Introduction: Auctions and Auction Houses in England: a brief history

Summary

When Roman emperors, generals and grandees employed auction procedures to dispose of booty acquired by conquest or plunder, they were pursuing a method of sale already of great antiquity. Moreover, as they bid excitedly at the periodic slave sales in the Forum, wealthy citizens may not have realised that half a millennium earlier their Babylonian forbears were enabled to buy girls of marriageable age via a form of carefully-regulated auction. Again, long after Rome and her empire had become a rather hazy memory, the authorities in far-away China used auction methods to sell off the belongings of deceased monks.

The subsequent history of the auction system in medieval and early modern Europe is rather obscure and while there are hints that auction methods were in use in England in the late fourteen hundreds, there is little hard evidence for the practice before the close of the seventeenth century. By this time, both notices of auctions and details of conditions of sale began to appear, with no less a luminary than Samuel Pepys recording that on 6 November 1660 two ships were sold in London ‘by an inch of candle’. Here we have an early mention of the so-called ‘English Method’ whereby an inch of candle was lit and the person offering the final bid before the candle burned to its base and the guttering flame petered out became the purchaser of the item under auction. This exciting, if slow procedure became for generations the principal means of auction in England. Alternatively, the ‘Dutch Method’ was available. In this scenario the auctioneer would put up a particular lot at a high price, which he would progressively reduce until a buyer emerged who was prepared to purchase at the latest reduced price. This arrangement remained popular for centuries and continues to be employed from time-to-time today. The leisurely ‘English Method’, however, has long given way to the process of selling by successively increasing bids which became the predominant means whereby the auctioneer plied his craft.

The auction was to become a major mode of disposal of goods of every description, from the great landed estate to the accumulated bric-a-brac of a suburban attic; from the renowned Old Master painting to a deceased uncle's stamp collection; from the thoroughbred racehorse to the broken-down hunter. Anything and everything could change ownership through the medium of the auction room.