Cloth Seal, Cloth Worker's Personal Seal, Ligate, BDR

Cloth Seal, Cloth Worker's Personal Seal, Ligature, BDR, Image & Found by William 'Roy' Aldington.
Found in Duddon, Cheshire, 30mm.

302 / 51650 (scratched) // BDR ligate

A cloth worker's personal seal. The scratched numbers are common to many cloth seals and originally recorded the weight in pounds and length in yards of the cloth it was attached to but latter seals from the 18th and 19th century have impossibly large numbers for this to be the case. It is not yet known what properties they stood for. Similarly it is not possible to say without further markings on the seals whether the owner was a weaver, a fuller, a dyer, a searcher or one of the many other workers involved with the cloth industry.