Cloth Seal, New Draperies, Image by StuE, Found by Nasher.
Found in North Hertfordshire / Cambridgeshire area, 34 x 13mm, 10.6g.
Four part cloth seal, the rivet section (discs 1 and 4) being blank and the central discs (2 and 3) display NEW / DRAPE / RIE / 72 and usually the arms of Stuart Britain respectively. On this seal the image on the shield could easily be interpreted as figures each side of a central strip - cloth workers each side of a cloth but are more likely three birds as seen on many kersey seals. See UKDFD 47997, which may show a parallel.
See FIG.4. "Four-disc 'new draperie' seal found in London", Leaden Seals for Textiles - Some Archaeological Evidence Relating to Fabrics and Trade By GEOFF EGAN, Costume, 23, 39-53, 1989, "The development in the second half of the century of a range of mixed-fibre, lightweight, cheap textiles known to contemporaries as 'new draperies' coincides with a much greater diversity in the information given on some seal stamps. New draperies were first included in the alnage in the late sixteenth century, though subsequently there were sometimes delays while the appropriateness of bringing particular newly-devised fabrics under the regulations was debated. A few late seventeenth-century four-part seals have the generic legend 'new draperie' (Fig. 4), but others are more specific, giving the name of a particular kind of textile. ... 'New draperie' seals are known with dates in the 1670s."
Geoff Egan, 'Lead cloth seals and related items in the B.M. (B.M. Occasional Paper 93)' describes the term new drapery in the following way, "generic term for a variety of lightweight, 'cheap and cheerful', often mixed fabrics, which were developed in England in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries."
Victoria County History of Essex, 1907, 391-392, indicates that the indigenous weavers of Bocking and Braintree began to follow the lead of the Dutch at Colchester in producing new draperies in the late sixteenth century.
J. Thirsk, Economic Policy and Projects: Development of a Consumer Society in Early Modern England (Oxford, 1978), 61, states that from 1578 various types of 'new draperies' began to be included among the textiles examined by the alnagers. The successive Dukes of Lennox held the alnage licences for these from 1605, and again (after a break during the Interregnum) following the Restoration."
