For the performance of this duty the escheator received a single fee of five pounds sterling.[1] The certificate of inquest was returned to the office of the Secretary of the Colony, where it remained for nine months, and at the expiration of that period a patent issued to the person for whom the inquest had been made, provided that no one had appeared in the interval and brought forward sufficient evidence to show that he was entitled to the estate as the heir of the former owner.[2] The same laxness prevailed in the acquisition of title to soil which had escheated as in the case of ordinary public lands, it being held by force of popular custom that an inquest like a survey conferred an absolute interest in all escheated plantation whether a patent had been obtained for it or not.[3] Many of these plantations amounted in area to one thousand acres, and occasionally exceeded that number. Whoever secured possession of them was required to pay a fine of composition of two pounds of tobacco an acre.
The confusion in which titles to plantations in the Colony was often involved is revealed in a striking light by the fact that it became a general habit among those who were appointed to settle the estates of persons who had died intestate, to convey the lands thus coming into their possession as if the absolute fee simple was in themselves, thereby preventing in many cases the operation of the law as to escheats.[4] So far was this carried and so
- ↑ Beverley’s History of Virginia, p. 198; Howard’s Answer to the Virginia Petition, British State Papers, America and West Indies, No. 512; McDonald Papers, vol. VII, pp. 221, 222, Va. State Library. See Commission of an Escheator, Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, vol. I, p. 238.
- ↑ Beverley’s History of Virginia, p. 227; Hartwell, Chilton, and Blair’s Present State of Virginia, 1697, p. 19.
- ↑ Letters of Governor Spotswood, vol. II, pp. 35, 36.
- ↑ Hening’s Statutes, vol. II, p. 137.
