Decrees, laws and ordinances issued by commissioners with responsibility for drainage.
Most of the documents in this series are from the period 1600-1650, when the Fens of eastern England were being drained. Accordingly the counties appearing most often are Lincolnshire, Cambridgeshire and the Isle of Ely, and Norfolk, with Yorkshire, Huntingdonshire, Nottinghamshire and Suffolk; Essex, Middlesex, Kent and Hertford also occur, but in the west only Cumberland and Gloucester appear.
While many of the laws detail drainage, banking or walling regulations, they are also partly, or even mainly, concerned with land awards to investors in reclamation, assessments of landholders to meet the cost of drainage, and the pursuit of defaulters on payment.
The series also contains a declaration of proceedings upon the execution of a commission fining the polluter of a river, articles and instructions relating to a commission of sewers, and the order on a petition made against a decree of the commissioners.
Although there was no requirement to enrol these documents in Chancery, some of them appear among such enrolments from 1633 to 1714 in C 226, and are in far better condition than the originals.