeown in the study of seal makers in London, that there might be separate production routes for lead alloy matrices to the copper alloy ones. Obviously can't forget we've got a soft metal and writing description backwards are not easy and do require some skill, but perhaps the skills more of a clerk or some attached to a scriptorium rather than loads of metal worker. And kind of another little strand of evidence perhaps in support of the suggestion, so I'll try and bring it up so you can see me as well, is the kind of other examples of seals made on reused other objects. So this is this is the favourite seal I'm going to show you of our entire session here or my favourite one is a reused papal bullet here. You can see on the left you can see the remains of the raised design of the bullet, which has then been cut down the backs or if I'm not actually with the the post name has been smoothed and it's been cut to make a seal matrix, probably named Thomas, although obviously it's now complete. And there are other examples of reused bullet to a known, so these people who are not casting matrices, but they're making seals matrices. And there's also one example here of a reused harness pendant from Norfolk, which is that big Rob's favourite seal of the ones with the seal matrix the ones we're showing you. And this papal bullet kind of leads us neatly on to the end life of seals because you can see that one reason we have passed it is it's been cut deliberately to destroy it. And as we're going straight from here production, we're skipping over the use life, which obviously the in-pip project and perhaps other research says more of, and we're going to go straight on to the end. Because again this is what somewhere where the PS data set is bringing new evidence and new kind of areas that can be researched. And that's because they're quite a big range again of cuts and deliberately to face seals on the database. Again perhaps more usually the personal seals in the lead alloy, perhaps because the research was destroyed by hand, perhaps because recycling lead priority cost-wise. The top left example here shows damage with a bend which may be placed deep position but as well as a deliberate cut. And I would say this is an area where given this new data set more work could be done. Looking at the method and the style of distraction we can see clear kind of knife cut marks on the one bottom right. But also thinking kind of perhaps more abstractly about how vis-to-facing is needed to make a seal unusable. While simply removing the centre, as has been done to that copper alloy example, enough ordered part of the legend need to be removed. In wider sense that allows us to understand how people at time, what people at time thought was necessary for a seal. What do you need to destroy to make this object no longer a seal matrix? What is the critical bit? Do you need to destroy the image? Do you need to destroy the legend? Do you need to destroy both? How much of a seal would still operate as a seal? If that makes sense. So having got to the end and destroyed the seal matrix, got sent to Lifecycle. What I want to do now is to go on to look at the PS data set as a whole and compare it to kind of other data sets. And I'm afraid that does mean we get to where we move away from perhaps some nice images of individual seals onto seal matrices onto lots of charts and graphs. Let's get this slide going up. So first of all, data. And as unstratified finds, dating a PS material is of course stylistic. And what we're comparing this slide is an heuristic part of a PS material with the now online collections of the British Museum and with the National Archive Collection 13 of seal impressions. And I have to tell you, we chose that collection just because it was readily accessible and the data was very easy to search. I haven't put the two graphs together. The reason is because PS1 is plotted in an heuristic matter, which we're graphing dates of varying precision together. But it means it's kind of not directly comparable perhaps particularly to National Archive data. So what we saw in all of them however is this sudden peak in the 13th century. Yes, there are no numbers in the 12th century in some cases in the 11th century, but there's a sudden huge peak in the 13th century. And that's both very visible here in the PAS and the National Archives and to some extent the British Museum as well. What happens with the Archive Service is that that peak drops off very quickly in the 14th century, whereas on the British Museum it's actually higher in the 14th century and the PAS retains a very strong peak. And this can in part be a factor of dating precision, obviously more close often with with kind of archive material where it's attached to a particular document. But it may also relate to a change in seal use, which I'll discuss later. So the National Archive data also had a peak kind of secondary peak in the 16th century. That's the blue peak. Here you can see. And a chemistry look suggests that relates to great seals, which are absent from the PAS data and not as common in the British Museum collection. And I think one thing that again brings about a theme more of a tenth round of talk is the type of seals that get preserved through history in order to make it into archives can relate to the kind of documents they're attached to, which may mean great seals and more preferentially surviving in archives than some other types. One thing that's quite interesting to me given, I know, as a talk is going to talk at a call, so I was going to address this next week, is this 15th to 16th century weakness and whether that's a factor of genuine changes in behavior or whether it's a factor of our own dating blindness. So I'm really interested to what she has to say. Now, both the PAS and the British Museum data, so here in orange and PAS up here, have another strong peak in the 18th century. And this is really representative tool in the archive collection we're looking at. And one reason for this is this is a change in use partly to seals as kind of dormant and decorative use. Obviously we're worn in the medieval period as well, but I think particularly of the fog seals of the 18th century, this becomes a very widespread method of adornment. And also the use of seals as seals of closure, so in personal letters, rather than authorization. And that change in use makes them perhaps harder, I'd suggest, to study through archives rather than through the matrices. And it's interesting to think we know that's what's happening perhaps in the 18th century, and that's why the difference is there, is that also what's happening in the 14th century. And that's why the difference is there then as well. So again, think about gaps. Well, research of course exists on the 16th to 