According to Lord Baltimore’s charter his northern boundary was the fortieth parallel of latitude, which runs a little north of the site of Philadelphia. The latitude was marked by a fort erected on the Susquehanna River, and when the crown lawyers consulted with Baltimore’s attorneys, they were informed that all questions of encroachment would be avoided if the line were to be run just north of this fort, so as to leave it on the Maryland side.[105] Penn made no objection to this, but when the charter was drawn up no allusion was made to the Susquehanna fort. Penn’s southern boundary was made to begin twelve miles north of Newcastle, thence to curve northwestward to the fortieth parallel and follow that parallel. Measurement soon showed that such a boundary would give Penn’s province inadequate access to the sea. His position as a royal favourite enabled him to push the whole line twenty miles to the south. Even then he was disappointed in not gaining the head of Chesapeake Bay, and, being bent upon securing somewhere a bit of seacoast, he persuaded the Duke of York to give him the land on the west shore of Delaware Bay which the Dutch had once taken from the Swedes. By further enlargement the area of this grant became that of the present state of Delaware, the whole of which was thus, in spite of vehement protest, carved out of the original Maryland. In such matters there was not much profit in contending against princes.
Old manors in Maryland.
In the course of this narrative we have had occasion to mention the grants of Bohemia and other manors. In order that we should understand the course of Maryland history before and after the Revolution of 1689, some description of the manorial system is desirable. One of the most interesting features in the early history of English America is the way in which different phases of English institutions were reproduced in the different colonies. As the ancient English town meeting reached a high development in New England, as the system of close vestries was very thoroughly worked out in Virginia, so the old English manor was best preserved in Maryland. In 1636 Lord Baltimore issued instructions that every grant of 2,000 acres or more should be erected into a manor, with court baron and court leet. “The manor was the land on which the lord and his tenants lived, and bound up with the land were also the rights of government which the lord possessed over the tenants, and they over one another.”[106] Such manors were scattered all over tidewater Maryland. Mr. Johnson, in his excellent essay on the subject, cites at random the names of “George Evelin, lord of the manor of Evelinton, in St. Mary’s county; Marmaduke Tilden, lord of Great Oak Manor, and Major James Ringgold, lord of the manor on Eastern Neck, both in Kent; Giles Brent, lord of Kent Fort, on Kent Island; George Talbot, lord of Susquehanna Manor, in Cecil county,” and he mentions a sale, in 1767, of “twenty-seven manors, embracing 100,000 acres.”
Life in the manors.
In the life upon these manors there was a kind of patriarchal completeness; each was a little world in itself. There was the great house with its generous dining-hall, its panelled wainscoat, and its family portraits; there was the chapel, with the graves of the lord’s family beneath its pavement and the graves of common folk out in the churchyard; there were the smoke-houses, and the cabins of negro slaves; and here and there one might come upon the dwellings of white freehold tenants, with ample land about them held on leases of one-and-twenty years. In establishing these manors, Lord Baltimore had an eye to the military defence of his colony. It was enacted in 1641 that the grant of a manor should be the reward for every settler who should bring with him from England twenty able-bodied men, each armed with a musket, a sword and belt, a bandelier and flask, ten pounds of powder, and forty pounds of bullets and shot.
The court leet.
These manors were little self-governing communities. The court leet was like a town meeting. All freemen could take part in it. It enacted by-laws, elected constables, bailiffs, and other local officers, set up stocks and pillory, and sentenced offenders to stand there, for judicial and legislative functions were united in this court leet. It empanelled its jury, and with the steward of the manor presiding as judge, it visited with fine or imprisonment the thief, the vagrant, the poacher, the fraudulent dealer.
The court baron.
Side by side with the court leet was the court baron, an equally free institution in which all the freehold tenants sat as judges determining questions of law and of fact. This court decided all disputes between the lord and his tenants concerning such matters as rents, or trespass, or escheats. Here actions for debt were tried, and transfers of land were made with the ancient formalities.