Page:Economic History of Virginia Vol 2.djvu/17

 fact called upon to serve only until he was twenty-two. The law was amended in 1666 to the effect that all who were imported without indentures should, if they were nineteen years of age or above, continue with their masters for a term of five years, and if under that age, until the completion of their twenty-fourth year.

It became extremely common for those who had been sold in accord with the custom of the country, to wait very quietly until the persons who had brought them in and the ships in which they had come over, had left for England, and then to advance the claim of having been introduced under indentures which were lost, but which if produced would show that they were bound to serve for a shorter time than was now required of them. To remove the confusion and annoyance arising from this source, it was provided that any one who had presumably been imported without formal covenants, from the fact that he had been disposed of by the custom, should be carried before the nearest justice of the peace, and if it was alleged that he had originally bound himself by a written agreement for a regular term, he was to be allowed one month in which to produce the document, or sufficient evidence of its former existence, and if in that length of time the claim could not be sustained in the manner required, he was to be debarred from urging it a second time.

Whether the servant was bound to a master by an indenture which laid down in the clearest language the full nature of their mutual relations or simply by the custom of the country, he had a legal as well as a moral right to expect that provision would be made for his