In witness whereof I have to these presents sett my hand and the great seale of the colony, given at James Citty the six and twentieth day of January one thousand six hundred twenty one [o.s.] and in the yeares of the raigne, of our Soveraigne Lord, James by the Grace of God King of England, Scotland, France and Ireland, Defender of the faith &c., Vizt: of England, France and Ireland the nineteenth and of Scotland the five and fiftieth, and in the fifteenth yeare of this plantacon.
Claiborne supervised most of the surveys included on the list of patents that was drawn up by Governor Wyatt in 1625. Out of 184 patents that were issued to individual planters, over seventy-five per cent included only 200 acres or less with the most frequent grant being the 100-acre grant to the "ancient planter." For the remaining individual grants, approximately one-sixth were between 201 and 600 acres; four were between 601 and 1,000 acres; and four exceeded 1,000 acres.
In an analysis of the status of the Virginia population with regard to landholding at the time of the dissolution of the company in 1624, Professor Manning C. Voorhis concluded that only about one-seventh of the 1,240 population obtained land from the company. This would leave the remainder of the settlers as indentured servants or tenant farmers who worked out their maintenance or transportation either for the company or for private individuals who financed their trip to America. The tenant farmers constituted the larger group. In the chapter that follows, some attention will be given to the status of these immigrants and the extent to which they were able to become independent landowners in the colony.
CHAPTER THREE
Virginia as a Royal Colony
The Nature and Size of Land Grants
A variety of reasons led the King to dissolve the London Company and to assume royal control over the first experiment in colonization under an incorporated company. Failure of the colony to thrive economically, the poor financial condition of the company, political differences between Sir Edwin Sandys and the King, internal dissensions between the Sandys faction and the Smith-Warwick group, the extremely high death rate in the colony, and the impact of the Indian massacre of 1622—all contributed in varying degrees of importance to the dissolution. The company rejected efforts of the crown to substitute a new charter drawn up in 1623 providing for the King to resume control of the colony by establishing a royal Council in England and a Governor and Council in Virginia. Consequently the Privy Council obtained a writ of quo warranto which terminated with a decision by the court of King's Bench in May, 1624, annulling the charter of the company.
With the advent of royal control there was a significant continuity in practice in the colony, and the political framework was little changed. The Governor and Council were then appointed by the King, but the House of Burgesses continued without major revision. In order to assure continued respect for public authority, a royal commission was dispatched to Governor Wyatt and an eleven-man Council empowering them to act "as fully and ampley as anie Governor and Councell resident there at anie tyme within the space of five yeares now last past." A similar commission was issued to Sir George Yeardley in 1626, and for the next sixteen years royal instructions to the Governors reflected a striking resemblance.
A similar continuity was evident in economic affairs as revealed in land policy. The London Company as a corporate body in charge of the colony terminated in 1624 after eighteen years, and the following year after the death of King James I the colony of Virginia by proclamation was made a part of the royal demesne. The landholder in Virginia became then in effect a freehold tenant of the King. The rights and property of the company were taken over by the crown, but recognition was made of the private property right of the planter and of individual claims of those who had invested in the company. Even land rights to planters and adventurers that had not been taken up were recognized, but few proceeded to effect settlement or to exercise the right of taking up 100 acres per share of stock.
The land rights of the private joint-stock associations also continued to be recognized, but there was less enthusiasm on the part of individual adventurers to promote the projects started some years earlier. This development was indicative of the major change in the economic life of the colony that resulted in the decline, if not disappearance, of absentee ownership. As previously noted, Berkeley Hundred had suffered the loss of many of its settlers in the massacre of 1622; and upon expiration of term of service of the few remaining servants, only the land and a few cattle were left in the settlement. By 1636 the adventurers had sold their claims to London merchants. In the case of Martin's Hundred located about seven miles from Jamestown, the massacre doomed the active settlement and only the title to the land continued. Eventually the title to this hundred was withdrawn to permit natural expansion of the colony, and the associates or adventurers were awarded claims to land allotments commensurate with the number of shares held in the joint stock.
The tracts known as company land were maintained for a while under royal control. The role of the public estate, however, never assumed great significance, yet there is evidence of the continued practice during the seventeenth century of endowing an office such as Governor or secretary with the proceeds of a land grant.