Items from an archive related to the Barrington family, £20,000 at Dominic Winter.
Sold at £20,000, five times top estimate, it was offered at Dominic Winter (20% buyer’s premium) of South Cerney in Gloucestershire on November 22.
The Barrington family papers comprised manuscript correspondence and documents, copybooks and some printed material and covered the c.1740s-1830s period.
The principal figures involved were William Barrington (1717-93), 2nd Viscount Barrington, twice Secretary at War (during the Seven Years’ War and the American War of Independence), and Chancellor of the Exchequer; his brother Admiral Samuel Barrington (1729-1800), and Shute Barrington (1734-1826), Bishop of Durham, and Major- General John Barrington (1722- 1764).
Further documents in this collection included estate accounts, invoices, bills, wine drunk and left in the cellar at Beckett Hall, 1760s-70s, family correspondence, various recipes - wild sage tea for gout, anchovy sauce, salting salmon, potting eels, mutton barley broth, barley water - and remedies for weak bowels, ague, wormwood draught for preserving teeth, etc.
Reflecting the comprehensive nature, the archive was organised into tied bundles and folders with alphanumeric codes on Post-it notes for which a “tabulated inventory spreadsheet” was available from the auction house.
