Chancery: Petty Bag Office: Decrees of the Commission for Complaints Against the...

The decrees in this series were made by commissioners appointed under the Bedford Level Act of 1663 and sent into the Petty Bag Office.

These were independent commissioners, hearing complaints from those who claimed that the drainage of one locality had adversely affected land in another, or who contended that certain owners, commoners or townships had been deprived of more land than was justifiable in order to compensate the adventurers.

The commissioners could examine witnesses under oath, order changes in the allocation of land, direct the corporation to award compensation, and even sequester the holdings of any adventurers who failed to comply with their decrees. The decisions of the commissioners concerning boundaries in the Bedford level were certified into Chancery.

A large collection of records of the Bedford level corporation for the period 1663 to 1920, the bulk of which was once held in the Fen Office at Ely, is now in the Cambridgeshire Record Office.

Under the terms of the Bedford Level Act, the fifth earl of Bedford and a number of fellow-adventurers were incorporated into a new authority, the 'corporation of the governors, bailiffs and commonalty of the company of conservators of the great level of the Fens'.

The corporation of 1663 was the successor to a similar authority that had been established in 1649 by a 'pretended' act of the Interregnum. This body had in turn superseded the original co-operative venture for the reclamation of land in the central 'great level' area of the Fens, which had been established in 1630. Each of these authorities proceeded upon the same principle: 'adventurers' would undertake to attempt the reclamation of land, in return for the grant of a part of the recovered territory.

The amount of land held by the 'commonalty' of adventurers had, since 1630, been 95,000 acres. The new corporation established in 1663 had the power to levy a tax on that land, the money raised from which was to be spent on the maintenance and repair of drainage works throughout the 307,000 acres of the Bedford level as a whole.