STEPHEN H. LESHER
Signing documents is nowadays second-nature; we all do it every day. But this was not always so.
In English history the first signed documents are charters — i.e., formal grants of land and privilege from the king. Charters were for a long time the most important — and almost the only — legal documents. Most charters of the twelfth century are not signed but beginning in the thirteenth century most are.
The earliest form of signature was a cross. Depending on time, circumstance, and person these could be elaborately drawn or, more often, look like a simple "plus" sign. The person’s name accompanied the cross but the scribe, not the person himself, wrote that in. Drawing a cross on the parchment was an attestation before Christ that what the person was signing was true and/or that he would abide by it. The person drawing the cross also made the sign of the cross on his body, which was at first more important than the written mark.
The seal, an ancient invention, at first supplemented and then replaced the cross. By 1200 only kings and high church officials had seals; a century later all those who had any need to execute documents owned a seal — elaborately carved of expensive materials for the nobility, cheap and wooden for the rest. In fact, many had two: one which stated their name (usually in a ring around the circumference of a central picture) for use on legal documents and a less formal seal with a picture or personal motto of some sort for personal letters (similar to the sorts of seals sometimes used today). The "Great Seal" and "privy seal" were the King’s formal and personal seals, respectively.
The reasons why the seal replaced the cross are complex and probably not entirely understood. The seal matrix itself (i.e. the object used to emboss the wax) was thought to have some metaphysical properties. A wax seal showing a picture of an object or person — and which was itself an object that could be touched — was more impressive than marks on parchment to a pre-literate mindset accustomed to having a transaction or conveyance associated with a ceremonial object (commonly a knife). A seal was less easily forged than a cross. And the seal matrix could be, and commonly was, worn as jewelry.
The use of crosses and seals does not necessarily imply that people could not write their names. Many people who had reason to "sign" a document could do so. But a signature was not a lawful symbol of authentication unless the signer were Jewish (because traditional Jewish law accepted signatures). Bureaucracy spread faster than literacy and so seals were eventually used even by peasants who could not write at all, but the eventual demise of the seal had as much to do with changing fashion than with changing levels of education.