y, the reparation of the falling
Church and so of the Store-house, a stable for our horses, a munition
house, a Powder house, a new well for the amending of the most
unwholesome water which the old afforded. Brick to be made, a sturgion
house... a Block house to be raised on the North side of our back river
to prevent the Indians from killing our cattle, a house to be set up to
lodge our cattle in the winter, and hay to be appointed in his due time
to be made, a smith's forge to be perfected, caske for our Sturgions
to be made, and besides private gardens for each man common gardens
for hemp and flax and such other seeds, and lastly a bridge to land our
goods dry and safe upon, for most of which I take present order."

Dale would have agreed with Dr. Watts that

Satan finds some mischief still
For idle hands to do!

If we of the United States today will call to mind certain Western small
towns of some decades ago--if we will review them as they are pictured
in poem and novel and play--we may receive, as it were out of the tail
of the eye, an impression of some aspects of these western plantings of
the seventeenth century. The dare-devil, the bully, the tenderfoot, the
gambler, the gentleman-desperado had their counterparts in Virginia. So
had the cool, indomitable sheriff and his dependable posse, the friends
generally of law and order. Dale may be viewed as the picturesque
sheriff of this earlier age.

But it must be remembered that this Virginia was of the seventeenth, not
of the nineteenth century. And law had cruel and idiot faces as well as
faces just and wise. Hitherto the colony possessed no written statutes.
The Company now resolved to impose upon the wayward an iron restraint.
It fell to Dale to enforce the regulations known as "Lawes and Orders,
dyvine, politique, and martiall for the Colonye of Virginia"--not
English civil law simply, but laws "chiefly extracted out of the Lawes
for governing the army in the Low Countreys." The first part of this
code was compiled by William Strachey; the latter part is thought to
have been the work of Sir Edward Cecil, Sir Thomas Gates, and Dale
himself, approved and accepted by the Virginia Company. Ten years
afterwards, defending itself before a Committee of Parliament, the
Company through its Treasurer declared "the necessity of such laws, in
some cases ad terrorem, and in some to be truly executed."

Seventeenth-century English law herself was terrible