Introduction.           xxvii

                            ORPHANS

        So few references are found to orphans and orphans' estates in the nine
      years covered by this record, that one wonders if a separate entry book for
      such matters may not have been since lost, as acts of the Assembly specifically
      provided that at least one session a year “for orphans”, preferably in June,
      be held (Arch. Md. LIII, xxxvii). Mention may be found of a few instances
      where very young orphans had been bound out until of age, in one case to a
      godfather (p. 497). When children of upper class planters were left orphans,
      where there was sufficient estate to care for them, other provision seems to
      have been made for them by the court. Thus, when Arthur Turner's five
      children were left orphans in 1667, the youngest was then only about a month
      old. The Turner family was broken up and prominent men were appointed
      guardians for them. Arthur, the eldest son, chose as his guardian, Josias Fen-
      dall, a former Governor. The second son chose Walter Beane, a justice of the
      court; the third son, James Bolling, a prominent planter; Ann, a daughter,
      was apprenticed until sixteen years old to William Marshall, until recently one
      of the justices, to “remaine with him unless married” until she was twenty-
      one. The youngest, a month old infant, was put out to nurse with Susanna
      Taylor, who was allowed 8oo pounds of tobacco if the child died within six
      months, with 8oo pounds more if he died between the ages of six and eighteen
      months. That all did not go well with these arrangements, and apparently also
      with Turner's estate, is shown by the fact that soon afterwards some of the
      guardians were changed, and provision was made for the care of certain of the
      children in the county levy (pp. 106, 142, 144, 229, 230). It may be recalled
      that Turner, some six years before, had appeared in a most unpleasant role in a
      bastardy case in which the mother of the child, Lucy Stratton, his servant,
      preferred a whipping to marriage with him, on the ground that “hee was a lust-
      ful, very lustful man” (Arch. Md. LIII, xxviii-xxix).

                            APPEALS

        There are six instances noted in this record in which appeals from the Charles
      County Court to the Provincial Court were asked. As described in a former
      volume of the Archives (LIII, xxiv-xxv), there were four methods by which
      cases in the county courts might be removed to the Provincial Court, to which
      the interested reader is referred. In five of these six instances in which appeals
      were asked the cases seem to have been referred to the higher court by a direct
      appeal entered in the Charles County Court at the time of the trial. In the
      one instance in which an appeal was denied, it is to be noted that one of the
      justices dissented from the refusal of the lower court to grant an appeal.
        The suit of the administrators of the estate of Dr. John (Jacob) Lumbrozo
      against Richard Dodd for a debt of 400 pounds of tobacco for rum and sugar,
      was heard at the November, 1667, court. As the plaintiffs could not produce
      their books of account, which had been lost, the court gave judgment against
      the plaintiffs, because their suit was “not justlie proved by one single evidence.”
      The plaintiffs then craved an appeal to the Provincial Court, which the county