The Price That Was Never Tested

An object can be argued about for months without ever acquiring a price

A price is what a saleroom produces when two people who want a thing bid against each other. Everything else that gets called a price is something narrower: an estimate, an ask, a target, an offer, a valuation for a particular statutory purpose. The distinction is usually academic, because most objects are eventually sold. For the small number of objects a country decides it cannot lose, it is the whole story, because preventing the sale is precisely what everyone involved is trying to do.

The Hereford Mappa Mundi is the clearest case in this archive. Between November 1988 and the spring of 1989 the map was the subject of questions in the Commons, a full debate in the Lords, a national appeal and a rescue package, and several substantial sums were discussed in public. Not one of them was a price for the map. The auction that would have produced one was called off, which was the point of the entire exercise.

What follows is not an argument that the map should have been sold. It is an argument about what the surviving numbers actually are, because a record that reports them as though they were valuations is reporting something that never existed.

The Chapter needed no permission from anyone to sell it

A cathedral chapter in 1988 could dispose of its treasures on its own authority, and that fact is the reason the episode happened at all. Opening the Lords debate on 21 December 1988, Lord Blake set out the position: corporate bodies such as cathedral chapters are completely autonomous and are exactly like private owners as concerns the disposal of their possessions, at any rate possessions that do not directly assist the purpose for which the body exists. He noted that the Charity Commissioners have some say over objects directly relevant to a cathedral's purposes, and that the Mappa Mundi was clearly not in that category.

The contrast he drew was with parish churches, where a vicar and churchwardens cannot dispose of possessions without permission from a diocesan consistory court, and where such permission is often withheld. There was, he said, no such external authority for a cathedral chapter, which is sole judge in its own right. Reform was in progress but had not arrived: the Care of Cathedrals Measure, which would require a Cathedrals Fabric Commission to approve disposals of certain moveables, had received only its First Reading in October 1988.

Lord Blake, who was chairman of the Royal Commission on Historical Manuscripts, added that his own body had never been consulted, and that he had suggested in a letter to The Times that the Chapter reconsider a private treaty sale to a British public collection. The most obvious alternative route to a number was raised, in public, by the person best placed to raise it, and it was not taken.

The first number was an endowment target, not a valuation of the map

The figure that set the whole affair in motion described the Chapter's deficit, not the object. The Mappa Mundi Trust's own history records that a London firm of financial advisers examined the Chapter's deficits and assets in the late 1980s and advised that the way forward was an endowment of at least GBP 6,000,000, the income from which would let the Chapter pay its way. The advisers recommended selling possessions to raise it.

The map was then selected to fit that number. The Trust's account is candid about the reasoning: the Mappa Mundi was identified as the single, stand-alone item that would realise the sum needed, on the view that selling one item was better than compromising the integrity of the Chained Library by selling a selection of its treasures. The sequence runs from a deficit to a target to an object, and at no point does it run through an assessment of what the map was worth.

This archive's record for the map notes a further figure of seven million pounds as the Chapter's stated aim, against the advisers' recommendation of at least six million. It also records, after searching, that no published Sotheby's valuation of the map has been located. Two targets exist and no valuation does.

The buyer and the auctioneer met before the saleroom did anything

By early December 1988 the parties who would have been on opposite sides of a sale were negotiating together. Answering a question from Simon Hughes in the Commons on 5 December 1988, the Minister for the Arts, Mr Luce, reported that Patrick Cormack, as chairman of the all-party heritage committee, had held an informal meeting with the Dean of Hereford, Lord Charteris as chairman of the National Heritage Memorial Fund, Lord Gowrie as chairman of Sotheby's, and Colin Shepherd, the member for Hereford.

