Rare Yorkshire £5 and £10 bank notes sold at auction

The £5 note issued in Leyburn in 1899 features an image of York Minster

Two rare bank notes which were issued in Yorkshire in the 18th and 19th Centuries have been sold at auction.

A £5 note featuring York Minster and issued by Leyburn Bank for the York City & County Banking Company Limited in April 1899 went for £1,984.

The note was one of the last examples issued by an English provincial bank, said Andrew Pattison, head of banknotes at auctioneers Dix Noonan Webb.

A rare Hull £10 dating back to 1772 was also sold to a collector for £1,240.

Mr Pattison said the note was produced by Pease's Old Bank in Hull and was an extremely rare early example of a high denomination note.

"It was a huge sum of money at the time and in today's money was the equivalent of having a £1,500 note in your pocket," he said.

The rare £10 note was issued in Hull by Pease's Old Bank in 1772

The star of the sale in London was a £5 note presented to former Prime Minister Harold Macmillan, which went to an anonymous bidder for £27,280.

The note was described by the auctioneers as "arguably the finest post-war Bank of England note in the public domain".

It had the serial number A01 000003 and was the third in a sequence of Bank of England presentation notes issued in 1957.

The first two notes in the sequence were given to the Queen and the late Duke of Edinburgh and remain in the Royal Collection.