An 11th-century seal once owned by Edward the Confessor has been found again in the French National Archives in Paris. Historians hadn’t seen it for over 40 years. Dr Guilhem Dorandeu, a researcher at the University of Exeter, came across this artefact while examining medieval documents. Dating back to the
An 11th-century seal once owned by Edward the Confessor has been found again in the French National Archives in Paris. Historians hadn’t seen it for over 40 years. Dr Guilhem Dorandeu, a researcher at the University of Exeter, came across this artefact while examining medieval documents. Dating back to the 1050s, this seal was originally attached to a document from the Abbey of Saint-Denis. Since the 1980s, it had remained hidden among uncatalogued collections. The seal is about three inches wide and stands out as the only complete example of its design from before the Norman Conquest. Why the 1,000-year-old royal seal was missed for decades Dr Dorandeu made an amazing find while going through some ‘trans-Channel’ documents, which are records shared between England and France over many years of history. The seal