The Minister's own framing of the solution is worth quoting for what it takes for granted. He told the House that the chairman of the National Heritage Memorial Fund had said he would be prepared, having taxpayers' money at his disposal, to consider playing a role on behalf of the taxpayer, and that all past experience in the sector showed the most sensible basis for a solution to be an effective partnership between the public and private sectors that is acceptable to all parties. Acceptable to all parties is a description of a negotiated settlement. It is the opposite of a discovered price.

Simon Hughes, pressing from the other direction, told the House that the Government must ensure the heritage of cathedrals is not sold off through auction rooms to the highest bidders wherever they might be. Both sides of that exchange treat the auction as the failure mode rather than the mechanism.

Where the price was tested, the public purse lost

The counter-case in this archive shows what happens when a comparable object actually reaches a saleroom. The Crosby Garrett helmet, a Roman copper-alloy cavalry parade helmet found in a Cumbrian field in May 2010, contained no gold or silver and therefore fell outside the Treasure Act, so the finder and landowner were free to sell it. It went to Christie's in London on 7 October 2010.

The numbers are unambiguous, and they run the wrong way for the public. Six bidders competed. The Tullie House Museum consortium in Carlisle, which had raised roughly GBP 1,700,000, withdrew at that figure with two bidders still active, and the helmet sold to an anonymous telephone bidder for a hammer price of GBP 2,000,000, reported at approximately GBP 2,330,468.75 in total once buyer's premium and the VAT then chargeable on it were added.

The helmet beat the top of its own estimate by more than six times. That is the risk a negotiated rescue is designed to avoid, and it is why the parties at Hereford preferred a room to a saleroom.

The threat itself changed what the object was worth

The most striking admission in the Hereford story comes from the Trust that exists because of it. Its own history records that at the time of the proposed sale scholarship around the Mappa Mundi was not advanced, that the map was viewed more as a rare curiosity of local interest, modestly displayed in a glazed case in the north choir aisle, and that its significance as a world-class artefact was yet to be understood. The international spotlight and media interest that followed the announcement, the Trust says, helped greatly to advance its status across the world.

That produces a genuine circularity, and it is not a criticism of anyone. A price discovered in a saleroom in early 1989 would have been a price for an object whose reputation the sale process was in the act of transforming. The map that would have been sold in February was a different proposition from the map that had been quietly on show the previous autumn, and the difference was created by the sale announcement.

It also means the counterfactual cannot be recovered. Nobody can now say what the Mappa Mundi would have fetched at Sotheby's in 1989, and the reason is not merely that the sale was cancelled. The conditions that would have set the price were themselves produced by the attempt.

How to read a number attached to an object that never sold

When a record reports a sum for an object that was withdrawn, rescued or never offered, the first question is which of five different things the number is. It may be a pre-sale estimate, which is a marketing instrument. It may be an ask or a target set by the owner's needs, as at Hereford, where the figure described a cathedral's deficit. It may be a grant or a gift, which is capped by a fund's rules rather than by the object. It may be a valuation made for a statutory purpose such as a treasure inquest or an export deferral. Or it may be a hammer price, which is the only one of the five that two independent parties competed to set.

Three habits follow, and this archive tries to keep to them. Say which kind of number it is in the same sentence as the number. Name who produced it and on what date, because an endowment target from a firm of accountants and a valuation from a saleroom are not comparable quantities. And where no valuation was published, record that as a finding rather than reaching for the nearest available figure to fill the space.

The Hereford record does the last of these explicitly: it states that no published Sotheby's valuation has been located, and it does not substitute the six or seven million pound targets in its place. That is a smaller claim than a price, and it is the true one.

Why this archive is free to read

We do this for everyone who loves art. The people who have studied it for years, and the people who just stopped to look. Iconotheca exists so that what we learn belongs to all of them.

Nobody pays us for this. No ads, no sponsors, no commercial interest. These works belong to all of us, and we would rather share them with as many people as we can than keep them to ourselves.

If it gave you something today, tell us to keep going. Follow us, leave a like, or write a positive comment. We read every one, and they are what keeps us going.