xx                Letter of TransmittaL

        City, to be found recorded in the not yet printed Proceedings of the Provincial
        Court Liber F. F. No. 3 (folio 645-649).
          Indian affairs occasionally find their way into the record. The Assembly in
        1669 had passed an Act to set aside for the use of certain friendly Indians a
        tract of considerable extent lying on the south side of the Choptank River in
        Dorchester County, subject to an annual rent of six beaver skins (Arch. Md.
        ii, 200). As certain portions of this tract were then in possession of the whites,
        it became necessary to condemn them for public uses. For this purpose a writ
        of ad quod damnum was issued out of Chancery, and on March 7, 1671/2, an
        inquisition was taken upon three tracts containing in all four hundred acres,
        lying within the bounds of the reservation as fixed by the Assembly, and dam-
        ages totalling 17,000 pounds of tobacco awarded to the several owners (pages
        71-72). On October 23, 1671, a similar writ was issued for an inquisition and
        assessment of damages of another tract lying within this Indian reservation,
        but in this case the return of the jury is not to be found in the record (page
        378). Several instances also occur in this volume of land condemned by the
        same procedure to be used for water mills. In these cases the land in question,
        after condemnation was granted to a specified individual, to erect thereon a
        water mill, which was looked upon as of value to the community as a whole.
          A case of some little human interest is that of a prominent planter, Thomas
        Marsh, of Kent County, who sought relief in Chancery against George Utie of
        Baltimore County, a prominent planter, and an indentured servant woman, Han-
        nah Bowen, whom Marsh had sold to Utie. Utie charged that Marsh was the
        father of a bastard child which Hannah had given birth to after her purchase.
        Marsh emphatically denied this, and declared that Hannah had made the charge
        in the hope of escaping a flogging, the penalty for bearing a bastard. The case
        had come up in the Baltimore County Court and was ordered to the Court of
        Chancery for a hearing in April, 1674, apparently because Utie had failed to
        pay Marsh 1,400 pounds of tobacco which he had agreed to pay for the servant,
        and which Marsh claimed he now sought to defraud him of by charging falsely
        that he was the father of the bastard child and because Marsh had other claims
        against Utie (pages 460-462). As there is no record of the matter coming up
        for trial in Chancery, it is presumed that it was settled out of court.
          In reproducing these old records the original manuscript has been faithfully
        followed, even when this means repeating obvious slips made by the old scribes,
        such as omissions of words, repetitions of words, or the use of words clearly
        wrong. The only liberty taken with the original text has been in a few instances
        to supply in brackets the missing word or words, where the old paper of Liber
        C. D., although disintegrated has left enough letters of a defective word to