Page:Economic History of Virginia Vol 2.djvu/532

 amount and the damages, process of attachment was issued against his estate in case he owned any property in the Colony. In order to avoid the possibility of a bill which lead been paid being presented for payment the second time, when the receipt perhaps had been lost, or the original parties to the document or the witness of the transaction which it represented had died, it was provided that suit upon such a bill must be brought before three years had expired since its passage, unless it had been renewed within that interval, or had been placed on record in the books of the General Court at Jamestown or in the county in which the debtor had resided or still lived. At a session of the General Assembly held several years later, it was enacted that the right of suit on a bill should not extend beyond five years beyond its date unless the debtor had left Virginia, thus rendering it impossible to renew the document. The validity of a judgment obtained upon a protested note was not to last longer than five years, unless the debtor by departing from the Colony had put it out of the power of the holder of the bill to enforce it against him.

The only forms of money which it still remains to touch upon are roanoke and wampumpeke. These had a legal circulation in the Colony, having come down from the aborigines. The references to roanoke are most frequent in the records of such outlying counties as Accomac and Rappahannock. It seems to have been measured by an arm&#8217;s length, and was not infrequently paid out to the Indians along with match-coats for services performed by them for the public good. It was occasionally found