Richard III’S ledger in house clearance sale

WHEN an antique dealer bought a box of 1930s memorabilia from a country house clearance, he must have hoped to find something of value. What he could not have expected was a medieval Latin manuscript among all the coronation cups, thimbles and magazines thrown into the job-lot box.

That manuscript has turned out to be a rare set of accounts ordered by Richard III from his lands and property in the Duchy of Cornwall, and is now to be auctioned off for up to £6,000.

The anonymous seller only discovered its worth after asking experts at Bonhams in Exeter to take a look. After painstaking work, the auctioneer’s medieval manuscript specialists identified it as a ledger prepared around the time that Richard’s short and bloody reign began in 1483. He died at Bosworth

Field on Aug 22, 1485.

His papers show how Richard made £500 in one year from the estate in Devon and Cornwall, particularly from tin mines. His accounts are to be sold on March 21, almost three years to the day that the remains of the last of the Plantagenet king of England were reburied at Leicester Cathedral after their discovery under a car park in the city.