18th century seals. They're also perhaps an under-researched resource in terms of design choices, materials, affiliations. And so just to share another personal favourite which I'm looking at but other research, here's an 18th century example of a rotating fob seal. It's an example praising Frederick King of Prussia, and it's a very kind of cheap, kind of small, you can see how tiny it is, personal object that's shown popular support for the Seven Years War. And that kind of interpretation of some of these fob seals, like I said, is another area wide open for further research. So moving on from dating to material, and as the discussion on kind of broad production has perhaps already started making, kind of raising, when the strength appears as a cheaper end market, and this is seen in the materials. So compared to the British Museum collection, and here we're only looking at medieval material, which of course seems quite, the British Museum is quite comparable in date, what we see is that for both copper is the most common material, and then the majority of thrust is made up of silver and lead. The British Museum also has some stone organic material made to seize, the pair has numbers prepared and both have negligible number of gold made to seize. The contrast further between the British Museum and the pair stays risk clear. The lead alloy seals, the kind of cheap end market in raw material, and most often the skill of design represents 40% of the 40% of the skill data in any 11% of the British Museum data, and I'd say there's probably a double bias behind this, that it's easy to say there's museum collection bias, and I'm sure I'm afraid there is, but also I'd say there's probably a bias of loss. If anything silver seals once found are more likely to be recorded with the PIS, as they're recorded illegally enforced through treasure rather than voluntary, so it's unlikely to be a bias of recording. The bias of loss can come from the inherent value of the material, the Nazi silver, but also that wealthy people and institutions have more to fear from the loss and misuse of their seal, both due to the kind of value of their land holdings and credit, but also, as we've seen by contemporary cases, there's much more risk of fraud by people in their employ, or by someone else finding and using their seal, and there are cases known of that. So in the final part of the talk, I want to move on from the seal matrices, physical objects from their material, from the kind of way they're being made, to think about the designs and the legends, and these figures in those following are based on our categorization of a sample of PIS medieval data. It's always, it'd be great to see more, more regional comparisons of it, so I want to take on that pattern. So, as was raised in the pre-seculated summary, and as we throw a bit in her introduction, there has been a shift in seal matrices away from a focus on institutional seals, which has been suggested account for perhaps 20% of those in archives to personal seals, for kind of other 80% of the stuff out there in archives. However, as these graphs make clear, that shift has perhaps not gone fast enough. Well, for the British Museum, and we see other museums, institutional seals make up 40% of their collection. For PIS, this is only 3%, and here I'm lumping together, obviously, governmental seals, religious institutions, and various other institutions, but you can see how small a proportion that is of the PIS data. Again, there are biases against loss of this type of seal, again, as we mentioned, but the seal seals, but I'll give you past this discrepancy as a survival bias amongst documents as well, towards those of larger institutions in the wealthy in general. It's also worth noting the very large proportion of anonymous seals in both the British Museum and the PIS data. We really, I'm very struck to find a readily comparable figure for archives. It may be some people today have those figures immediately to hand and can say whether this is true, but my impression is that the proportion of anonymous seals in archives is much lower, and here we're talking about seals which don't name an individual. And that, again, may mark the anonymous seals' greater use of seals of closure. To not say that anonymous seals aren't by archives, I know they are, but, and they are used as seals of authority, but it's about the relative popularity of different uses of different types of seals and designs. And again, studies are focusing on seal impressions in archives, and it's no wonder that such seals perhaps are under-researched relative to their perhaps true popularity out there in the medieval period. So it seemed useful because we've got that data to kind of categorize these anonymous seals, to think about the type of messages being given by these, and in future to our comparison the best survival in the archives and what that tells us about their kind of different, useful different types of documents. And this also perhaps will find a useful background to discussions of individual seals this time by Malcolm Jerry's next week. What we see is that over a third of these kind of anonymous legends focus on the role of the seal itself. When we're thinking here about seals, now we have to apologize to my Latin, which is non-existent, we think about seals such as I'm Frangere lego tege, so break, read, seal. A further third religious, and these can vary from very grand 14th century copper allied, pointed ally seals with standing seals and kind of kneeling figures, right down to the very simple hill of calvary images, such as this one with ESOS Amome. The final third is again perhaps disproportionately where a lot of attention has been focused on the kind of amortery and hunting examples and the funny joking legends. And it's something because they're really fun ones, but it's important to bear in mind that these are in a small proportion of this and again it'd be great to compare some of these statistics to archives and hopefully these figures provide a kind of useful baseline for that sort of future comparison. It would also be good to see more work in future on dating and how the use of them changes through time amongst the PS data set as well as in archive and seal oppressions. This obviously is looking at the legend and it is the case that hunting scenes, for example, can be combined with legends talking about the role of the seal, for example. So the designs will be finally turned and moving from the legend sign, this is what we can really study in the X-men resource of DigiSync and we sent a link I think in the pre-circulated summaries and just have to say thank you to the creator of that, which by categorising seals in online database allows to compare the PS data to their data and because it's that one