Label
Collection: The Merchant Taylors’ Company
Medium: Silver
This matrix was used to imprint the Company’s seal onto documents. The seal consists of the standing figure of St. John Baptist, wearing his camel hair robe and draped in an outer cloak. He holds a book, on which rests the Lamb of God holding a cross. The Baptist is depicted in the wilderness, surrounded trees and animals. He stands above a shield of the Company arms which were granted in 1480.
Around the edge is the abbreviated inscription: ‘SIGILLUM COMMUNE MERCATORUM SCISSORUM FRATERNITATIS SANCTI IOHANNIS BAPTISTAE LONDON’ – Common Seal of the Merchant Taylors and Fraternity of Saint John the Baptist London’. In 1502, Henry VII granted a new Charter, in which the Company is first referred to as the Merchant Taylors. It is therefore likely that this seal matrix was made in 1502 when the Company began to use their new title.
The relevance of this object to this exhibition can be found when one compares the seal to folio 27r of Jenyns’s Lectionary. Although the standing figure of St. John Baptist is not an unusual iconography, it would appear that Jenyns supplied the Masters of the Dark Eyes with an impression of our Company seal. In the Seal matrix, the Baptist has a unicorn to his right, and lion to his left. He holds the Lamb of God atop a book in his right hand. The illumination in the Lectionary is the direct inverse of this image. Jenyns wanted to ensure a reference to the Merchant Taylors’ was made in his prestigious commission of the Lectionary, and evidently gave the artist an impression of the Company seal to use as inspiration for the illustration of the Feast of St. John Baptist.
