When a house on the scale of Crichel, near Wimborne in Dorset, has passed by descent it is never really credible that no evidence about its building should have survived; but it was almost as a last throw that I asked Mrs Marten where her forbears had banked in the past. She replied that they had been to Hoare’s Bank for over 300 years; and so that sent me to 37 Fleet Street in pursuit of the accounts of Sir William Napier and Humphrey Sturt, the two men responsible for the building of the eighteenth-century house. There the ledgers soon produced a number of names made more familiar by Howard Colvin.