The Clerks of the Signet were English officials who played an intermediate role in the passage of letters patent through the seals.
The duty of the Clerks of the Signet was to compare the signed bills with a transcript prepared by the Clerk of the Patents, and then to rewrite the transcript as a bill of privy signet, which was returned to the Secretary of State to be signed with that instrument.
[1] By the end of the seventeenth centuries, many of the Clerks of the Signet performed their work through deputies, with the office itself becoming a sinecure.
[2] The history of these earlier Signets in the medieval period is not recorded by the table below.
Appointments were not made under the Commonwealth of England until 1655 as the republic did not recognise hereditary house of Lords, so peerages were not created.