Cloth Seal, Suffolk, Alnage, Cockerel, RS, Image & Found by London Mudlark.
Found on Thames foreshore, 40 x 15mm.
Missing // Cock in square border of rope // RS in circle, (+SU)FFOLKE around // A...
Three discs (inner two opened out) from a four disc Suffolk alnage seal. Six parallels are recorded in Provenanced Leaden Cloth Seals by Geoffrey Egan, Sub-Department of Medieval Archaeology, University College, University of London, submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, 1987, p.221. None of these has the rivet or rove disc but similar Suffolk seals show a windmill with AD to sides as a searcher's stamp on the fourth disc and further variant has an AC privy mark on the fourth disc. Egan records them as being without indication of date and so we can only put them in the broad range of late sixteenth to seventeenth century.
"Similar Suffolk and Essex seals for the alnager RS are known in London and from a wreck off the south coast of Norway, dated to the 1630s - early 1640s (Molaug 1980, 181-2). The other inner disc is known with a crowned harp or cock (e.g. for the latter M.O.L. ABO92 acc. nos. 789, 1051, 1055, the first of these being excavated together with ceramics dated to 1630-50)", Geoff Egan, Lead Cloth Seals and Related Items in the British Museum, No.100.