OF COLONIAL MARYLAND 29

the erection of dwellings and the planting of fruit trees, etc. Terms
of the leases ran from five to twenty-one years or for three lives, with
a strong tendency to favor three lives and twenty-one years, the
Proprietor generally refusing to grant leases for any longer terms.
When manor land was leased, the steward in charge of the manor
ran the lines of the tenement, made out a certificate, and drew a
lease in duplicate. These were sent to the agent, who, if he ap-
proved, signed the leases himself, secured the Governor's signature,
and returned one of the duplicates to the steward to be delivered to
the tenant. Each steward was supposed to keep a roll on which all
leases were entered and which showed the amounts of rent due.
According to this roll the rents were collected and turned over to
the agent. ⁴²

PATENTS, WARRANTS AND PROPRIETARY LEASES
AS ARCHIVAL SERIES

At the beginning, of course, the land records were not divided into
series; they were not even segregated and kept as one series. For
the first few years land records, Court Proceedings, Assembly Pro-
ceedings and every kind of business, were entered into one book in
the order of their occurrence, and kept in the office of the Secretary
of the province. Because of this circumstance the first volumes of
the Land Office records have preserved in copied form valuable
records and proceedings otherwise lost. This situation holds true
only of the very first volumes, however, for almost immediately
separate land records began to be kept. In fact, in Liber A B & H
of the Patents series we have the case of a volume made up of land
records extracted from among the Court Proceedings and other busi-
ness of Libers A, F and H and put into one convenient volume of
just land records.

After the separate set of records for land was established it was
still quite a while before any separation of the different types of
land records into series took place. Assignments, entry rights,
patents, warrants, certificates were all entered just as they came
into the office. The first step towards an orderly organization was
the putting of little batches of certificates, of warrants, of patents,
together. This idea gradually developed and in 1680, just after the

⁴² Gould, p. 91-97.