xxviii             Introduction.



           lower Eastern Shore counties of Somerset, Dorchester and Worcester, and to
           seize unlicensed traders (ibid., I 15). And Herman Cornellison, the other man
           to whom Jones had to make satisfaction, was on that same December 16, 1672,
           authorized to trade on the lower Eastern Shore, and to stop those not authorized.
           Cornellison's commission was limited to a year and no longer; the other two
           were not limited as to time. Two days later, December 18, 1672, Henry Smith,
           proponent of the charges against Jones, who had told the Council that the wanted
           to be relieved of his duties as justice of the peace for Somerset and Worcester
           because they took too much of his time, was, in compliance with his request,
           ordered to cease acting as justice of the peace (ibid., p. 117). Whether this was
           in fact the resignation it was in appearance, is not certain: perhaps the Council-
           justices thought all these hot-headed Eastern Shoremen needed to be calmed
           down. At any rate they appear no more in these records of the Provincial
           Court.

                          IMPORTANT CIVIL CASES

             In the three years devoted to civil cases at this time, there were almost or
           quite sixteen hundred cases that came up. Even deducting those in which little
           or nothing is said beyond “Continued untill the next Provincial Court (and there
           are pages on pages of these), or in which there is one mention of a case and
           only one, there are several hundred in which the minutes of the clerk preserve
           at least something to interest the modern lawyer or the student of social condi
           tions. Every case that came onto the docket is entered here in the Table of
           Cases at the end of the volume, by plaintiff and by defendant, and the subject
           matter of each is entered in the index. Perhaps a few of them deserve com
           ment here. Of the cases in which it is indicated what the charge or the plea was,
           the vast majority concerned some form of debt. There were a few cases of
           ejectment, a few of breach of contract, several arising out of events that would
           seem to have justified criminal prosecution also. There were two cases that
           began as criminal (post, pp. 32, 158), and, without having been decided as
           such, appear later as civil suits for damages. But there were a hundred and fifty
           cases in which the plaintiff claimed that the defendant owed him sterling or
           tobacco and unjustly detained it.
             Many land matters appear in this part of the records of the Provincial Court,
           and cases connected with land appear frequently on the docket. At this time,
           there were five steps in the acquisition of a piece of land from the Proprietary.
           Anyone coming into the Province to live was entitled to a certain number of
           acres of land for himself and for each person whom he brought in. The
           number varied with the conditions of plantation in force at the time of his
           arrival. After the rights had been proved to the satisfaction of the proper
           official, the immigrant received a warrant for the number of acres due him. The
           county surveyor, deputy of the surveyor general, next surveyed the land, and
           returned a certificate for it to the Secretary's office to be recorded. The next
           step, and the last needed to perfect the title in the grantee, was the obtaining
           of a patent.
             Several cases in the Court arose out of trouble over one or the other steps in