ny, which had served theretofore as the
immediate colonizing agent, was becoming more and more a supervisory
body for the encouragement of individual and associated adventurers in
their own colonizing efforts. For itself, the company looked forward to
a continuing revenue from quitrents to be paid, at the rate of two
shillings per hundred acres after a term of seven years from the
original grant, by all save the ancient adventurers and the planters
who had migrated before 1616 at their own costs. To this revenue from
quitrents could be added the benefit to be expected from the company's
control of the colony's trade.

As in 1609, there seems to be no doubt that all plans looked ultimately
to the establishment of individual land titles. Where the record has
survived, the associated adventurers clearly intended that their common
grant would in time be divided. 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.

To understand the plans of 1618, the modern American needs to dismiss
any idea that the isolated farm house of later America represented the
ideal toward which men looked at this time. He should think rather of
the English village community, or of the New England town, where men
lived together with the advantages of a close social relationship and
where the land they cultivated lay close at hand to the village and its
church. If the associated adventurers continued to depend for a time on
variations of the original joint-stock plan, it was not merely because
they wanted to share the risk of a still uncertain venture or because
they were seeking some useful device for meeting the problems of
management. It was also because the plantation they hoped to establish
was to have at its heart a town, and it was thought that the town could
best be built through some common effort.

What has been said above is not intended to suggest that the company's
role after 1618 was to be purely supervisory. Although it had an
accumulated debt of some L9,000, or possibly because of this debt, the
company agreed for the encouragement of individual adventurers to
assume heavy responsibilities of leadership. It directed Yeardley to
lay out four towns, or boroughs, along the Jame