THE Statutes at Large; BEING A COLLECTION OF ALL THE LAWS OF VIRGINIA, FROM THE FIRST SESSION OF THE LEGISLATURE, IN THE YEAR 1619. PUBLISHED PURSUANT TO AN ACT OF THE GENERAL ASSEMBLY OF VIRGINIA, SAND EIGHT HUNDRED AND EIGHT. VOLUME I. BY WILLIAM WALLER HENING. "The Laws of a country are necessarily connected with every thing belonging to the people of it) NEW-YORK: PRINTED FOR THE EDITOR, BY R. & W. & G. BARTOW WE, P. V. Daniel, William F. Pendleton, William Robertson, and William Selden, members of the executive council of Virginia, do hereby certify that the laws contained in the first volume of HENING'S Statutes at Large have been, by us, examined and compared with a copy as corrected by the certificate of the examiners heretofore appointed, from which they were taken, by William F. Pendleton and William Selden, from page 1, to page 368 inclusive, by William F. Pendleton and William Robertson, from page 369 to page 428, inclusive, and by William F. Pendleton and Peter V. Daniel, from page 429, inclusive to the end, except from page 465 to page 472, in clusive, which were examined by Peter V. Daniel and William Selden, and we have found the pages respectively examined by us, truly and accurately printed except as to the following list of errata, to the number of twelve. Given under our hands, this 14th day of July, 1823. P. V. DANIEL. W. F. PENDLETON. ERRATA. Page 217, line 11 from top, strike out "L" after "3" 342, line 10 from top, for "on" read "no" 360, line 16 from top, for "hut" read "by" 518, line 17 from bottom, for "though" read "through" PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION. WHETHER I shall render an acceptable service to my native state in furnishing the only authentic materials for its early history, which have hitherto been published, and which display alike the virtue and vices, the wisdom and folly of our ancestors, I am at a loss to conjecture. Nations as well as individuals have their pride of ancestry; and poets and historians in all ages have delighted to gratify that harmless propensity. Homer has interwoven a few historical facts, with a strange mixture of Grecian mythology. His heroes were all allied to the Gods, and the celestial beings, in every conflict, had their feelings enlisted on the side of their respective descendants. He is the only historian of the Trojan war; and amidst the innumerable beauties of this immortal bard, we almost lose sight of the fictions with which his poem abounds. Virgil, in imitation of his great prototype, equally administered to the vanity of the Romans. It was not enough that they were the successors of Janus, of Saturn, of Jupiter, and a whole race of Latin kings, who were afterwards deified, and that their city was founded by Romulus, the son of the God Mars, but their passion for illustrious ancestors gave a ready admission to Eneas the Trojan, son of Anchises by the Goddess Venus, and ranked him as the sixth king of the Latins. Livy, one of the best of the Roman historians, introduces his work with those fabulous accounts, which the prejudices of education had induced the best informed of his countrymen to adopt. Modern English historians have, with propriety, rejected the legendary tales with which the writings of their predecessors are filled; but the early histories of all the kingdoms of Europe, established after the dark ages, which succeeded the decline and fall of the Roman empire, contain little more than the traditions of their bards. Indeed, until we come to the laws of a nation, it is impossible to form a correct idea of its civil polity, or of the state of society: "As every new law," says a celebrated writer, "is made to remove some inconvenience the state was subject to before the mak |