make a settlement in their stead.[1] In many instances, claims to land in the Colony based on a purchase of shares in the Company were declared valid after the Company itself had been dissolved. Thus Thomas Graies, who had subscribed to the extent of twenty-five pounds sterling, did not secure a patent to his dividend until 1628,[2] and it was not until 1636 that Captain John Hobson received a patent upon a bill of adventure bearing the date of 1621.[3] It happened also that under the same circumstances a son was granted a tract that had been due to his deceased father on his holding of shares.[4]
A magnified form of the dividend of the individual shareholder was to be found in the subpatents obtained by private societies. The earliest were those known as Martin’s and Smith’s Hundreds. Certain associations of persons were allowed to engross enormous bodies of land in Virginia by purchasing many shares in the original Company, which carried with them the same privileges and the same obligations as those accompanying the purchase of a single share.[5] Thus, if one of these associations acquired twenty thousand acres in the Colony by the purchase of two hundred shares of stock, its members were entitled to twenty thousand acres in addition as soon as they had seated the first twenty thousand.[6] The history
- ↑ This is the calculation of Mr. Brown in the Genesis of the United States; see p. 549.
- ↑ Virginia Land Patents, vol. 1623-1643, p. 72.
- ↑ Ibid., p. 414.
- ↑ Ibid., pp. 390-391.
- ↑ Abstracts of Proceedings of the Virginia Company of London, vol. I, p. 143.
- ↑ The subpatentees also acquired at first special powers. At a general quarterly meeting, held Feb. 2, 1619 (O. S.), at the house of Sir Edwin Sandys, “it was ordered allso by generall consent that such captaines or leaders of particular plantacions that shall goe there to inhabit by virtue of their graunts and plant themselves their tenants and servants in Virginia, shall have liberty till a forme of government be there settled them, associating unto them divers of the gravest and discreetest of their companies, to make orders, ordinances and constitutions for the better orderinge and dyrectinge of their servants and business, provided they be not repugnant to the Lawes of England.” Neill’s Virginia Company of London, p. 129. For the dispute which arose in the Assembly of 1619, with reference to the powers and rights of Captain Martin under the subpatent of Martin’s Hundred, see Colonial Records of Virginia, State Senate Doct., Extra, 1874, p. 19. Martin claimed that he was to enjoy his lands “in as large and ample manner to all intents and purposes as any lord of a manor in England.”
