xviii          Letter of Transmittal.





           daughter, entered a claim to a number of horses that were running wild and
           annoying the Indians at Port Tobacco, and damaging their fields of grain. The
           court ordered the colonists to aid the Indians in making a stockaded pound
           where stray animals might be held until their owners paid for any damage
           done by them (page 139). There is one reference to an Indian slave (page
           495).
             A number of cases came before the court involving disputes between inden
           tured servants and their masters, and cases of alleged cruelty of masters to
           servants. At the March, 1663, session, an interesting account is given of a
           strike among the servants of no less a personage than Richard Preston on his
           Patuxent plantation, because they were expected to do hard work on a ration
           of beans and bread without meat. The court does not seem to have sympathized
           very much with them on this ground, as they were sentenced to be flogged with
           thirty lashes each, but upon craving forgiveness of their master in open court
           the penalty was suspended (pages 8-10).
             A case presenting considerable human interest was that involving a young
           girl named Hester Nicholds. Hester, who had been born in the province, was
           indentured as a servant in 1659, when ten or eleven years old, by her father
           John Nicholds, an impoverished planter, to Thomas Cornwallis, one of the
           founders of Maryland and a man of the highest standing. Cornwallis and his
           wife went to England a few months later, and the girl was then sold with his
           other servants to Thomas Nuthall. At the February, 1662, session of the Pro
           vincial Court, the father of the girl asked to have the indenture cancelled and
           Hester released, asserting that Cornwallis had violated his promises that she
           would be treated as if she were his own child and only be required to wait on
           his wife, and that she would be taught to read and sew, but that instead of this
           she had been sold to Nuthall as an ordinary indentured servant. One of the
           witnesses who testified in behalf of Hester was a certain Edward West.
           Nuthall was represented by his attorney Daniel Clocker. The case was tried
           before a jury which decided that the contract had been violated, and the court
           ordered that the girl be released (Arch. Md. XLI; 515-516). Cornwallis then
           appealed the case to the General Assembly, and it was tried September 18, 1663,
           before the Upper House. He was represented by William Calvert, his attorney,
           who requested a rehearing on the ground of error. Cornwallis declared that
           the girl had been bound by an ordinary indenture and that he had made no
           promises as to the kind of service that she was to perform, that he had taken
           her very reluctantly out of pity for her and her father, as she was a “rude raw
           ill bred child” not fit for his wife to take to England as an attendant, where
           good maids were plentiful. He adds that West, the only witness at the trial,
           testified falsely as he wished to marry the girl. He asks that the case be sent
           back to be retried in the Provincial Court, sitting at a court of chancery, on the
           ground that, involving as it did the interpretation of a contract, it should not
           have been tried before a jury, and the Upper House so ordered (Arch. Md. I;
           463-466, 481). The record of the rehearing is to be found in this volume.
           Sitting as a court of chancery the case came before the Provincial Court at its
           February 11, 1664, session, when Cornwallis was represented by Josias Fendall