The practice of arbitration in seventeenth-century England has not been the subject of close study. Whilst it is recognised that arbitration was a frequent and favoured means to resolve disputes during this period, previous historians of law and social relations have focused their interests elsewhere. For this reason, little has been done to account for the passing of the Arbitration Act of 1698, the first statute on arbitration to be enacted in England. The statute authorised the common law courts to imprison individuals for contempt of court if they did not comply with an arbitration, thereby instituting a procedure that is dissonant with the conciliatory or ‘neighbourly’ view of arbitration espoused by historians. The aim, then, of this dissertation is two-fold. First, it seeks to examine the structure and practice of arbitration in seventeenth-century England to provide an introduction to the topic that is long overdue. This will offer the opportunity to question some of the prevailing assumptions about the process, and it will be argued that arbitration was often far more coercive and law-related than previous scholars have indicated. Second, the dissertation seeks to explain why the Arbitration Act of 1698 was made. By analysing the development of the enforcement procedure on which the statute was based and the circumstances surrounding its drafting and enactment, it will be argued that the making of the Arbitration Act was in fact a two-stage process, the stages of which were largely unconnected to one another. Whereas the enforcement procedure the statute authorised first arose to ensure the specific performance of an award, the decision made as a result of an arbitration, the statute itself was passed to address political and commercial exigencies of the 1690s.