mon in two instances in
York County in 1667, was two pounds sterling each and in 1690, five
pounds sterling.

As there were no undertakers, the laying out of the corpse was a tender
ministration for which some close friend of the family volunteered. The
technique for this service was passed from generation to generation and
only in comparatively recent years has that custom been abandoned
altogether.

The company of relatives and friends, who gathered for the funeral
occasion, remained for several days and were, of course, fed and housed
at the expense of the deceased's estate.

The law required that servants be buried in public cemeteries
established for the purpose. This decree issued in the seventeenth
century followed several scandals, occasioned by private funerals of
deceased servants. In order to remove all possibility of suspicion,
prior to burial, several neighbors were summoned to view the corpse, if
death occurred under extraordinary circumstances, and to accompany the
body to the grave. That such precautions were taken as early as 1629, so
that possible murder would not go undetected, is shown in testimony
before the General Court at Jamestown after the newly-born bastard child
of a servant girl was found dead. Several persons were called as
witnesses, and when evidence was produced that the child might have been
born alive, the serving maid's master was required to give bond for her
appearance at a higher court.

TOMBSTONES

The well-to-do planters or their families invariably saw that
appropriate tombstones with proper inscriptions--lengthy ones,
characteristic of the day--were duly placed. Some of these stones
remain with barely legible inscriptions; others, the inscriptions on
which, fortunately, were copied in a past era, have disappeared
altogether. The oldest tombstone in Virginia with a legible inscription
is that of Mrs. Alice Jordan at "Four Mile Tree" in Surry County. The
inscription, reciting that she was the wife of George Jordan, gives
praise in verse to her virtues.

[Illustration: Photo by Flournoy, Virginia State Chamber of Commerce

Four Mile Tree--Surry County

A seventeenth-century home was the basis for this present structure
located on a portion of a 2250 acre grant to Henry Browne in 1637. The
estate remained in the family for two hundred years. In the adjacent
graveyard may be seen the oldest tomb in Virginia with a legible
inscription, that of Alice (Miles) Jordan, who d