MOTIVATION

This is the paragraph that was the catalyst for my research, the Victoria County History of Derbyshire Volume 2 page 172.


Records of the Duchy of Lancaster [1][1] contain cases from the reign of Henry VII to the end of the Stuart period.

These suits in the Duchy Court today closures continued during the reigns of Edward VI, Mary, and Elizabeth.

There were enclosures at Belper, Duffield, Scropton, Alderwasley, Bowden, Spondon, Mellor, Parwich, Buxton, Fairfield, Tunstead, Bonsall, Priestcliff, and Wirkesworth. They all appear to refer to the enclosure of common land as separate pasture, while the evidence of the enclosure of arable land, or the conversion of pasture to arable is very small. The court rolls of Ashford for the year 1608 [2][2] contain entries which indicate clearly an enclosing operation of that kind in progress.

It took me 30 years to find my 6 documents at the national archive and another 3 to transcribe them. I originally helped to form the Spondon Historical Society in 1982 after a 13 week WEA course, from our point of view to do the necessary research as a group, but this fell on stony ground and I was left to do the research by myself. Most of the delay occurred because I only read the relevant paragraph and didn't read the preceding pages which gives a clue where to find the documents. Most of the time early on, has been spent building up books on enclosure, mainly by Rex C. Russell working in Lincolnshire recreating the landscape before Parliamentary enclosure and documents relating to Spondon's Parliamentary enclosure in 1789.

I wanted to find out where these documents related to and I would like the website to announce to the world that Spondon was not only affected by the Parliamentary enclosures on the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries but an earlier bunch of documents told of earlier set of sixteenth and seventeenth century enclosures.


STEVEN MAY