Legal - Banking - a remarkable document on 12 sheets of parchment, all measuring approx. 750x700mm, dated 1841, being the extensive defence in a case brought against Ralph John Lambton (1767-1844) and his partners in Lambton's Bank, Newcastle on Tyne, by creditors. The case surrounds an agent for the bank who appears to have absconded with a considerable amount of the bank's customers' money. The first six sheets of the document comprise a very closely written (and very extensive) narrative of the whole affair. The remaining sheets comprise a huge list of the bank's customers each of whom are named with financial details, making this a remarkably important record of commercial life at this time, when banks had a considerably greater freedom to issue their own bank notes and securities. Ralph John Lambton was also the MP for Durham and was a revered huntsman, with a portrait of him on his favourite hunter 'Undertaker' hanging in the National Portrait Gallery. Despite the case and the behaviour of the Bank's agent, Lambton is recorded as dying a few years after this case 'a considerably wealthy man'