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Catalogue description Commissioners of Sewers: Laws, Ordinances and Decrees of Sewers
| Reference: | C 225 |
|---|---|
| Title: | Commissioners of Sewers: Laws, Ordinances and Decrees of Sewers |
| Description: |
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. |
| Date: | 1599-1831 |
| Related material: |
Material from the Crown Office relating to commissions of sewers is in C 191 |
| Held by: | The National Archives, Kew |
| Legal status: | Public Record(s) |
| Language: | English and Latin |
| Physical description: | 72 bundles and parchment membranes |
| Administrative / biographical background: |
From time immemorial it has been recognised that the danger of flood, and the threat of inroads from the sea, could best be combatted by effective land drainage and the building of embankments and sea walls. The communal responsibilities that the maintenance of these works imposed were, during the thirteenth, fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, enforced in different localities by either customary authorities or specially appointed justices under royal commissions of sewers. The first such commission recorded on the patent rolls dates from 1258, and relates to the parts of Holland in Linolnshire. During the fifteenth century successive parliamentary statutes began to impose a greater regularity in these proceedings, culminating in the Statute of Sewers of 1531. The statute empowered the lord chancellor, lord treasurer and chief justice to issue, when they judged it necessary, a commission to a body of men to govern the sewers of a particular district. Under this act a commission of sewers lasted only three years, although in 1571 the term was extended to ten. To ensure that the more important laws passed by the commissioners might survive the termination of their authority, the 1531 statute provided scope for certain laws to be engrossed on parchment and certified under the seals of the commissioners into the Court of Chancery. Once the Commission of Sewers Act of 1571 dispensed with the need for the royal assent to be given to the commissioners' decrees, the mere authority of the seals of any six commissioners became sufficient to make permanently binding laws; laws which held good (until expressly abrogated by successor commissioners) even after the term of a commission had expired, or had been summarily brought to an end by a writ of supersedeas. |
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