xxxvi                introduction.

        are both picturesque and vivid, but we shall doubtless never learn whether her
        reputed common fame was a just or unjust one.
          The term “fire-ship” was one applied in the seventeenth century to a prosti-
        tute infected with venereal disease. Its use in this old court record appears to
        be its first recorded occurrence in the English language. The Oxford English
        Dictionary gives the earliest known use as in 1672 in William Wycherley's
        Restoration comedy Love in a Wood (Act II, scene i). Sir Simon Addleplot,
        meeting, but not recognizing, My Lady Flippant, masked, at night, in revels in
        St. James' Park, exclaims: “Are you not a Fireship? a Punk, Madam ?“ This
        was three years after its employment in 1669 as a nickname for a prostitute
        in a Maryland court record. Slang, especially if pornographic, seems to have
        crossed the Atlantic rapidly in the seventeenth century.

                     OUTSTANDING CIVIL CASES.

          Two law suits of especial interest are to be found recorded in this record.
        The Bateman case involved an attempt upon the part of the widow of a
        member of the Governor's Council, as executrix, to misappropriate funds held
        in trust by her husband as agent for a London merchant, in order to assure the
        payment to herself of a marriage settlement, and was brought to an end as the
        result of a direct appeal made to the Proprietary. In the case of Balley vs.
        Staplefort, joint owners of a vessel and merchandise, one of the partners
        removed from the house of the other during his absence the merchandise owned
        jointly by them, and later executed upon a bond of his partner which he fraudu-
        lently represented to be many times larger than it was. This resulted in two
        appeals.
          The Bateman case, before the provincial courts for ten years, is one of no little
        interest not only because of the large amount involved, but because of the
        direct part played by the Lord Proprietary, Cecilius Calvert, in bringing it to a
        somewhat dramatic end. John Bateman, a citizen and haberdasher of London,
        had married there in 1649 Mary Perry, and entered into a marriage agreement
        with her mother, Margaret Perry of Westminster, London, that in considera-
        tion of his receiving with Mary a dowry of £500 he would obligate himself to
        leave her lands or personal property amounting to £1000, and gave a bond of
        £2000 as assurance that he would do so (Arch. Md. XLIX; 3I9-321). Bateman
        and his wife soon afterwards removed to Maryland, where he became promi-
        nent, serving on the Governor's Council and on the Provincial Court from 1660
        to 1663. He died on his plantation, Resurrection Manor, Calvert County, late
        in the year 1663, apparently making provision in his will for his indebted-
        ness under the marriage settlement. Mary, the widow and executrix, proceeded
        to settle his estate, which was a large one for Maryland in those days. At the
        October, 1664, court, John Gittings, attorney for Margaret Perry, mother of
        Mrs. Batcman, brought suit for £2000 against Bateman's estate upon Bateman's
        bond for this amount, on the ground that the estate was so encumbered with
        debts that it did not amount to the £rooo provided in the marriage settlement
        (Arch. Md. XLIX, 291-294). An inventory filed a short time later showed an
        estate valued at only 139,971 pounds of tobacco (about £870 sterling), in