maturity where there is only one wage-producing employment
available to the family, the younger sons must seek a living from other
sources. Farms cannot be reduced below the number of acres required to
support one family. When that has been done and there are several sons,
one of them must inherit the farm and the others must seek a living
elsewhere.

The broad acres of Virginia and its equable climate attracted thousands
of such younger sons, and also others who had not been successful and
sought opportunity in a new land. The settlers came from every section
of England, and from the bleak hills of Scotland; from Wales and also
from Ireland. The English were mostly from the Anglican parishes of the
Established Church. The Scottish new-comers were accustomed to
membership in the Established Church of Scotland and they found little
difficulty in living within the Established Church of Virginia. Indeed
there is no recorded effort to establish a Presbyterian congregation in
Virginia until the last quarter of the seventeenth century. So friendly
was the feeling between the Anglicans and the Scottish Presbyterians in
the Norfolk section that Rev. James Porter of Presbyterian ordination
was the incumbent minister of the Anglican Lynnhaven Parish prior to
1676 and until his death in 1683.

A second source, certainly in the early years, was the rapidly
increasing population of the cities and towns of England. It is of
record that in the days of the London Company one town appropriated
funds sufficient to pay the expenses to Virginia of a large number of
its unemployed, and probably the same thing was done by other towns for
their unemployed. Doubtless a little "pressure" was applied in the case
of young men who had no occupation and no visible means of support. And
shanghaiing, to use a modern term, was not unknown.

A third source from which settlers came developed from the custom which
grew up in England of sending to Virginia, and later to all the
colonies, persons who had been convicted of law-breaking. At that time
there were some hundred felonies in the English code of jurisprudence
for which the sentence of death by hanging could be imposed. These
felonies included such offenses as stealing a pig or anything of
greater value than a shilling. The ruling classes of England had long
realized that punishments were too severe for offenses which today
would be misdemeanors; and in the fifteenth century an effort had been
m