The Collection of Wiltshire Coins, Tokens and Paranumismatica formed by the late David Ward

Paper Money, Salisbury, Sarum Bank, One Pound, 15 August 1807, no. 6221, for Burrough & Co, signed by Michael Burrough, vignette of City arms at top left (Outing 1886a). Bankruptcy stamp 31 August 1810 on back and other light notations, several small holes in body, otherwise fine £80-£100

This lot was sold as part of a special collection, The Collection of Wiltshire Coins, Tokens and Paranumismatica formed by the late David Ward.

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Michael Burrough (b 1767), who married Barbara Eeade at Fordingbridge on 30 June 1788 and was elected mayor of Salisbury on 18 November 1790, was formerly in a banking partnership with George Reade that was dissolved on 25 June 1799. The effect of the banking crisis in Salisbury in the summer of 1810 was widely felt. A contemporary wrote of Bowles, Ogden & Wyndham’s bank that ‘the city...is of full of weeping and wailing. The bank has stopt payment; and every body in the town kept money at it, or has got some of its notes. Some have lost all they had in the world. It is the next thing to seeing a city with a plague within its walls.’ Nevertheless, the number of traders who sustained large losses was small and the immediate consequence was a run on Burrough’s bank, which stopped payment. Burrough himself, a ‘man’s mercer, dealer, chapman and part-time banker at Salisbury’ was unfortunate, because his balance with the clearing house of Kensington & Co in London far exceeded his liabilities. His bank’s collapse was the prelude to a wave of similar failures in the south and west