-6-                             
 
 
from the Indians for bagatelles; and such great numbers of servants did
run away that more laws were enacted on that than any other subject
during a period of thirty years.  But the laws could not be enforced
effectively where half the population sympathized with the runaways;
nor were the punishments of runaways so severe as the law prescribed
when vestrymen of the churches and justices of the courts were often
ex-servants (1).  Thus the plantation areas were unruly democracies.
 
 
Nor was this all. The Chesapeake Bay lands did not produce good tobacco
more than five or six years in succession, more perhaps on limited
river fronts. Consequently, permanent attachment of less ambitious
workers to the soil was not possible. Plantations were always moving
and changing.  The masters of a few great estates lived in fair sized
houses on river banks during the second half of the seventeenth
century; but a far greater number of planters were constantly migrating
westward or southward.  Moreover, the downward trend of prices, except
in the short period of uncontrolled British trade, 1642-1660, made
 
 
1. Hening, William Waller: 
the Statutes at Large of all the Laws of Virginia
, II., especially for the years 1660-1670.