Cloth Seal, German, Augsburg, pre-mid 16th century

Cloth Seal, German, Augsburg, pre-mid 16th century, Image & Found by James Venton.
Found in Kent, ?mm.

Lower case Lombardic 'a' star each side // stylised pine-cone star each side

See Nos.308 - 310 Fig.41, Geoff Egan, 'Lead cloth seals and related items in the B.M. (B.M. Occasional Paper 93)' "Seals from the fustians (mixed linen-warp and cotton-weft fabrics) of Augsburg, known to contemporaries in this country as 'Ousbrow or Augusta fustians', are among the most common and widespread of all the recorded imports in England, constituting almost one third of the Continental seals found here. They have been found in over a dozen counties ... and they are also known in large numbers abroad.... The pine-cone on the stamps is the heraldic badge of the city and the letter A is its initial. A large number of different stamps are known, most with the same basic devices on ... Sixteenth-/early seventeenth-century dating seems appropriate for these."

See pages 296-8, Elton, S., Cloth Seals, An Illustrated Reference Guide to the Identification of Lead Seals Attached to Cloth: from the British Perspective, Archaeopress, 2017, "Series of Augsburg seals found in Gdansk showing the progression of the lower-case letter ‘a’ into a stylistic feature that could well be mistaken for a crosier and preceding letter. The switch to upper-case ‘A’ occurred in the mid-16th century [Maćkowski, T., 2012b, p.41, Fot.15]."