xii                 Kent County.

        Ringgold, although he was no longer a member of the court (p. 224) ; and in
        June 1662 it met at Mr. Henry Morgan's house (p. 233). Usually it is not
        specified where court was held; thus between 1668 and 1671 the place of meet-
        ing was specified only once, when it was held November 18, 1671, at the house
        of Mr. Robert Dunn (p. 317). The court records from 1672 to 1675 are
        missing, but under date of July 2, 1672, we find an order from Gov. Charles
        Calvert to “Mr. Thomas South and the rest of the Comissionr's", “, that “the
        place for holding your county Court be in some part of the easterne neck and
        not upon the Island as formerly” (Arch. Md. xv, 42). It would appear that
        the meetings were then held for several years at New Yarmouth.
          Until 1658 the only established settlements on the Eastern Shore were those
        on Kent Island, although before this there may have been a few adventurers
        and squatters on the mainland. No patents to land on the mainland in the areas
        now occupied by Cecil, Kent, Talbot, Queen Anne's, and Dorchester counties
        were issued before 1658, although some warrants for lands near Kent Island
        had been issued as early as 1651. Whatever jurisdiction in judicial, civil, or
        military matters a local “frontier “ court might exercise in this extensive
        territory on the Eastern Shore was exercised by the Kent Island Court, the
        Governor and Council having ordered, August 3, 1659, “that those Plantaöns
        aliready seated, or to bee seated on the Easterne Shoare adjoyning & neare to
        the Isle of Kent, shall bee esteemed as belonging to Kent County, till further
        Order” (Arch. Md. xli, 322). With the opening up of the mainland in 1658
        for settlement many prominent Kent Islanders took out patents for land on
        which they had long had their eyes.
          The order for a new county to be carved out of this widespread territory,
        until then under the jurisdiction of the Kent court, cannot be found, but early
        rn 1662 Talbot County had actually come into existence, for under date of
        February 18, 1661/2, the Council appointed six commissioners to administer
        its affairs (Arch. Md. iii, 448), and on April 25, 1662, the first Talbot Court
        met at the house of Mr. William Coursey in Wye River (p. 356). Three of
        the newly appointed Talbot justices, Coursey, Foster, and Ringgold, had been
        members of the Kent Court up to the time of the creation of Talbot. Kent
        County now comprised the island, and extended on the north in a general way
        to an indefinite line running east and west between the Chester and Sassafras
        rivers. Until the erection of Cecil County in 1674, the bounds of Kent County
        northward were undefined. Baltimore County as originally laid out in 1660
        extended around the head of the Bay, and included not only what is now Cecil,
        but also part of the present Kent County. The line separating Kent and
        Cecil counties, not finally clearly defined until 1707 as at the Sassafras River,
        was between 1658 and 1674, the period covered by these Kent records, appar-
        ently about midway between the Chester and the Sassafras. About thirty tracts
        of land recorded in the early Baltimore County records for this reason appear
        later in the Kent rent rolls. In 1695, however, Kent Island was taken from
        Kent County and included in Talbot; and in 1707 the island was made part of
        a new county, Queen Anne's, when the latter was carved out of Taihot.