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Similarly, each could claim an additional fifty acres in the name of every person whose passage he paid. This was known as the headright system of granting land. Thus, a man with a wife, three children and two servants, was entitled to 350 acres.
Following their surveys, the explorers rushed back to James City and put in claims for the waterfront acreages, presenting one "headright" proof that someone had been imported into the colony by their agency for every fifty acres. Occasionally more land was granted than the claimant was entitled to on the basis of the headrights he presented.
If a person brought himself and three others, for example, he could claim 200 acres under this arrangement. This headright system was later adopted in other colonies and continued in use for generations. Participation in the affairs of government was another element in the new Company approach.
But the headright system, even imperfectly administered, remained during the Parliamentary period as one of the elements of restraint on the unbounded desires of the planters. Land acquisition was thus tied in a fixed ratio to population increase. There was, as a result, some assurance that land acquired would be populated and farmed.
Two jugera, which Romulus first made the headright and which thus became the unit of inheritance, are called an haeredium: later one hundred haeredia were called a centuria, which is 2,400 unciae square. Four centuriae adjoining, so that there are two on each side, are called a saltus in the distribution of the public lands." Of the considerations on building a steading a. Size
In the case of Berkeley Hundred, the evidence suggests too that the associates used the promise of a share in this division for the recruitment of their first tenants. Yeardley's instructions reaffirmed the company's promise of a headright in terms inviting the migration of individual settlers at their own cost.
Articles of submission were agreed upon which were honorable to both sides, Virginia receiving guarantees of the privileges of freeborn people of England, authority for the Grand Assembly to continue to function, guarantees of immunity for acts or words done or spoken in opposition to Parliament, guarantees of the bounds of Virginia, of the fifty-acre headright privilege, and of the right to "free trade as the people of England do enjoy to all places and with all nations according to the lawes of that commonwealth."
For every tenant sent to the plantation, the associated adventurers were entitled to an additional headright of 50 acres. They were awarded also an additional 1,500 acres for the support of public charges in the hundred, such as those incurred for the maintenance of a church and minister.
This was the Virginia headright, as it came to be called, which was destined to remain the chief feature of the colony's land policy through many years after the demise of the company itself.
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