Governor in 1639, it was declared that for every person who had transported himself, or had been transported into Virginia before 1625, an area of fifty acres of ground should be allowed if it had not already been done, and Wyatt was directed to continue to enforce this regulation until he had received orders to pursue a different course.[1] The same injunction was laid upon Berkeley in the instructions given him in 1641 on assuming the administration of affairs in the Colony.[2] So important did the Virginians consider the head right of fifty acres, that in their surrender in 1651 to the Commissioners of Parliament, they sought and obtained its confirmation as one of the conditions of submission.[3] This fact is embodied in the preambles of many of the patents put on record during the existence of the Protectorate.[4] In the Act of Parliament passed for the settlement of affairs in Virginia, the privilege of fifty acres for every person transported thither was continued, and this Act is mentioned in many of the patents issued at this time as the authority for the grants which they contained. After the Restoration, this privilege was confirmed repeatedly in the instructions given to the Governors of the Colony.
The acquisition of land in Virginia by the conveyance of persons from England was not as inexpensive a means of becoming an owner of soil in the Colony as it would seem upon the first view. If a man obtained his title to fifty acres by the transportation of himself, the cost in general in the seventeenth century was six pounds, the outlay entailed by a passage across the ocean at that period.
- ↑ Instructions to Wyatt, January, 1638-1639, British State Papers, Colonial; Sainsbury Abstracts for 1638, pp. 46, 47, Va. State Library.
- ↑ Instructions to Berkeley, 1641, Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, vol. II, p. 281.
- ↑ Hening’s Statutes, vol. I, p. 364.
- ↑ The following was the form during the administration of Richard
