until war with the Indians broke out in 1676; in that year, as a means of prosecuting hostilities, it was decided that all the land assigned to the tribes under previous Acts, which had been given up by them, and that all lands they now occupied but which they should hereafter desert, should be appropriated and sold for the benefit of the public.[1] Previous to this, when the Indians were shown to have abandoned ground laid off by public authority, it was the custom of the General Court, upon the most positive evidence to that effect, to suffer private persons to obtain patents to this soil, just as if it had been in the limits of the older settlements.[2] How strictly the regulation was enforced when the aborigines were still in possession of their lands, was revealed, in 1674, in the stern injunction to the colonists who had seated themselves in the territory of the Nottoways to withdraw, and also in the general instructions to surveyors not to lay off the lines of new grants in the boundaries of that territory.[3] The same means were employed in Virginia in the seventeenth century to evade the law prohibiting the alienation of Indian lands, as have been used in the present age on the reservations in the West, namely, the securing of a nominal lease from the aboriginal proprietors; the General Court was always quick to condemn such arrangements, and to deny their validity unless they were clearly to the advantage of the Indians.[4]
As time passed on, the Indian population gradually diminished, and great tracts in this way became deserted without any removal on the part of the aboriginal owners beyond what death had brought about. In 1685, for in-
