How Justice Grew: Virginia Counties, An Abstract of Their Formation

E-text prepared by Mark C. Orton, Eric Skeet, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team (http://www.pgdp.net)

In addition to their human cargo, the poultry and fruit acquired in the West Indies, the clothing, household gear, and other possessions of the passengers, the Susan Constant , Godspeed and Discovery had a large though imponderable cargo of English laws, customs and religion. The colonists had left England, neither driven out nor seeking escape, but to found a new England in a new world.
Though the seat of government was at King James His Towne, the natural curiosity to explore and the economic necessity for means of livelihood caused settlements to spring up farther and farther away. Despite the fact that the colonists were in a region where rivers and numerous streams afforded easy transportation interrupted only for short periods by ice in winter, attendance at court in Jamestown was burdensome.
The Four Corporations
By 17 June 1617, Governor Samuel Argall had established the four great divisions of the colony, namely: the incorporations and parishes of James City, Charles City, Henrico and Kikotan (later Elizabeth City). The Eastern Shore settlements were not included in this division.
Each of the incorporations mentioned above and the Eastern Shore contained one or more boroughs or settlements. Eleven of the settlements in the four incorporations were represented by two Burgesses each, in the first General Assembly. This, the first legislative assembly of English speaking people in the Western hemisphere, convened on 30 July 1619 in the church at Jamestown. Itself based on the English Parliament as a model, it became the model followed by all succeeding British colonies including Australia. The colonial assembly next in age to Virginia's is that of Bermuda established in 1620. In the Journals of the House of Burgesses , the names of the Burgesses for the 1619 Assembly are arranged by the cities and plantations they represented. In the Journal of the second Assembly that is extant, 1623/24, for the first and only time, the plantations are grouped under the corporations of which they were a part, except Eastern Shore, which, as has been noted, was a separate entity.