INTRODUCTION

THE number of judicial records left by the early Maryland colonists,
and the amount of judicial business recorded in them, may surprise those
who suppose that pioneers and frontiersmen in all times and places tend to
become independent of the law. For it seems to be demonstrated that, re-
moved as these people were from the environment of their civilization, and
relaxed as that civilization must therefore have been, in some degree, they
were nevertheless tenacious of regulation by law, and prone to litigation.
They brought with them the valuation that the time placed upon written
records, and the result is that in the public buildings of the state and its coun-
ties there are still stored accumulations of manuscript folios and papers, of
a large sum total, in which the daily work of the several courts of justice from
the time of the organization of the settlement is set down. Some of these rec-
ords have already been printed and published. The Maryland Historical
Society, acting as an agency of the state for the purpose, has printed and
made accessible to students, in the Archives of Maryland,¹ four seventeenth
century records of a central court of common law, the " provincial court,"
and it is engaged in reproducing others of that court, of a court of chancery,
and of county courts of the province. But these constitute only a small frac-
tion of the surviving records of even that one century, and the remainder,
especially records of the county courts, must continue difficult of access for
some years to come. As a consequence, studies of the early legal history of the
province have thus far been restricted to a few sources of information, and
can hardly be said to have penetrated far beyond beginning points and
outlines. For prosecution of further study, the record here reproduced will
be an especially helpful one, because it presents a view of proceedings in all
the principal courts of the province, assize, county, provincial, and appellate,
during a jjeiiud uf diiity ycais at die tuiu of the seventeenth ccntuiy into
the eighteenth.

It is a record of a court of final resort organized under royal author-
ity, and under local statute of i6g4,² shortly after a royal government had
supplanted the original proprietary government upon a Protestant revolution
following the Revolution in England. But the court had its roots farther

1 The Archives of Maryland are reproductions of old records of the province and state,
published serially. Fifty volumes have been issued, and the fifty-first is on the press.

2 Chapter 18, Archives, XXXVIII, 6. Designations of early Maryland statutes by chapter
numbers originated with Thomas Bacon, who in 1765 published a compilation of laws of Mary-
land to the year 1763. He printed at length only a limited number of trie statutes, and most of
the others of his period may be found in the Archives, as in this instance.