ssion of great
tracts of land at their pleasure."[44] In 1621 a number of extensive
grants were made to persons thus engaging themselves to take settlers
to Virginia. To Arthur Swain and Nathaniel Basse were given 5,000
acres for undertaking to transport one hundred persons. Five thousand
acres was also given Rowland Truelove "and divers other patentees."
Similar tracts were given to John Crowe, Edward Ryder, Captain Simon
Leeke and others.[45] Sir George Yeardly received a grant of 15,000
acres for engaging to take over three hundred persons.[46]

Even more potent in building up large plantations was the wasteful
system of agriculture adopted by the settlers. It soon became apparent
to them that the cultivation of tobacco was very exhausting to the
soil, but the abundance of land led them to neglect the most ordinary
precautions to preserve the fertility of their fields. They planted
year after year upon the same spot until the soil would produce no
more, and then cleared a new field. They were less provident even than
the peasants of the Middle Ages, for they failed to adopt the old
system of rotation of crops that would have arrested to some extent
the exhausting of their fields. Of the use of artificial fertilizers
they were ignorant.

This system of cultivation made it necessary for them to secure very
large plantations, for they could not be content with a tract of
territory sufficiently large to keep busy their force of laborers.
They must look forward to the time when their fields would become
useless, and if they were wise they would secure ten times more than
they could put into cultivation at once. If they failed to do this
they would find at the end of a few years that their estates consisted
of nothing but exhausted and useless fields. Thomas Whitlock, in his
will dated 1659, says: "I give my son Thomas Whitlock the land I live
on, 600 acres, when he is of the age 21, and during his minority to my
wife. The land not to be further made use of or by planting or
seating[47] than the first deep branch that is commonly rid over, that
my son may have some fresh land when he attains to age."[48]

The plantations, thus vast in extent, soon became little communities
independent in a marked degree of each other, and in many respects of
the entire colony. The planter, his family, his servants and slaves
lived to themselves in isolation almost as great as that of the feudal
barons or of the inhabitants of the vill o