to venture into this area in sufficient numbers to inflict. sufficient numbers to inflict serious injury. Remnants of the palisade were in existence a quarter of a century later.[1] The country in the immediate vicinity of Jamestown, however, formed the principal cattle reserve of the Colony. All the forest in the general neighborhood had now been removed, and it was converted into pastures and gardens. But little grain or tobacco was planted there. Here the greater number of the live stock of the surrounding plantations were kept throughout the year, being fed on hay in winter, instead of being suffered to browse at large in the woods, or to devour the refuse of the cornfields.[2] The rate of increase was not extraordinary; there is a record of a herd in Virginia which numbered fifteen head in 1628, and which had grown to fifty only in 1636, eight years later.
The first legal provision, looking to the enclosure of land as a barrier against the depredations of cattle, was adopted in 1626 by the General Court. It was ordered in the course of this year that in those parts of the Colony where cattle were preserved, such as Hog and James City Islands, the planters, in seeking to protect their grain, should be careful not to run fences across narrow necks of land, as this would deprive the animals of a wide area in which to browse, but instead to enclose the fields in which their crops were growing, leaving the live stock to wander at liberty outside. If in violation of this regulation a fence was erected, shutting them out of a range not under cultivation, it was to be destroyed, and the loss which might follow from the entrance of cattle was not to be made good.[3] In February, 1631–1632, the General Assembly
