The ship on the signet from Roskilde


Most of the medieval representations of ships on seals and signets are to be found in the large and varied group of town seals from the harbour towns around Europe - and this also applies to Danish seals. But there are other examples as well, as we shall see from the case of a newly-found signet from medieval Roskilde.

In the centre of present-day Roskilde, immediately to the north of the Cathedral, there is a field which strangely enough has not been built on in the last 400 years. In the Middle Ages the area in question was part of the parish of Sankt Hans, which extended to the north between the Cathedral and the town rampart. Although Roskilde was a harbour town, it was placed on a hill-top and not directly on the fjord. The town instead had two harbour-suburbs: Sankt Jørgensbjerg and Vindeboder.

Today the field is known as Provstevænget, and since 1994 it has been a focus of archaeological investigations. It was as a result of this that Roskilde Museum came into possession of a remarkable signet which had been found on the surface some years previously. The signet is made of bronze and has a circular stamp-area 2.6 cm in diameter. On the back of the signet is a grip with a hole in it so that it could be carried on a chain around the owner's neck, or on a belt, etc. The owner would have held the signet by this handle when he used it to stamp his mark in warm sealing-wax.

In the Middle Ages a signet was an extremely valuable and personal object which had to be kept as safely as possible. The seal was actually what made letters and documents legally valid. The seal was used where a signature is used today. The medieval signets therefore all had their own personal distinctive features which served to identify, in one way or another, the owner; often a combination of text and picture was used.

In the case of this Roskilde signet the connection is a particularly well-chosen one. The Latin inscription, written in Gothic capitals, runs as follows: S' Nicholai Tink Sacerdotis (parish priest Nicolai Tink's seal). The picture represents a scene from the legend of St Nicholas, in which he saves the crew of a ship in distress. The parish priest has thus chosen his patron saint as his motif. The signet is therefore allusive - a phenomenon which is well-known in heraldry.

St. Nicholas was one of the most familiar saints in the Middle Ages, known as the protector of seafarers and the benefactor of children. He is known from innumerable depictions, many of them in churches, in mural paintings and wooden sculptures, etc.

Nicolai Tink is known to us only from this signet, however. There are no letters preserved with his seal. It is probable that he held the position of priest in Roskilde, perhaps in the parish of Sankt Hans. The signet was found very close to the disused cemetery of Sankt Hans Church, and it is thus reasonable to conjecture that his signet was buried with him, as was the practice, in order to prevent misuse of a signet after the death of its owner. We do not know when Nicolai Tink lived, but the seal suggests a dating to the period around 1400, on the basis of the lettering of the inscription.

The ship on Nicolai Tink's signet is a hulk, a large clinker-built trading ship. Its boards and rivets can be seen clearly. At the stern and bow there are castles which are integrated parts of the construction of the ship; they may even have a structural function in holding the ship's boards together. On older representations of this type of ship one can see that the boards were held together by ropes.

The hulk is supposed to be a ship without a visible keel or stem. This characteristic is the result of the half-moon curve of the hull, produced by the fact that all the boards are curved and go right out to the point of the bows and stern. The hulk has a single mast and a square sail. These can clearly be seen on Tink's signet, on which the upper part of the broken mast with the sail disappears off the edge of the picture.

The crew of the ship consists, in this depiction, of three men, all clad in long garments with the head-gear typical of the period - hoods. Probably the size and number of persons depicted should not be taken literally, however. The ship should of course be thought of as relatively much larger than it is on the signet-picture. It must have been important, however, for the signet-maker to express the drama in the situation by enlarging the figures and not least by showing their gestures: the folded hands of the sailors and the large right hand of the bishop raised in blessing. This was the core of the message from the pious parish priest, Nicolai Tink, but as a bonus he has endowed us with another ship-representation from the Middle Ages in Denmark.

Michael Andersen, Roskilde Museum


Jorn.Sjostrom@natmus.min.dk
Copyright © 1995 The National Museum of Denmark
Last Updated may. 5 1995