The majority of the items in this collection were created in early modern England. These notably include lease and releases, a form of a title deed popular between the 16th and 19th centuries originally established to avoid the Statute of Enrolment (1535) and the restrictions it placed upon the sale of freehold land. To avoid these restrictions, land was conveyed as leasehold property through a “lease and release,” a title deed composed of two documents (a lease and a release). The lease document establishes a lease between the parties (thus rendering the land leasehold property) and the release (usually created the following day) conveys the said leasehold property from the landholder to the leasee (i.e., buyer). Since these are separate documents, it is rare that both the lease and release survive together. The majority of the lease and releases in this collection survive only in part, either as the lease or the release.

Other notable English documentary forms include mortgage by demise (a temporary transfer of property for a long time (e.g., 500 or 1,000 years) in order to secure a loan of money), assignments of lease or mortgage, bargain and sales, admittances (a record of the admittance of a copyholder to property within a manor), surrenders (surrender of property within a manor from the copyholder to the Lord or Lady of the Manor) and feoffments. In the medieval era, feoffments granted use of land to a feoffee in exchange for a pledge of service (thus, “enfeoffing” them to the lord or owner of the land). Early modern feoffments still used much of the same legal language as medieval feoffments, but by this time had become more akin to a bargain and sale, as they record the sale of real property from one party to another.

Edward Moulton, Neville Miers; Ga[rner?] Hayman.