the land office terms of Pennsylvania, and the agreement
between the two late proprietors, or where any sale should be
acknowledged by the commissioners or the intendant to be a
mere mistake so that the purchaser could hold no part of the
land; and the chancellor was authorised to grant any lands held
under an equitable title as aforesaid where the office terms of
Pennsylvania had been complied with, and for which a grant
ought therefore to have passed, in the same manner as he was
before empowered to direct grants for lands within the limits
of Maryland which had been theretofore actually granted by
the Pennsylvania proprietaries. The commissioners were
empowered to stay executions where the purchasers of
confiscated property should declare by affidavit that they had, in
their belief, just ground or cause for relief from their bonds
or contracts, in whole or in part, specifying the particular
ground of that belief, and it was provided that where, in the
case of any lands sold by the commissioners or the late
intendant, the purchasers should afterwards be legally deprived
of any part thereof (by persons having titles not known at the
time of sale) whereby the remainder would become of
inconsiderable value, the chancellor, upon a view of all
circumstances, might make such decree therein as equity and
justice should require.
By an act of 1788 (ch. 37) a remedy was provided for
some hardships experienced by certain purchasers of
confiscated property, by which the rules of the land office were in
some degree affected. Persons who had purchased different
parcels of leased and vacant land within the proprietary's
manors or reserves in Baltimore county, adjoining their own
lands, in order to avoid the expence of separately surveying
all those parcels had them included in resurveys with their
other lands, but could not obtain patents, the resurveys being
irregular, since the county surveyor, who had made one of
them, could not legally include those leased lands, and the
special surveyor, who made another, was not authorised to
resurvey patented lands. The proceeding was doubtless
contrary to all existing regulations¾The certificates were
however directed by this act to be received into the land office,
and patented as regular resurveys, and further resurveys of
the same kind were authorised in all similar cases.
Among the lands sold as confiscated property by the
intendant of the revenue, who had succeeded the
commissioners in that business, were those called the Nottingham
lot lands, and the Welch tract, in Cecil county, the settlers on
which who became in general the purchasers, by petition to the
assembly, in 1788, alledged that they held under equitable
titles acquired from the proprietaries of Pennsylvania while
the boundaries of the two provinces were in controversy
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