estates at that time ranged from one hundred to one hundred and fifty acres; many covered as much as three hundred acres; a few extended to six hundred, and still fewer to one thousand.[1] It was not many years before the disposition to sue out patents to tracts which were considered large in that age had grown sufficiently to induce the Governor and Council to write to the Privy Council in England, and advise them strongly to prohibit the appropriation by any one individual of great bodies of land in Virginia, but this recommendation made no impression on those to whom it was addressed.[2] Barely a decade later, there were men in the Colony in the possession of plantations in the different counties which aggregated ten thousand acres.
When a person, however, was able to obtain possession of a great number of acres, it was generally through the acquisition, by patent, of plantation after plantation, each of a comparative small area, but amounting in their aggregate extent to a vast body of land. The records in the Register’s office in Richmond, in which the copies of the patents are preserved, enable us to discover with a fair degree of exactness the size of the tracts taken up from year to year after the dissolution of the Company.[3] From
- ↑ British State Papers, Colonial, vol. IV, No. 10, I. This important document will be found in the appendix to Burk’s History of Virginia, and also in Hotten’s Original List of Emigrants to America, 1600-1700.
- ↑ Governor and Council of Virginia to Privy Council, British State Papers, Colonial Papers, vol. IV, No. 10; Sainsbury Abstracts for 1626, p. 141, Va. State Library. See also for this document, Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, vol. II, p. 50.
- ↑ This collection of patents undoubtedly constitutes the great bulk of those granted in Virginia in the course of the seventeenth century. They fill eight large folio volumes. Hardly a single, if any, year after 1630 is unrepresented. The fire which did so much damage in the office of the Secretary in the time of Governor Andros, must have been confined in large measure to the destruction of other records. See Beverley’s History of Virginia, pp. 82, 83. The General Assembly in 1666 referred to “the casualty of two severall fires, whereby many of those rights (head rights recorded in the Secretary’s office) . . . were destroyed.” Hening’s Statutes, vol. II, p. 245. This statute was passed to give validity to patents “for which there appeare not any right upon record.” It is quite probable from the apparent completeness of the patent books for the seventeenth century now in the Register’s office in Richmond, that the owners of many patents which were found not to be on record in consequence of these fires or the neglect of the clerks, presented them at the Secretary’s office in order to have them copied into the patent books as a means of strengthening their titles.
