If a sample of all surviving probate accounts were to be taken it would be skewed towards East Kent. Erickson has estimated that roughly one-fifth of all deceased adult male residents of the diocese of Canterbury are represented for the later seventeenth century, and more for the decades prior to the Civil Wars. No other geographical region is comparable. East Kent would also dominate any cross-regional sample because it covers a greater range of dates than any other collection. Even if 10 per cent of the East Kent accounts were to be selected for the years 1570–1719, to make the collection comparable in size with that for West Sussex, it would still heavily outweigh Sussex (and any other county for that matter) at the start and end of the date range. With approximately 13,500 documents, almost all of which fall within the parameters of this study, it is significantly larger than the 10,000 unindexed documents in the Public Records Office relating to the whole province of Canterbury, and more than double the size of the next largest diocesan collection (Lincoln). It is more than four times the size of the collections which relate to the diocese of Salisbury (including its three archdeaconries of Berkshire, Sarum and Wiltshire and its peculiar parishes), which is the next largest geographically related set of documents. Finally, a feature of East Kent's geography is that it has few borders with other administrative areas – the dioceses of Rochester and Chichester being the only two – more than half its border being coastline.