xvi               Letter of Transmittal.

       various officials. As a court of record a number of deeds and mortgages are
       to be found enrolled. In two instances delivery of land by seizin with turf and
       twig is mentioned in the deed. The Court of Chancery, however, was used
       less than the Provincial Court for recording deeds and mortgages.
         Writs of error or of certiorari directed to the county courts or the Pro-
       vincial Court, ordering that cases be sent up for rehearing from these courts
       respectively to the Provincial Court, or to the Upper House sitting as the
       highest appellate court, are quite numerous, and as they passed under the Great
       Seal are to be found recorded in the Chancery Court proceedings. It is to be
       noted that during this period, and in fact until 1718, final decrees of the Chancery
       Court were not subject to appeal and review by the Governor and Council in
       the Upper House, or after 1695 by the Council sitting as a Court of Appeals,
       as were the decisions of the Provincial Court, although a very few cases in
       which the Court of Chancery had restrained proceedings at law, found their
       way on appeal to the Council. It should be remembered, however, that any
       case decided in the higher courts of the Province which involved more than
       £300 sterling might be appealed to the King and the Privy Council of England.
         As measured by the bulk of the papers, the most voluminous entries among
       these Chancery records are those involving the inheritance of land, and are
       the writs known as diem clausit extremum, and mandamus, which are orders
       to make inquiry as to the ownership of land lately held by a person supposed
       to have died without lawful heirs, and instituted with a view to a possible
       escheat of such land to the Lord Proprietary, these writs being followed by
       an inquisition post mortem with a record of the findings of the jury of inquiry,
       and the judgement of the court. A very large number of these writs and in-
       quisitions are recorded and they give valuable insight not only as to the lands
       in question but as to their former owners. Perhaps a fourth of the material
       found in this volume is of this character. Judge Bond gives an interesting
       description of these writs and inquisitions in his Introduction to the Legal
       Procedure.
         Among the pardons granted by the Lord Proprietary was one to a man
       sentenced to death nine years before in the Provincial Court, but whose sen-
       tence had been suspended by the Governor in open court, and who, in modern
       parlance, had then been released on probation. Although the story of Pope
       Alvey, a cooper of St. Mary's County, and of his two trials in 1664 and 1665
       for two separate offences, is reported at considerable length in an earlier volume
       of the Archives, for some reason the record of the case entered in the Pro-
       ceedings of the Chancery Court at the time when the Governor's par don passed

       the Great Seal, July 7, 1674, is given here in even greater detail than it is in