Catalogue description SURVEYS AND RENTALS, ETC

Surveys and other similar documents, such as rentals, extents and valors. These volumes, many of which were rediscovered in 1790, appear to be the remains of a numbered series, possibly used within the Office of Land Revenue Records and Enrolments. The volumes, including many documents bound together, generally relate to counties, or groups of counties, and apart from a few of the later seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries are all pre Restoration in date.

There are a few volumes of particular interest in this sub-series, which are amongst the earliest volumes within it. There are, for example, the copies of an important fourteenth century survey of the lordship of Denbigh in LR 2/232 and 248 and an original valor of the lands of Syon Abbey dating to 7 Henry VII in LR 2/180. There is a sub sub-series relating to the Dissolution and another one which contains records of the Court of Augmentations (certificates of chantries).

They are described in the published 'List of rentals and surveys...', Indexes, XXV, which can be found at Kew. References to these records are given as 'Miscellaneous Books (Land Revenue)' with a note of the present piece number. Many of these surveys were used by H L Grey, English Field Systems (Cambridge, Mass., 1915), which includes transcripts of parts of them.