32
BRITISH COLONIAL POLICY
things was set on foot by the summoning of a popular 1 Assembly, which met on the 30th of July of that year. Hutchinson speaks of it as “ breaking out,” and Professor Seeley has repeated the expression. But, in fact, it was duly summoned by Yeardley, according to the instructions which he had received from home. The Assembly was to be composed of the Governor and his Council, together with Burgesses, elected by the freemen from each plantation, each county and hundred returning two members. The Assembly was to have power to make and ordain whatsoever laws and orders should by them be thought good and profitable.
Meanwhile the Company at home was not inactive. To check the over-production of tobacco, a new clause was inserted in all fresh grants of land, binding the holder to grow in part 2 staple commodities, e.g., “ corne, wine, silke, silke grasse, hempe, flax, pitch, and tar, pot-ashes and sope- ashes, iron, clap boord and other materialls, not wholly and chiefly about tobacco and sassifras.” A serious effort was made to improve the class of emigrants. “ The men lately sent,” 3 it is asserted in 1620, “have been most of them choise men, born and bred up to labour and industry.” Among them we find forty ironworkers out of Sussex. It was intended further to introduce men skilled in hemp work from the East, vignerons from France and the Rhine, sawyers from Hamburg, olive-planters from Marseilles and Leghorn. The list 4 of adventurers published in 1620 includes about 800 names, and the capital subscribed amounts to over £35,000. Every adventurer of a share was entitled 8 to one hundred acres upon the first division and to a second hundred acres when the land of the first division had been sufficiently peopled. In addition he was entitled to a further fifty acres for every person transported thither before Midsummer 1625, and for a second fifty acres upon a second division ; such
1 The best English authority on the first Colonial Parliament is Sainsbury in Antiquary, Vol. IV., July 1881.
2 Orders and Constitutions in Force’s Historical Tracts, Vol. III.
3 “A Declaration of the state of the Colonies,” June 1620; Force’s Hist. Tracts, Vol. III.
4 Force, as ante.
5 Orders and Constitutions, No. cxv.