Page:Economic History of Virginia Vol 1.djvu/554

 estates at that time ranged from one hundred to one hundred and fifty acres; many covered as much as three hundred acres; a few extended to six hundred, and still fewer to one thousand. It was not many years before the disposition to sue out patents to tracts which were considered large in that age had grown sufficiently to induce the Governor and Council to write to the Privy Council in England, and advise them strongly to prohibit the appropriation by any one individual of great bodies of land in Virginia, but this recommendation made no impression on those to whom it was addressed. Barely a decade later, there were men in the Colony in the possession of plantations in the different counties which aggregated ten thousand acres.

When a person, however, was able to obtain possession of a great number of acres, it was generally through the acquisition, by patent, of plantation after plantation, each of a comparative small area, but amounting in their aggregate extent to a vast body of land. The records in the Register&#8217;s office in Richmond, in which the copies of the patents are preserved, enable us to discover with a fair degree of exactness the size of the tracts taken up from year to year after the dissolution of the Company. From