two head rights on account of the same person. The proprietaries of the Northern Neck did not consider themselves under any legal constraint to give fifty acres of land for the transportation of every man, woman, or child who might be introduced into the boundaries of their territory as defined in their grant. This led to a further perversion of the object of the head right. The ship-master or merchant who had imported servants into the Northern Neck, or English emigrants who had gone there to settle, entered a claim for lands in that part of Virginia which lay outside of the limits controlled by the proprietaries, in proportion to the number of individuals brought in, and when they had secured acknowledgments of their claims, they assigned the certificates for a stated consideration to persons who either lived in that division of the Colony or who proposed to take up their residence there, and who by means of these certificates were able to obtain patents to extensive plantations. In cases of this kind, the Colony at large acquired the additional population, and to that degree the principle of the head right remained inviolate, but the principle was really disregarded in the fact that these transactions threw into the hands of the purchasers of the certificates great bodies of land which must continue wholly uncultivated and uninhabited.[1]
The perversion was pushed so far that head rights were granted upon the presentation of lists of names copied from old books of record, and it ended in the clerks in the office of the Secretary of the Colony falling into the grossly illegal habit of selling these rights to all who would pay from one to five shillings for each right, without any pretension being made that the buyer had complied with the law either by bringing in immigrants
- ↑ Letters of Governor Spotswood, vol. I, p. 153.
