Norwich Castle Museum acquires elephants and castle seals –

The rare medieval gold seal with a sunken gem on it, the seal depicts an elephant with a castle on it, found behind the discovery in Norfolk, England in 2020, has been acquired by the Norwich Castle Museum and Art Gallery.

The seal was discovered by a metal detector near King’s Lynn and the treasure was announced in 2021. Its history dates from 1250 to 1350. It is one of only three gold seals recorded in the portable antiquities program database and one of the only three gold medals. Interestingly, all three gold seals are anonymous. They have no name or indication of who the owner is on the gem or inscription. The seal impresses the wax and posts it on the document as an official signature, so the owner is usually recognized.

When Gold Oval sets the inscription around it, when it first spots, the inscription around the gold oval sets is not a recognizable name or motto. The inscription reads: parmat est ‧wevei dra obest, originally considered medieval Latin. The best explanation researchers might come up with is that “armed with a shield, an illegal dragon is harmful”, and its reading is more like a sentence than a riddle.

The meaning of the inscription is not obvious. one Parma It’s a small round Roman shield, so Parmatus It means “armed with Parma”. This word Weiwei is a medieval Latin word with a similar meaning to “Outlaw”, “abandoned” or “useless” (as in today’s “Waif or Stray”; Latham 1965, 519 under “Waiv”). DRA Draco is abbreviated as “Dragon”, and obesity It’s a third-person odd number Being taken away It means “becoming a nuisance”, “harmful” or “obstruction”.

Medieval French expert Malcolm Jones now cracked the code when it came up not at all in Latin, but rather the French rhyming couplet, where “wevei’s w” should be read as “vu”, meaning “you.” By this explanation, the inscription reads: par ma test ‧vu evei d dra o best, meaning “on my head, you have a dragon or a beast.” In the Middle Ages, “my mind” was a kind of expression of surprise or sincerity, such as “my soul”.

The dragon’s reference may be an allusion to the dragon, which was described as the only enemy of the elephant in the medieval beasts. The illustration is said to depict a dragon surrounding an elephant trying to suffocate or breathe on fire. They also claimed that elephants were born in the lake to protect their young people because the dragon was too hot to cross the body of water. The father elephant stood guard on the shore and if it approached, it would trample on it.

The castle on the back of the elephant is also often seen in the wild. They argued that the war elephants in India and Persia carried a fortress on their backrests and were able to support and protect multiple fighters, such as the castle’s Kreinal Castle. The image of the elephant comes with a castle, and the back becomes a heraldic symbol and a popular bar name.

Illustrations of these carnival artists have never seen an elephant in real life. They were conducted through written descriptions, many of whom were elephants who had never seen their own eyes, which is why they tend to look a little strange like they were carved on gemstones. There are very few exceptions. In 1255, the first elephant seen in England was a gift from Henry III of Louis IX, France. Around 1250-1259, the portrait of Henry’s elephant was very realistic in a series of studies by chronicler Matthew Paris.