e peace of Charles City, Surry, Isle of Wight, and
Nansemond counties were instructed to be on the alert for violators of
the order.

However, the Indians themselves, residing in the region on the south
side of the Blackwater River and in Pamunkey Neck had requested in 1688
that colonists be allowed to settle across the boundary line in the area
now made vacant by the gradual dying out of their tribes. The basis for
the request seems to have been a desire for relief in their precarious
economic condition and the fear of invasion by hostile Indians, whom
they regarded with more apprehension than they did the English. By 1705,
the colony, influenced by the request from the natives revoked its
former law regarding the Indian boundary, permitting a limited number of
white settlements in Pamunkey Neck and in the region south of the
Blackwater Swamp and Nottoway River.

Thus in the seventeenth century the pendulum moved from a position of
the colony ignoring any Indian rights in the land to a gradual
recognition of the Indian right of occupation. This sweep of the
pendulum brought the establishment of boundary lines between the whites
and the Indians with reservations being designated for certain tribes.
By the end of the century the diminution of the tribes found the
pendulum swinging back to open the area to white settlement which had
once been reserved to the natives, yet still retaining the recognition
of the Indian's right of occupation where tribes survived. With this
survey of the problem of the red man's title to land, let us now turn to
a consideration of the white man's title and how it was obtained in
seventeenth-century Virginia.

CHAPTER TWO

The London Company

General boundaries for English settlement were designated in the charter
of 1606 creating the London Company and the Plymouth Company to settle
the area in America known as Virginia. The London Company was authorized
to settle a tract of land 100 miles square in the southern part of the
area extending from the thirty-fourth to the forty-first degrees north
latitude, or from the Cape Fear River in present North Carolina to New
York City. The boundaries for the Plymouth Company were from the
thirty-eighth to the forty-fifth degrees north latitude, or from
approximately the mouth of the Potomac River to a line just north of
present Bangor, Maine. In the overlapping area between the thirty-eighth
and forty-first degrees, which in effect created