hannock County for 1668 is an example of the practice, in which
Thomas Sheppard of Plymouth, England, designated William Moseley to
handle his interest in 150 headrights which he claimed for importing 150
people to Virginia. It was likely in this case that duplicate claims
were issued, either to the individual if he paid his own transportation
or to some master if the immigrant became an indentured servant. In some
instances, as many as three or four claims were made for one
importation: one for the ship master, one for the merchant who acted as
middle-man in purchasing the service of the immigrant, one for the
planter who eventually purchased the indentured servant, and less often
one for a second planter who may have joined with the first in obtaining
the services of the imported person.

As abuse of the system increased, headright lists sometimes included
fictitious names or in some cases names copied from old record books.
The final stage in irregular procedure was reached when the clerks in
the office of the secretary of the colony sold the headright claim to
persons who would simply pay from one to five shillings. The exact date
at which this practice began has not been determined, but it was
prevalent sometime before 1692. Francis Nicholson reported to the Board
of Trade that while serving as Governor of Virginia from 1690 to 1692,
he had "heard" that the sale of rights by the clerks in the secretary's
office was "common practice." Another report to the Board in 1697
described the clerks as being "a constant mint of those rights."

The combined variations in the operation of the headright system
resulted in the distortion, if not destruction, of its original
concepts. The system continued to bring immigrants into the colony which
had been a very important purpose when inaugurated. But the abuses threw
out of balance the relation between patented land and the number of
people in the colony; and furthermore through perversion of the system,
speculation in land was not prevented and there resulted large areas of
wholly uncultivated and uninhabited lands to which title had been
granted. The headright was also originally intended to apply to
inhabitants of the British Isles, but by the middle of the seventeenth
century the names of persons imported from Africa appeared occasionally
as the basis for headright, and by the last decade of the century they
were frequently found.

The distortion of the headright system wa