Great Seal, Privy Seal, and Signet: What’s the difference?

We know that the Great Seal was an indispensable tool for keeping the government running. Historians pay close attention to the use of the Seal; not only does this help identify the date and reign of a particular warrant, but the use of lesser Seals helps us follow the movements of our itinerant kings.

Edward the Confessor is thought to have been the first English ruler to use the Great Seal, and each successive medieval monarch remade the design in his own image, to be stamped into wax. Charters, letters, and writs required a seal to initiate legally binding orders; the clerks of the Chancery wrote these orders, and the head of the Chancery was the Chancellor, usually a Bishop. So the Chancellor was officially in charge of the Great Seal and guarded it against improper use. In fact, counterfeiting the Great Seal was a serious crime, defined as High Treason in the reign of Edward III.

Without the Great Seal there was essentially no lawmaking. When the Chancellor retired, resigned, or was fired he usually handed over the seal to the King. During the Peasants’ Revolt, Archbishop Sudbury suddenly resigned his chancellorship, handing over the Great Seal to young King Richard. The timing was interesting; the following day, Richard met the rebels at Mile End and promised them everything they demanded—hoping to defuse the situation and send them home. While they waited, thirty clerks wrote out pardons and Richard applied the Great Seal to every document, making it official. Unfortunately, a few days later when the King was obliged to renege, he had to send out officials to retrieve the pardons; by then, many troublemakers used the sealed document as a “carte blanche” to continue their depredations.

In official use, there were three Seals (there were many other seals— the Exchequer, Ecclesiastic Seals, Guild Seals; the list goes on and on. I am only referencing the king and his Chancery). The Great Seal was required for any state document, but if the king was traveling around, he could use a Privy Seal—first employed by King John—to move (or authenticate, or instruct) the Great Seal. Under the early Plantagenets, the Privy Seal was under the custody of the Keeper of the Wardrobe; this evolved into the Keeper of the Privy Seal. By 1312, the Barons ensured that the Privy Seal clerk was appointed by the king in Parliament and approved by them. Hence, the Privy Seal office became a sort of second clearing-house for official documents. Eventually, almost all non-judicial documents required a warrant from the Privy Seal before it could pass under the Great Seal.

Edward II, chafing at the strictures of Parliament, started using a secret seal which eventually evolved as the Signet—the king’s personal Seal—and was guarded by the king’s Secretary (precursor to the Secretary of State). In his early years, Richard II would use the Signet to move the Privy Seal, which would move the Great Seal. But in 1383, Richard got the idea that he could bypass the usual procedures, and he started using his Signet ring for everything—circumventing the Privy Seal office altogether to communicate instructions directly to the Chancery. Why did this matter? The Barons interpreted Richard’s “abuse” of the Signet as an attempt to take personal charge of government affairs, trying to shake off control of his actions. He was even recorded ordering money from the treasury for his personal use. In 1386, however, this came to a screeching halt when Parliament ordered the reorganization of his administration and impeached Michael de la Pole, the King’s friend and Chancellor. Richard was forced to stop issuing Signet letters “to the damage of the Realm”, and his use of the Signet fell off dramatically.