Page:Economic History of Virginia Vol 1.djvu/443

 four thousand at the beginning of the fifth, the whole to be produced on the plantation leased.

In 1693, John Tucker, of Norfolk County, leased for a period of eight years a plantation in that county to Thomas Watkins, who agreed by way of consideration to pay the quit-rents and a nominal sum of tobacco each year. In further return for the use of the land, he bound himself to plant an orchard of apple, peach, cherry, and pear trees, to be protected from depredations by the erection of a fence. He was to be permitted to use the timber in repairing houses and constructing casks.

In a lease of five hundred acres in York County, near the end of the century, the tenant was required to plant an orchard of apple trees, to build a house thirty feet in length and eighteen in width, with a chimney on the outside and one on the inside, and with the chambers ceiled. A tobacco barn, thirty feet long and twenty wide, was also to be erected.

Colonel William Fitzhugh owned twenty-one thousand nine hundred and ninety-six acres in a single tract in the Northern Neck. Being anxious to lease this body of land to a colony of Huguenots, whom one of his friends had proposed to transport to Virginia, he offered to enter into an agreement which would assure them possession for a period of three lives, with the right to renew the leases for three additional lives, or for one life as they might prefer. Fitzhugh declared his readiness to furnish the whole number of settlers during the course of the first year with meat and corn at reasonable prices, and also the other supplies which would be thought necessary, and bound