. It seems, too, that Maryland was healthier than Virginia.

Hence, the very first year they had an excellent crop of corn, and
sent a ship-load to New England to exchange for salt fish and other
provisions.[13] Imitating the example of the Virginians, they began
immediately to plant tobacco, which, as in Virginia, became the
currency and leading product. Its cultivation caused the importation
of a great number of servants, "divers of very good rank and
quality,"[14] who, after a service of four or five years, became
freemen. In the assembly of 1638 several of the servants in the first
emigration took their seats as burgesses. As the demand for houses and
casks for tobacco was great, a good many carpenters and coopers came
out at their own expense and received shares of land by way of
encouragement.

A state of society developed similar in many respects to that in
Virginia. Baltimore, accustomed to the type of life in England,
expected the settlements in Maryland to grow into towns and cities;
and, under this impression, in January, 1638, he erected the
population on the south side of St. George's River into a "hundred,"
and afterwards created other hundreds in other parts of the colony.
But the wealth of watercourses and the cultivation of tobacco caused
the population to scatter, and made society from the first distinctly
agricultural and rural. St. Mary's and St. George's Hundred, in
Maryland, shared the fate of Jamestown and Bermuda Hundred, in
Virginia, and no stimulus of legislation could make them grow.

The application of the powers of the palatinate intensified these
conditions by creating an agricultural and landed aristocracy. There
was a council like that in Durham, whose members, appointed by the
lord proprietor, held all the great offices of state.

Outside of the council the most important officer was the sheriff,
who, like the sheriff of Durham, executed the commands of the governor
and the courts, of which there were (in addition to the council) the
county court and the manorial courts, answering respectively to the
court of quarter-sessions and the courts baron and leet in Durham. As
for the manorial courts, feudal relicts transplanted to America, they
sprang from Lord Baltimore's attempt to build up an aristocracy like
that which attended upon the bishop in his palace in Durham. In his
"Conditions for Plantations," August 8, 1636, after providing
liberally for all who brought emigrants to the colo