1. 2It is quite clear that those cases of enclosure by agreement which were registered in certain courts of seventeenth-century England represented a very small proportion of all the enclosure by agreement which took place during that century. The main categories of these sources in the Public Record Office are: C78/1-1250 (Chancery Decree Rolls), C79 (Chancery Decree Rolls Supplementary), E159(8) (Exchequer Memoranda Rolls), and Palatinate of Durham, Entry Book of Decrees and Orders (Durham 4) Vols. I and II (Durham Chancery Decrees). But any proposal to use these sources as the basis of a systematic study of enclosure rates in seventeenth-century England is greeted with hollow laughter from the Record Office staff. Even if these sources were to be supplemented by all the evidence available in the county record Offices of England, and by all the surviving ecclesiastical records of relevance, the full extent of seventeenth Century enclosure would still remain undocumented.
2. 4See the note onSourcesfor Table I, below.
3. 5W. G. Hoskins, and L. Dudley Stamp , The Common Lands of England and Wales (1962 ), p.103 .