r the London streets. They were the unfortunate and the
dispossessed rather than the vicious--men who were vagabonds because
there was nothing for them to do, or petty thieves because they were
starving. They were, none the less, an inferior and a servile class. The
colonial law made no great distinction between the servant for life and
the servant for a term of years; during the term of his indenture, the
latter was subject to his master, driven and whipped like the negro
slave with whom he worked and ate and with whom he was classed.

Less clearly defined than the distinction between the free and the
unfree was the distinction, which began to develop toward the middle of
the century, and which was doubtless accentuated by the Cavalier
migration from England during the Commonwealth period, between the small
and the large landowner. The master of a great estate, enjoying a
certain leisure and exercising a political and social influence denied
to the average freeman, was set above the mass of the planters much as
in England the titled nobility was set above the gentry. Of this small
but important class, the first William Byrd was a notable example.
Uniting in his ancestry the Cavalier and the Roundhead traditions, he
inherited, before the age of twenty, 1800 acres of land and a recognized
social position in the colony. Before his death he had built up an
estate of 26,000 acres, which his son, in the next century, increased to
179,000 acres. He was at once planter, merchant, politician, and social
leader. His caravans of from fifty to one hundred pack-horses penetrated
regularly for many years to the Cherokee country beyond the Blue Ridge
Mountains. The furs which they brought back, together with the products
of his plantation, were exported to England and elsewhere in payment for
slaves, servants, or other commodities which were periodically landed at
his private wharf to be used on his own estate or retailed from his
general store to the small planters roundabout. Before he reached the
age of thirty, Byrd became, and remained throughout his life, a leader
in his own county and in the colony at large--a colonel of militia, a
burgess in the assembly, and member of the governor's council.

From the middle of the century Virginia society thus began to take on
the character which it retained throughout the colonial period. The
colony was primarily a rural and an agricultural community, combining in
curious fashion the democr