Old Virginia and her neighbours

146 OLD VIRGINIA AND HER NEIGHBOURS.being bent upon securing somewhere a bit of seacoast,he persuaded the Duke of York to give himthe land on the west shore of Delaware Bay whichBythe Dutch had once taken from the Swedes.further enlargement the area of this grant becamethat of the present state of Delaware, the whole ofwhich was thus, in spite of vehement protest, carvedout of the original Maryland. In such matters therewas not much profit in contending against princes.In the course of this narrative we have hadoccasion to mention the grants of Bohemia andother manors. In order that we should understandthe course of Maryland history before andafter the Revolution of1689, some description ofOld manors ^^ manorial system is desirable. One ofin Maryland.^^^ j^^g^ interesting features in the earlyhistory of English America is the way in whichdifferent phases of English institutions were reproducedin the different colonies. As the ancientEnglish town meeting reached a high developmentin New England, as the system of close vestrieswas very thoroughly worked out in Virginia, sothe old English manor was best preserved inMaryland. In 1636 Lord Baltimore issued instructionsthat every grant of 2,000 acres or moreshould be erected into a manor, with court baronand court leet. " The manor was the land onwhich the lord and his tenants lived, and boundup with the land were also the rights of governmentwhich the lord possessed over the tenants,and they over one another." ^ Such manors were^Johnson, "Old Maryland Manors," Johns Hopkins UniversitjStudies, vol..i.