ribution to heirs and by sale of small segments
of the larger patent. Whatever the variation in size, the small
landholder constituted the major group in seventeenth-century Virginia
and assumed a more important role in the socio-economic pattern of the
colony than is evident from the descriptions of plantation life by
romantic writers.

By the end of the seventeenth century the use of the headright as the
major means of land distribution began to give way to acquisition of
title by purchase in all of Virginia other than the Northern Neck. For
the Northern Neck which was granted to various proprietors who were
faithful to the King during the civil war, the headright never served as
the basis of the land system. Rather the distribution of land by the
"treasury right" was employed in the seventeenth as well as the
eighteenth century.

The abuses of the land system and lax enforcement of its major
principles brought forth a detailed discussion of its many facets by the
Board of Trade near the end of the century. Reforms were proposed that
would enhance the royal revenue by collection of the quitrent and would
prevent the accumulation of large estates. But the existence of vast
areas of unoccupied land on the frontier militated against the
restriction, and there was considerable opposition to feudal tenures and
to the payment of rents to the crown. The proposed reforms did not
prevent the acquisition of large landholdings; the few large estates of
the seventeenth century increased both in number and size in the
eighteenth century and from them were developed the large plantations of
some of the well-known Virginia leaders of the American Revolution.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

I. MANUSCRIPTS

Virginia Land Patents. Forty-two volumes. Records of the Virginia
State Land Office now in the custody of the Virginia State Library,
Richmond. Indispensable source for the study of land grants in
Colonial Virginia. Nine volumes cover the period to 1706 with two
additional volumes for the Northern Neck beginning in 1690: Northern
Neck Grants No. 1, 1690-1692 and Northern Neck Grants No. 2,
1694-1700.

Thomas Jefferson Papers. Alderman Library, University of Virginia,
Charlottesville.

II. PRINTED PRIMARY SOURCES

Brown, Alexander, ed., _The Genesis of the United States_, New
York: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1890. 2 vols.

Force, Peter, ed., _Tracts and Other Papers Relating Pri