Four rare Victorian St Albans five pound notes that would once have been deemed worthless fetched nearly £1,000 at auction.

The notes, issued 170 years ago when St Albans printed its own money, sold for nearly one thousand pounds at an auction on Tuesday October 4,

making them some of St Albans’s most valuable fivers.

The notes are all emblazoned with the words ‘Bank of St Albans’ and were issued by the short-lived bank in 1841 and 1842, shortly before the bank went bust in 1842.

At least one of the notes is signed in the bottom right corner corner by the bank’s proprietor, George Alfred Muskett, who was MP for St Albans between 1837 and 1841 and one of Rickmansworth’s most colourful 19th century inhabitants.

He and his wife, Sarah, and their daughter, Selina, lived at The Bury in Bury Lane, Rickmansworth.

Muskett became a major figure in the Hertfordshire banking world in 1834 when he established the Bank of St Albans.

But like so many early 19th century English provincial banks, the Bank of St Albans went bust and in 1843,the year after his bank’s collapse Muskett unexpectedly died, aged 57. It is not clear whether he committed suicide.

The four five pound notes from Muskett’s St Albans bank were expected to sell for between £500 and £700 at the auction at Spink in Bloomsbury, London, on Tuesday October 4.

But in the end, they were snapped up by a mystery bidder for £960.

According to auctioneers Spink the St Albans fivers are in “good fine condition.”

Barnaby Faull, head of the banknotes department at Spink, said: “In the late 18th and early 19th centuries most towns and cities in

England used to issue their own banknotes. Merchants would get together and set up their own banks, but their notes, which were like IOUs, could only be used locally, so when provincial banks such as the Bank of St Albans went bust, their notes became completely worthless.”