Catalogue description Office of Woods, Forests and Land Revenues and predecessors and successors: Miscellaneous Books

This series contains a collection of miscellaneous volumes kept in The Crown Estate Office. It includes accounts, letter-books, etc, of the Office of Woods, Forests and Land Revenues; grants, leases, surveys, records of the disafforesting commissioners etc., relating to Crown properties; political and parliamentary treatises, etc, collected by Sir Julius Caesar in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.

Also included are papers relating to Queen Catherine of Braganza's jointure; records of the Commissioners of Inquiry into the Woods, Forests and Land Revenues of the Crown, 1786 to 1793; and of the New Street Commissioners. The proposed purchase in 1826 of the Duke of Atholl's properties in the Isle of Man produced an exceptionally fine series of surveys, valuations and reports (CRES 40/88-92): other detailed local material also exists for other places such as Orkney: CRES 40/101

CRES 40/42-55 contain a wealth of interesting and varied material relating to Crown lands, including some transcripts of process relating to the escheat (forfeiture) of lands belonging to convicted felons. The volumes contain subject indexes.

The kernel of the collection was in existence by the mid-eighteenth century at the latest, when Zachary Chambers, the Register of Crown Lands, compiled inventories (CRES 40/67-69) mentioning some of the earlier books.