the social life and
customs of the people of colonial Virginia. But except in the able works
of Dr. Philip Alexander Bruce little has been said concerning the small
planter class, the men who made up the vast bulk of the population, the
true Seventeenth century Virginians. We have long and detailed
descriptions of the residences of the small group of the well-to-do,
their libraries, their furniture, their table ware, their portraits,
their clothing, their amusements. The genealogy of the leading families
has been worked out with minute care, their histories recorded, some of
their leading members idealized by the writers of fiction. The mention
of colonial Virginia brings instantly to mind a picture of gay
cavaliers, of stately ladies, of baronial estates, of noble manors. And
the sturdy, independent class of small farmers who made up a full 90 per
cent of the freeholders at the time the rent roll was taken, have been
relegated into undeserved obscurity.

It is to be noted that the roll does not include the names of
proprietors residing in the Northern Neck, as the peninsula between the
Potomac and the Rappahannock is called. This territory, although
acknowledging the jurisdiction of the Government at Williamsburg in most
matters and sending representatives to the House of Burgesses, paid its
quit-rents, not to the Crown but to a proprietor. Nicholson, therefore,
was not concerned in their collection and took no steps to list its
landholders in his new roll. There is no reason to believe, however,
that conditions in that part of the colony were fundamentally different.

Nor can the accuracy of the rent roll be challenged. There existed
always the incentive to make false returns, of course, in order to
escape the payment of taxes, and not many sheriffs were so diligent as
the one in Henrico who unearthed 1,669 acres that had been
"concealed."[3-44] Yet it must be remembered that the Governor brought
to bear all the pressure at his disposal to make this particular roll
accurate, that the sheriffs were his appointees, that they could not
lightly defy him in so important a matter. And even though in isolated
cases they may have winked at false returns from men of wealth and rank,
from the mass of small proprietors they must have insisted upon reports
as accurate as the records or actual surveying could make them. No doubt
certain uncultivated tracts in the frontier counties were omitted, but
with these we are not immediate