to announce that it would be illegal for those designated as beneficiaries in a subpatent to unite of their own motion with them in the rights accompanying it, persons whose names did not appear in the document, unless the consent of the Company had first been obtained. If particular persons with their dependents should remove to Virginia, and, although not members of that body, justify their title to the lands occupied by them in the Colony by their combination with certain subpatentees, they were to be set down as mere tenants who were to be required to pay one-fourth of the annual profits of the ground which they had brought under cultivation.[1] After the dissolution of the Company, these private societies, which do not appear to have been at any time very prosperous, either quickly or gradually broke down. The lands belonging to some were transferred by patents with little regard to their original ownership. In order to confirm the persons who had obtained these patents in their tenure of the soil granted to them, special instructions were given in 1639 and 1641 by the English Government, which conferred upon the colonial authorities the power to assign a proportionate area of land to these associations elsewhere, in case they laid claim to the tracts conveyed.[2] The adventurers interested in Southampton Hundred seated in its boundaries at least three hundred persons, and expended in its improvement six thousand pounds sterling.[3] There
- ↑ Instructions to Yeardley, 1618, Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, vol. II, pp. 161, 162.
- ↑ Instructions to Sir Francis Wyatt, Colonial Entry Book, vol. LXXIX, pp. 219-236; Sainsbury Abstracts for 1639, p. 47, Va. State Library. The same instructions were given to Berkeley in 1641, Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, vol. II, p. 281; also McDonald Papers, vol. I, p. 383, Va. State Library.
- ↑ Abstracts of Proceedings of the Virginia Company of London, vol. I, p. 65; Sainsbury Abstracts for 1619, p. 23; Ibid. for 1635, p. 132, Va. State Library.
