St Andrews

If Guisborough's seal perhaps depicted its actual church buildings, there's little doubt that St Andrews' seal really does.  (Ah. St Andrews Cathedral.  I used to revise for medieval history exams in its cloister, although its sunny tranquillity was a little too soporific to recommend it as a place for work.)

But this central tower to me looks like St Reg's Tower (it seems officially to be St Rule's Tower - but St Rule's Tower is a bit of a mouthful, so everyone used, at any rate, to call it Reg's).  And lo, so it says, here (with a nice bit of audio from Richard Fawcett).  You can see traces of the roof-lines of the east and west bits (this Wikipedia/ Geograph photo shows several roof-lines), and the west end is very like what's left of the east and west ends of the St Andrews Cathedral building next door (there's a bit of an optical illusion going on in this photo!).  I wish they'd put the spire back on St Reg's - especially if it really was that rather nice snail-shell spiral in the seal!

The seal says SIGIL' ECCLESIE SANCTI [ANDRE]E APOSTOLI IN SCOTIA, and has two crosses in the field:  dexter, the saltire and sinister a cross cross.  I can't quite make out from this photo what the things are above it, but Henry Laing's descriptions of the Chapter's various seals (all using St Reg's) say that:

‘issuing from the upper part is a dexter hand, the forefingers pointing upwards.  At the lower part of the seal is an ornament composed of three semicircles interlaced.’  (It's not this one, but I like the idea of fingers of right reason pointing upwards.  St Andrews was where I first encountered the finger of right reason.)

‘in addition to the saltire and the hand, there is in this a crescent and an estoile, and on the sinister side of the tower is a cross in the place of the saltire’  (That's more like it - the second seal, or, at least, a later one than the above.

 Here's a rather nice reconstruction of St Andrews.  The history of St Andrews is very interesting, but too long for here.  It's an example of an Augustinian house taking over a much older one, in this instance a Culdee house.

 The counterseal is St Andrew himself.  This slender figure is a little disturbing! It looks late 12th-century.  The inscription is SECRETUM C[ON]VEN' S ANDREE.

The thumb or finger prints are magnificent.  (There's a fingerprint project on seals here.)

(In 2016, a teenage detectorist dug up the seal of William Lamberton, bishop of St Andrews (1297-1338).)

Photos of the seals are from Durham University Library.

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I didn't particularly enjoy my student days at St Andrews, although it was a beautiful place to be in, and there were some very good tutors.  But I did make some very good friends, and it's rather nice that the bottom of the seal should have such a topological design - my best friend from St Andrews is now one of the leading topologists in the world.