These days, it isn't very often I get to an auction sale of any kind, so a farm sale where all the lots are set out in rows across the grass is quite an attraction.

I thought I'd go and have a look at what was on offer, especially as I believe there hadn't been a sale at Townend Farm, in my native village, for well over a century.

It was in 1895 that Thomas Sanderson came "from off the Wolds, somewhere near Pocklington" to take this Wiganthorpe Hall estate farm, and it is his nonagenarian grandson who had instructed Boulton & Cooper to conduct the sale.

The change of tenant in Victorian days seems, unusually, to have taken place without there being a sale – I can find no mention of one in the local newspapers of that era.

There was a sale nearby, however, about that time referred to in the village school's log-book. The headteacher noted on Monday, March 25 (Lady Day) that "owing to a sale in the village, only half the scholars came – these I sent home and closed the school".

In the event, the sale was at Mr Goodwill's Moor House Farm, a mile-and-a-half away, half-way to Hovingham – so no chance of rounding up those who made quite clear their preference for truanting over times-tables.

A year later, on March 27 1896, there was a sale actually in the village. It was at The Old Hall Farm, where William Foxton had died the previous year. The nearness of the farm to the village school was one of the reasons my grandfather, Jonathan Hickes, left Mill Farm at Brandsby to move here; the thinking behind this becomes clear when you learn that he had three young sons when they flitted on April 6 – and four by the end of the 7th.

Boulton & Cooper (founded 1801, so already well-established) conducted the Foxtons' sale, according to the Malton Gazette, but it was the Easingwold Advertiser which in April carried the story of George Smith's misbehaviour – "Drunk and Assault on Police at Scackleton Farm Sale" was the headline.

Smith was a "farm servant" who caused "considerable trouble and annoyance – refusing to go away", and struck PC Bustard "a severe blow on the face". He was said to be very penitent, but was unable to attend the court "as he had to attend to the sheep". He was fined 2s 6d and costs in each case – swift justice indeed.

I must have been taken to sales from an early age because I thought all events where people stood about in groups were sales. When I was about four years old and was taken to see a wedding, at Terrington church, I am told that at a sudden hushed moment just as the church door was opened after the ceremony, I demanded very audibly "Now are they going to start selling?", much to the amusement of everyone in earshot.

It was about 10 years later that I made my first purchase, which took quite some courage. The sale was at the Rectory at Dalby, near Terrington and the bookcase was exactly what I wanted.

Mother wasn't at all keen, however and said that if I wanted it, I would have to bid for it myself and pay for it myself, too – so I did, out of the money I had saved from going bush-beating on the Hovingham estate on freezing or wet Saturdays.

"And how do you think you're going to get it home?" – well, a kind neighbour stacked it onto his roof-rack, along with various things he had bought, with ropes threaded through the open windows – we must have looked like the Larkins in The Darling Buds of May. That bookcase is still in excellent order and has never been out of use – there's nothing flimsy or Scandinavian about it all.

Over the years there have been many rewarding visits to auctions, especially when we were furnishing our first homes, in Lincolnshire and in the East Riding – painted chair (Market Rasen), chest of drawers (Fotherby), stair-carpet (Louth), Delft-rack (Kirkbymoorside), mirror (Goodmanham), a set of Victorian balloon-back mahogany dining-chairs (Troutsdale – on a pouring wet afternoon with very few people there, so we got them very cheaply indeed).

Perhaps the best buy of all, though, for a couple of pounds, was at an evening sale at Market Weighton, in 1964 we think, where I discovered a very large cardboard box which had contained a cabinet TV set a year or two earlier, but now it had in it, along with various oddments, an oil painting (or maybe it is only a copy – but a very good one) in the most battered and broken frame imaginable.

Scarborough, Queen of the North, by RF McIntyre, whose work was exhibited at The Royal Academy in 1892 and 1897, has been much admired, and one or two quite handsome offers have been refused.

The view is of the South Bay and the Castle Hill from above the Spa. It may not be Turner or Constable standard and the new frame cost about 10 times what we paid at the auction, (and there was another painting in the cardboard box, too – a schoolroom scene, a comment on Forster's Education Act probably; it is by Charles Hunt Jnr, RA, and is dated 1881) – but it was an all-round good bargain, that box of sundries.

Rural auctions must have been at the height of their popularity in the middle decades of the 20th century. After my father's untimely death in December 1946, we sold up; looking at the Malton Gazette for March 28 1947 (the sale was postponed because of the snow and flood conditions of that momentous winter), I see the whole of the front page, which is still a broadsheet to this day, is devoted to sale notices, nearly all of which give detailed lists of the lots.

There were sales that April at Hawnby and Leavening, the Fox and Rabbit at Lockton and Picksharp at Birdsall, West Lutton and Hutton Buscel, Staintondale and Seamer, Nawton and Norton. More than 30 sales listed, good entertainment, if nothing else.

The confident auctioneer could, like a stand-up comedian, work the crowd, and build up a following. "Was that only a friendly wink, madam, or was it by way of a bid?" he might say, or "Come on, missus – surely you could do with a guzunda at both sides o' the bed?".

In the event, the Townend Farm sale turned out to be quite memorable for me; firstly, there was the old-style sociability. I wasn't the only one there who had really only gone "to see and be seen" – there were three or four acquaintances from days gone by, who hadn't met for four or five, six in one case, decades.

It is amazing how people can live within 20 or 30 miles of each other and yet so rarely meet up.

But then there was the discovery – that among all the modern-day farm-gear with Continental naming, there was a real gem from the century before last: a four-row seed-drill from the 1880s or '90s. It had been adapted for tractor use at some time.

The manufacturer's nameplate reads R&J Reeves & Son. My guess is that its manufacture was somewhere around the time of the Queen's golden jubilee (Victoria) in 1887. There were still a few turnip seeds in the wooden hopper.

The wheels from the drill were the main attraction – to restore and preserve them, I suppose, to become a feature on someone's front lawn.