thing talking about data consistency we can see where they've applied a particular term to a particular design. We can be sure that we're applying it to the same types of designs because we can see the visual record of their example. Although DigiSync I know is pulling in PS data at the moment because it's not categorised it doesn't turn up when you're kind of looking through their proportions. So what their categorised data is mainly archive and museum based so it's kind of comparisons to the PS data. So looking at this what we see is kind of a real clear discrepancy in that the kind of designs being found in cataloged archive museum collections are both different so within the PS devices and here we're talking about things like flood and lead or radiating devices and the most common followed by animals in contrast on DigiSync at humans and objects predominate and when we break this down in detail just going to examples there for an animal a device a standing figure and of an object nice hatchet there. So if we break this down in detail a lot of this discrepancy is actually caused by kind of a few particular motifs within these classes. So it's a very complicated graph but just say the red and blue dots represent the portions of seals of that sign on DigiSync in red or PS in blue and for most actually they're not that for most classes in each kind of column in effect represents class they're not that clear apart partly actually because most of these designs aren't that common so the difference between one and three percent just isn't that great that makes sense. But what we see is there are some real discrepancies it's much stronger the DigiSync data is much stronger in terms of full-length human figures and representations of periodic shields in the object class and that this kind of difference is not just a product source we categorize so if our DigiSync is shown by archive research so there's only two percent of PS data as our moral designs and this can be compared to the 17th cent London and 15th cent in their new cluster that analysis you can have in your research so again we're seeing a difference between the matrices that are lost and the seals that survive on documents to make it into archives the higher number of animals in pairs seems to reflect the higher number of hunting-rated creatures to become anonymous seals and again are we looking at a difference there in terms of the kind of different uses of these different seals and what then happens that while their seals may be used in legal texts are they more popular because they're more popular being used on personal letters and documentation. Final PS data has a lot more radial devices and they've been more stylized lilies and these particularly common lead are known matrices 44% of all lead animating are sample peptides in a copper alloy while radial designs should not be assumed to be a below status individual I think it's better that again we're seeing a link between a less individual design and intrinsically less valuable material and a pair of status sets of seals which people are more like to lease um I'm just coming to the end sorry so these are people who are choosing to let our seal or being provided with one perhaps people I just wonder whether people who do not need is hard-wearing a seal or to invest in much money in a fancy material or individualized design a group who perhaps don't need to use a seal as often a seal in fewer land rather lead or documents and expect their seal impression to be seen by fewer people and therefore the display potential which I know is going to discuss a lot in seals and we'll discuss very much dates next week which might encourage people to invest in seal it's a messy medium it's kind of less I was just that the documentation of these people's also less like to buy and that's the large institution so overall differences here are perhaps not surprising but they seem to confirm that we are in a pair of state-based revealing a largely different sector than the medieval seal using population seal matrices of different styles and of different individuals having different types of use lines and the different life cycles which can each different design choices but also difference in where and how they're used and ultimately whether they survive for us to study today whether it's discarded objects we're going to get here or impressions in archives so thank you very much thank you very much indeed I mean that was absolutely fascinating very exciting we have a lot of questions I don't know if we're going to get through them all now so I'm going to throw some of them at you maybe Helen could also speak to some of these as well for her paper why 500 paper bullet in the PAS from that so where are they um so there's a suggestion of whether some of them are ones where they document has been destroyed things like the information but also a suggestion that some may have been deliberately used kind of reused in new ways I'm looking at Rob here he has more comment no he's shaking his head as well I I think there has been work on this and I would just point them to the work of Tim Pestle here who's recently published about that and we can find that reference if useful if I can break in there's also um something that's been done on paper bullet in the Netherlands by um I've got a note of Bartels 2017 um and really I think we're a bit desperate aren't we Laura for somebody to come in and do a bit more work on the paper bullet I mean Tim Pestle but we need we could do with a PhD student yes right thanks very much um I'm just taking these in order next one from Ella Paul um they're all so similar gaps in 15th century evidence in Scotland um but do you have other objects being reused as civil matrices I'm any aware of but I'm the harness pendant I think I'm trying to think of other objects that could be I think the problem is is to what example I'm thinking about other types of seal tickly cloth seals and so on the impression would really hide any other data I think again it's a case of a really good search so the payers may bring more of these up and again it'd be a wonderful project for somebody but yeah below the one I can think of at least two or three examples and that's a perhaps thank you from Paul Drury why are there so many discoveries recorded from East Anglia from East Anglia um a history of excellent liaison in that area particularly in Norfolk it's also a geographical reason obviously it's a very heavily plowed agricultural landscape compared to the upland landscapes but yeah that combination of a lot of activity there in terms of the agriculture and also that long history of liaison and also a slightly more investment in terms of the number of people recording you know the number of staff recording in that area right