e owned no less than 179,440 acres
of the best land in Virginia.[38] Robert Carter, of Nomini Hall, owned
60,000 acres.[39] The lands of William Fitzhugh amounted to 54,000
acres, at his death in 1701.[40] Other prominent men were possessed of
estates not less extensive. These vast tracts of land comprised
usually several plantations that were scattered in various parts of
the colony and which differed widely in value and in extent. In the
region to the west beyond tidewater estates of 20,000, 30,000, or
40,000 acres were not infrequent, while in the sections that had been
first settled the average size was much less. Yet the plantations that
stretched along the banks of the James, the York, the Rappahannock and
the Potomac were so extensive that often the residences of the
planters were several miles apart. From 4,000 to 6,000 acres was the
average size of the farms of the wealthier men.[41]

The author of Virginia's Cure, a pamphlet printed in 1661, says: "The
families ... are dispersedly and scatteringly seated upon the sides of
rivers, some of which running very far into the country, bear the
English plantations above a hundred miles, and being very broad, cause
the inhabitants of either side to be listed in several parishes. Every
such parish is extended many miles in length upon the rivers' side,
and usually not above a mile in breadth backward from the river,
which is the common stated breadth of every plantation, some extend
themselves half a mile, some a mile, some two miles upon the sides of
the rivers."[42]

The system of large plantations was in vogue in Virginia from the
early years of the 17th century. Even before the days of Sir William
Berkeley, many of the colonists possessed extensive tracts of land,
only part of which they could put under cultivation. Doubtless the
dignity which the possession of land gave in England was the principal
inducement for the planter to secure as large an estate as his means
would permit. The wealthier Virginians showed throughout the entire
colonial period a passion for land that frequently led them into the
grossest and most unjustifiable fraud.[43]

The tendency was accelerated by the law, made by the Virginia Company
of London to encourage immigration, which allotted fifty acres of land
to proprietors for every person they brought to the colony, "by which
means some men transporting many servants thither, and others
purchasing the rights of those that did, took posse