Page:Economic History of Virginia Vol 1.djvu/593

 great would have been the personal hardship which might have followed if the escheator of each county had been directed to make the most rigid inquests of all such lands, and to return the certificates to the Secretary&#8217;s office as a basis for new patents, that the Governor and Secretary entered into a formal composition with the holders, which was approved by the General Assembly, that where an individual had for two years been in the enjoyment of a tract which properly should have reverted to the King, he was to be granted a clear title upon the payment of a hundred pounds of tobacco for every fifty acres in his possession, in addition to fees charged for the conveyance in the clerk&#8217;s office. He was, however, required at first to enter his petition before the expiration of two years, but afterwards in eight months, and if he failed to do so, he was to be forever estopped.

No account of the system of land tenure in Virginia in the seventeenth century would be complete without some reference to the regulations in force in the Northern Neck. All that portion of the Colony situated between the Potomac and Rappahannock Rivers, extending as far towards the west as the heads of these important streams and towards the east as Chesapeake Bay, was in 1661 granted by the King to Lord Hopton, Earl of St. Albans, Lord Culpeper, Lord Berkeley, Sir William Morton, Sir Dudley Wyatt, and Thomas Culpeper. The only conditions attached to the conveyance of this domain, which was equal to a principality, were that one-fifth of all the gold and one-tenth of all the silver discovered within its limits should be reserved for the royal use, and that a nominal rent of a few pounds sterling should be paid into the treasury at Jamestown each year. In 1669, the letters patent were surrendered by the existing holders and in their stead new ones were issued. Among