Letter of Transmittal.           xxvii





        this law was limited to a period of three years, as were most of the other acts
        passed at this session (Arch. Md. I, 195-196). It is likely that the enactment
        of the statute merely gave legal sanction to a custom which already existed, and
        one which, as we see, was still current some twenty years after the law had ex
        pired making the use of the Broad Arrow obligatory.
          Two instances occur in the period covered by this volume in which we find
        the sheriff marking with the Broad Arrow tobacco attached by him for fines
        levied against the owners. In the first case Richard Blunt, High Sheriff of Kent,
        served an execution on tobacco and on a boat owned by a certain William
        Ellyote, to enforce payment of a fine of three hundred pounds of tobacco levied
        against him for his failure to plant a certain quantity of corn, as required by the
        statute. The case came up before the Provincial Court in 1663, because Ellyote
        had made away with the boat and had erased the Broad Arrow which the
        sheriff had set upon the tobacco house. The court held that the sheriff was
        personally responsible to the Lord Proprietary for the amount of the fine, and
        that he must seek his remedy at law against Ellyote to reimburse himself for
        this (pages 85-86). In the second case, which came before the court in
        February, 1664, Thomas Hawker employed the sheriff to impanel a jury to mark
        the bounds of his land, and then failed to pay the costs of the proceedings,
        which amounted to four hundred pounds of tobacco. The sheriff then laid an
        attachment for this amount, with costs of fifty pounds added as his charges for
        execution, and placed the Broad Arrow on the tobacco house. Hawker objected
        in court to this latter charge as unreasonable, but the justices decided in favor
        of the sheriff (pages 138-139). We find a similar use of the Broad Arrow in
        1657 reported in the Proceedings of the Provincial Court (Arch. Md. XLI;
        174). The Maryland archives show that the Broad Arrow was made use of in
        Virginia in a somewhat similar way at this period. In 1662 when the boundary
        dispute between Maryland and Virginia over the dividing line on the Eastern
        Shore was at its height, Colonel Edmund Scarborough, Surveyor-General of
        Virginia arrested John Elzey, a prominent resident of Maryland living in the
        disputed territory, demanding of him “ obedience” to the Virginia authorities,
        and threatened to set the Broad Arrow upon the house of any one who did not
        submit to the authority of Virginia (Arch. Md. III, 473-474).
          Suicide, especially among indentured servants, was quite common in the
        Province at this period. The verdict of a jury of inquest which was called
        to investigate the death of a certain Anne Vaughan illustrates the attitude of
        the public mind of the day towards suicide. The jury found that her wounds
        were self inflicted, and brought in the verdict of wilful murder against her
        (page 88). Similar verdicts were also rendered in several other cases of suicide.
          A suit by Philip Calvert, as Treasurer and Receiver-General of Rents of the
        Province, against a certain Hugh Stanley, shows that when a man married a
        widow, the personal property which he had acquired through his wife's interest
        in her former husband's estate was subject to the latter's debts, as has been seen
        in the case of Hannah Price. Stanley had married Dorothy, the widow and
        administratrix of Giles Sadler, a deputy Receiver of Rents, who had failed to
        pay over to Calvert certain rents which he had collected as deputy. Suit was