lvi                  Introduction.

        by the Protestant Revolution, and the deposition of James II. It was doubtless
        felt to be safer for church lands in Maryland to be held by prominent Catholic
        laymen than by a Jesuit priest.

                             QUAKERS.

         There are few mentions of Quakers by name in this record, but there are sev-
        eral references, known from other sources, to apply to Quakers. Thus there
        can be no doubt that John Sumner, who was fined at the June, 1667, court 500
        pounds of tobacco for refusing to take the oath of a juryman, and Nicholas
        Wyatt, summoned to serve on the Grand Jury at the December, 1668, Court,
        who also refused to take the oath and was fined, were both Quakers (pp. 197,
        355).
         Although the validity of the Quaker marriage ceremony does not seem to
        have been openly attacked in Maryland as it was in Virginia about this time,
        it is probable that the formal entering in the records of the Provincial Court
        in the year 1670 of two marriage certificates, in both instances involving
        Quakers, may have been with the desire to make assurance doubly sure. One
        of these marriage certificates recited the marriage January 12, 1669-70, of
        William Ford of Bristol, England to Sarah, the daughter of Richard Preston
        of Calvert County, deceased (p. 502). Richard Preston, who had died in 1669,
        was the leading Quaker of Maryland and lived at Charles' Gift, on the Patuxent
        River, recently made famous by Hulbert Footner in his delightful book,
        Charles' Cift. A month earlier on December 9, 1669, Margaret, another
        daughter of Richard Preston, had entered into a pre-nuptial agreement with
        William Berry of no little interest to students of social history. This agree-
        ment provided that Margaret for her own use and for her own disposal reserved
        the following: £100 sterling; plate to the value of £40 sterling; “the little
        Negro Girle called sarah borne in Richard Prestons house, vallued to Tenn
        pounds sterling, if the said Girle should dy, the said William Berry to make
        the same good to the said Margaret by another Negro or the vallue; a good
        mare to ride on vallue seaven pounds sterling; and a Chamber or Roome to be
        well furnished with bedding and furniture with other household stuffe to the
        vallue of forty three pounds sterling” (p. 469). Margaret was obviously a
        far-seeing young Quaker heiress.
         The other marriage certificate recorded on the same day as that of
        Sarah Preston and William Ford, and in identical terms, was that of William
        Stevens of Dorchester County to Mary Sharpe, the daughter of Peter Sharpe
        of Calvert County, known to be Quakers (p. 502).
         That the Quakers played the part of the good Samaritan in these as well as in
        later days is brought out in two instances discussed elsewhere in this introduction
        where Quakers were asked by the Provincial Court to take into their care c for
        cure indentured servants, who were ill and were being neglected by their
        masters. In one of these cases it was this same Peter Sharpe who took into his
        house a certain John Corbett “in a languishing condicon of body” (pp. xlvii-
        xlviii, 182, 368-9); in the other instance Thomas Powell, a leading Quaker of
        Talbot County, was appointed by the court guardian to a boy named Joseph
        Edloe suffering from “an old ulcher in his legg” (p. xlvii, 182).