História

The history of lead seals

We can define lead seals as small metal items that were used as protection marks. Determining the origin of product, they guaranteed its quality to the buyer. They were attached to pieces of cloth or to bags and packages with diverse commodities.

According to the design we can distinguish two types/categories of lead seals.

The first design – cloth seals, are older, mainly made of two discs, one of which has a perforation and the other has a rivet. The two discs are usually connected with a band. They are attached to the cloth threading the rivet through the cloth and through the perforation on the other disc and consequently it is bended to fix the joining. It is known that these cloth seals were used in Northwestern Europe since 13th century to the middle of the 19th century (Elton 2017, 4).

Fig. 1: Types of cloth seals (after J.Hunka, 1999, obr. 2, 297).

The second design consists of more modern bag seals. Its name comes from the fact that they were usually attached to bags with specific commodities to which they were related. As they were often attached to bags made of cloth, the first design could be used as well. But almost without exception were used type “bulla” seals. This type was employed on Papal documents. They consisted of one lead disc fixed with a string that’s closing the bag and is inserted laterally into the lead seal. Typically, the string is threaded through one or two holes that go through the body of the seal. The seal is secured by compressing the lead. Bag seals became widespread during the Industrial Revolution in 18th century and their used decreased in the middle of 20th century when materials like aluminium, alloys and plastics started to be used. Quality started to be assured also by printing the information directly on the packaging. Nevertheless, seals can still be seen on electricity, gas or water gauges. The majority of the catalogue consists of this type of seals (bag seals). The most numerous category is the so-called mill seals of Hungarian steam mill. An interesting fact is that in 1891 the Hungarian mill created their own protection mark which consisted of three cereal spikes arranged around the quality grade of flour, on the sides there were the letters M and T. This information was published in magazine Mlynář n°22, on 26 of November of 1891. This protection mark can be found on bag seals and also on flour bags. On one side of the seal is the mark with the quality grade inside of a cereal spike triangle with M.T. (Magyar Type) on sides of the triangle. On the other side of the seal is the company name. We thank for this information to mister Karel Mlýnek who made us aware of this fact.

Fig. 2 One type of bag seal (source: : https://library.hungaricana.hu).

J. Hunka dedicated his work (1999, 295-299) to cloth seals from 14-17th century found in the Slovak territory. Sporadically the newer seals were published alongside other founds in small articles (e.g. Čurný/Hunka 2011, 165-169; Furman 2020, 107).

We believe that continuously adding new examples of seals from Norther Slovakia into the online catalogue will be a moving factor in awakening interest in this underrated archaeological find.

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