Search -
English Colonies in America ...: The middle colonies
English Colonies in America The middle colonies Author:John Andrew Doyle Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: THE PATROONSHIPS. 13 aeval king, the Company allotted portions of its territory to individuals, on whom it conferred not only proprietary rights but also cert... more »ain subordinate jurisdiction. These grantees?patroons as they were called?were tempted by an exceedingly restricted share in the Company's monopoly of trade. Each was to bring out fifty adult emigrants, and in return was to receive a tract of land reaching sixteen miles along the river, all on one bank or half on each, with no fixed limit of width. The colonists whom the patroon took out were to be ascripti glebce. The patroon himself was to hold manorial courts, from which there was a right of appeal to the Company. If he could found townships within his territory, he might himself appoint in them a staff of officials. A privilege of the Old World, too, was renewed for the benefit of the patroon. The tenant might grind corn nowhere but at his mill. On the patroons the Company cast a duty which they might themselves have fitly discharged, that of providing ministers and schoolmasters.1 The objections to these arrangements were many and obvious. It meant the introduction of a landed aristocracy among a people whose life in the Old World had done nothing to familiarize them with such a system. To leading members of the Company it offered opportunities for large and lucrative speculation in land. Thus we find one director, Kiliaen van Rensselaer, an Amsterdam jeweler, acquiring a territory on the upper Hudson so vast that as a concession to the general outcry he had to slice it up into five patroonships. It was a system, too, which went to make any effective central government impossible, alike for civil or 'military purposes. There was no cohesion between the patroonships, no interdependence: one might prosper without ...« less