"The extant 1583-1642 records of the Gloucestershire Court of Sewers are a nationally important survival from a small body of documentation that has rarely been fully appreciated by past scholarship. 'Sewers' in this instance are watercourses that drain low-lying coastal marshes, and these Gloucestershire records are to be prized and cherished as much as the rich agricultural land the commissioners of sewers served to protect."--xxvii.