Cloth Seal, Clothier's Seal, Rochdale, John Walmsley
Cloth Seal, Clothier's Seal, Rochdale, John Comfley?, Image & Found by Derfel.
Found on Thames foreshore.
"It appears to say John a i or l mfleyi think there is a letter before a as the a in the surname is not a capital letter. Rochdal e possibly missing as it is next to the first letter in the surname? Nothing on the back of the seal its 29mm wide."
Possibly John (Comfley?) and probably a clothier from Rochdale.
From Paul Cannon, "The letter you think is an ‘f’ is in fact an ‘s’. It is a long ‘s’ which was in use up to the early 1800s in handwriting and print (see Long s). Compare the front page from Paradise Lost. I have never seen one on a seal before.
I would suggest that the inscription can probably be read as ‘John / [W]almsley / ROCHDAL[E]’. From the style of lettering I would date it to 1775 to 1825. John Walmsley of Rochdale was recorded as a cotton spinner in 1797 [Scholes’s Manchester & Salford Directory, 1797, p159]. Walmsley’s Sun Insurance records of 1791, presumably for the mill are in existence see London Metropolitan Archives: City of London, Insured: John Walmsley, Castleton, Rochdale, Lancashire, cotton spinner as are wills of two different John Walmsleys of Rochdale, proved in 1809 and 1822 National Archives, John Walmsley. If I am right, the John Walmsley of the seal is probably one of these men."
