x INTRODUCTION

by act during the whole period from the founding of the province to the
year 1763 contains 171 names of individuals or families, eighty-four of
them naturalized before 1689, and eighty-seven later; and some of the
names are British. By the end of the seventeenth century there were many
who had been born in the province, and the development of a distinctive
American people must have become perceptible then or soon after, but,
whatever the growth toward separate identity, England continued to be
looked to as the home country, and well down in the eighteenth century
going to England was spoken of as going home/

The holders of the larger tracts of land occupied a somewhat higher
social level and constituted a ruling class, but never the order of nobility
that seems to have been contemplated in Lord Baltimore's first solicitation
of settlers,¹ in charter references to lords of manors, and in provisions of
early provincial statutes for distinctions to these lords.² Some of the feat-
ures of an order of nobility were sketched in, but the whole was never fully
reproduced, and what was drawn faded out; the lords and ladies attained to
no greater dignity than that of legal forms. Some of the landholders, how-
ever, bore arms inherited in England, and many are distinguished in the
records as " Gentⁿ or " Esq," until they acquired local distinctions more
highly valued. Rank in the provincial militia organization provided the
local distinction most frequently used; and the lists of judges present at the
openings of court sessions recorded in this volume will be seen to include
many colonels, chiefs of the military organizations of their respective
counties.

The smaller landholders were constantly receiving additions to their
number in immigrants able to take up land, and in those who passed from
the condition of white servants into the landholding class upon the expira-
tions of their terms of service, when each servant became entitled to fifty
acres and necessary equipment for a year. These white servants were per-
sons of quite varied quality whose services were sold out in the first place
as a means of paying for their passage, including convicts sentenced in Eng-
land to pass seven years in some colony, indentured servants contracted out
for from two to five years' service, and what were termed " freewillers," or
those who engaged their services as they might wish after reaching Mary-
land. It cannot be said from any knowledge now possessed that immigrants
from any one part of England predominated in the province, but it is ob-
servable that Yorkshire, the home county of the proprietary, and other
northern counties, were the sources of a large number of the landholders
whose counties of origin are known.

The peculiar geography of their chosen land had its effect on the life and

¹ Kilty, op. cit., pp. 29 et seq.

2 An Act for Treasons, 1638, ch. 22, Archives, I, 70; An Act What Persons shall be called
to every General Assembly, 1638, ch. 26, ibid., p. 74.