xx                  Introduction.

              which they as Exrs . . . have lost be restored—& also yt they recover agt the
              said Geo: Wells two thousand three hundred sixty nine pds tob costs” (post,
              p. 354). Stockett did not stop when the Provincial Court revoked the judg
              ment in his favor: perhaps George Wells did not give up, either. But if he did
              persist, nothing further is known now.

                             IMPORTANT CIVIL CASES

               Only civil cases were heard at this time, and of them there were hundreds.
              Pages and pages of them have but one not very enlightening entry; they were
              continued or discontinued, the defendant imparles until a later court, or the
              parties were able to settle the dispute by agreement (see post, pp. 36-42, 47-50,
              146-15 I, 273-279, 426-430). Aside from these (and some of them appear later
              in another form), there are hundreds that have in them something to interest
              the modern lawyer or the sociologist, or the irreverent descendant of the old
              worthies. Many of them deserve comment or explanation, and all of them de
              serve reading. Most of them arose out of some form of debt, whether the ob
              ligation that gave rise to it was written or unwritten. In a hundred and thirty-
              three cases the plaintiff produced in court a writing obligatory sealed with the
              seal of the defendant, and asserted that he had not been able to collect the
              tobacco called for in the bond. The payment is always in terms of tobacco: at
              this time there is not one bond or writing obligatory that called for the pay
              ment of sterling, and in some of these cases where a debt is reckoned in terms
              of sterling, it is paid off in tobacco (post, pp. 169-170, 257-258).
               Land matters also took up much of the time of the Court. The Land Office
              was not yet separated from the Provincial Court, and therefore the land records
              were still kept in the Secretary's office, along with all the other records of the
              Province (post, pp. 88-89, 346), and the same clerk took care of them all. In
              past years, indentures for the sale of land were often put into the Provincial
              Court record, not because there was controversy about them, but solely for
              safety's sake: this year there are none inserted in this way, though the record
              in some of the cases of ejectment may recite the indenture on which the suit
              is based. There are no cases of the escheat of land to the Proprietary. But
              there are more than twenty cases of ejectment, largely of ejectment to try title.
              All of them are interesting, but not all of them can be told about here. In the
              case of Charles Boteler v. George Lockier, Boteler was the lessee of Thomas
              Clegatt and Mary Hooper Clegatt his wife. Mary was the mother and guardian
              of Sarah and Ellinor Hooper who were heirs of their fathers, Richard Hooper
              deceased. Lockier, the casual ejector, was replaced as defendant by Henry
              Hooper, to try title to a messuage and five hundred and fifty acres of Calvert
              County land. William Traverse, Hooper's tenant in possession, was served
              with a declaration in ejectment, and Hooper appeared and got a continuance
              until the next court (Archives LXVI, p. 491). Now, at the October court,
              Clegatt and his wife appeared but Hooper “came not but made default”. Ac
              cordingly, Clegatt received a writ of habere facias possessionem which would
              restore to the Hooper girls the messuage and the land (post, p. 115). The same
              steps were taken in the case of Thomas Gerard v. John Lewellin (post, pp.