[Footnote 8:  Md.  Archives, III., 21.]

[Footnote 9:  Fiske, Old Virginia and Her Neighbors; Bassett, Constitutional Beginnings of North Carolina; Lapsley, County Palatinate of Durham.]

[Footnote 10:  Calvert Papers (Md.  Hist.  Soc., Fund Publications, No. 28), p. 132.]

[Footnote 11:  Md.  Archives, III., 23.]

[Footnote 12:  White, Relation (Force, Tracts, IV., No. xii.); letter of Leonard Calvert, Calvert Papers (Md.  Hist.  Soc., Fund Publications, No. 35), pp. 32-35; Baltimore, Relation (London, 1635).]

[Footnote 13:  Winthrop, New England, I., 166.]

[Footnote 14:  Neill, Founders of Maryland, 80.]

[Footnote 15:  Johnson, Old Maryland Manors (Johns Hopkins University Studies, I., No. iii.).]

[Footnote 16:  Md.  Archives, I., 1-24.]

[Footnote 17:  Md.  Archives, I., 32, 74, 243, 272.]

[Illustration:  MARYLAND IN 1652]

CHAPTER VIII

CONTENTIONS IN MARYLAND

(1633-1652)

The delay in the constitutional adjustment of Maryland, while mainly attributable to the proprietors, was partially due to the prolonged struggle with Virginia, which for years absorbed nearly all the energies of the infant community.  The decision of the Commissioners for Foreign Plantations in July, 1633, disallowing the Virginia claim to unoccupied lands, was construed by the Virginians to mean that the king at any rate intended to respect actual possession.  Now, prior to the Maryland charter, colonization in Virginia was stretching northward.  In 1630, Chiskiack, on the York River, was settled; and in August, 1631, Claiborne planted a hundred men on Kent Island, one hundred and fifty miles from Jamestown.[1]

Though established under a license from the king for trade, Kent Island had all the appearance of a permanent settlement.  Its inhabitants were never at any time as badly off as the settlers in the early days at Jamestown and Plymouth, and the island itself was stocked with cattle and had orchards and gardens, fields of tobacco, windmills for grinding corn, and women resident upon it.  Had it, however, been only a trading-post, the extension over it of the laws of Virginia made the settlement a legal occupation.  And we are told of Kent that warrants from Jamestown were directed there.  “One man was brought down and tried in Virginia for felony, and many were arrested for debt and returned to appeare at James City."[2] In February, 1632, Kent Island and Chiskiack were represented at Jamestown by a common delegate, Captain Nicholas Martian.[3] The political existence of the whole Virginia colony, and its right to take up and settle lands, the king expressly recognized.