Seals as illustrations to family history

– with some examples from the county of Telemark, Norway

Av Hans Cappelan

In most family histories there are few illustrations dating from the 17th and 18th Centuries. In Norwegian archives, however, there are many seals from that period and they are well fit to be used as illustrations. Most of the seals are not yet investigated and published.

People from different social levels of the society used seals. There are seals from small farmers as well as great landowners, from merchants, ships’ captains, civil servants and many others. They signed and sealed letters, contracts and title deeds, legal courts’ decisions, witness’ statements, taxations, petitions to the King etc.

The motifs in the seals can be divided into four groups; house marks, monograms, allegories or other symbols, and coats of arms. The borderlines between the groups are not always so easy to determine. In all the groups it is common to have the initials of the owner in the upper part of the seals. When there are three letters in the seals, the first is usually for the owner’s first name, the second for the father’s first name and the last is the letter S meaning son.

House marks
The house marks consist of simple lines without colours. A number of them are from the runes (the old Norse script). Others are international symbols as pentagram, hexagram and swastika, or contour drawings of crosses, arrow, crossbow etc. Lots of house marks are variations of basic forms, made by omitting or adding small parts of lines.

Sometimes we can follow a mark with variations through generations, and some marks may be linked to the owners of a farm for a long time. We cannot, however, say that these are established principles. Several fathers and sons had different marks and so had owners of farms succeeding each other.

Farmers used house marks, and so did merchants, civil servants and others.

House marks are often placed in shields. That does not make them heraldic coats of arms, because they are still lines and not coloured fields.

Monograms
The seals with monograms can have very simple and primitive engravings. Others are elaborate and very elegant. Some seals have two sets of letters with one of them reversed, in the same way as the royal ciphers.

The monograms are often in shields and many letters are combined so that they look like house marks. Some monograms have a coronet on top, even when their owner was not noble and had no official rank.

We have seals with monograms from all social classes, across the country and throughout the Centuries.

Allegories and other symbols
Many seals have symbols from religion, moral and abstract ideas, as an angel, a skull and the horn of plenty. There are also seals with symbols or pictures from the every day world as a shoe, an axe or a bird. Today it might be difficult to see why the owner wanted to have a certain motif in his or her seal. Some symbols were popular for some time, as the religious symbols especially in the 17th Century.

Symbols made by simple lines only, are like house marks. When the symbols are in shields they are as usual called coats of arms, even when they are quite naturalistic and complicated.

Coats of arms
Only a few noblemen lived in Telemark. We have several coats of arms in seals both from them and from other groups of people. Priests, military officers and civil servants had armorial seals, as well as many merchants, some farmers and others.

The arms in the seals vary from a shield only, to the traditional combination of shield, helmet, crest and mantling. Some arms have a shield with the crest on top without a helmet, in the style of rococo (Hugo Hiorthøy) or the English style (Just Wright). The mantling consists often of ropes with flowers in the 18th and 19th Centuries.