For many of us, both seventeenth-century writing and courtroom jargon feel like different languages. Below you’ll find some historical context to help make sense of some of the key social and legal shifts which determined the fate of many seventeenth-century unfree people.
Legal Background
Seventeenth-century colonial Virginia did not have a preset comprehensive code of laws or legal precedents regulating labor and punishments for runaways. Building a set of legal codes was very much in-process, and the court records in our project reflect changing colonial law governing indentured servitude, slavery, movements of bonded laborers, and recapture. As historian Kristalyn Marie Shefveland notes, “labor relations in Virginia in the seventeenth century, by all accounts, were a complex set of laws and realities wrapped up in antagonisms over class and racial assumptions.” It is important to keep in mind that laws can provide information on concerns the colonial government had, and were often written in reaction to events happening in the colony, but we cannot assume that all laws were followed, or implemented exactly as they were intended. As the laws developed over time, they changed the reasons for, and nature of court cases surrounding escapes that you’ll encounter in these records. Below is a list of some key laws; text in quotations is taken directly from the historical laws and reflects the language and terminology of the time. Links to the text of laws included.
1640 General Court Case: In a case involving three runaways, different penalties were given based on race: two white men had time added to their indenture, while “the third being a negro named John Punch shall serve his said master or his assigns for the time of his natural Life here or elsewhere.”
1643 General Assembly Law: As punishment for running away, double the time an individual was gone was added to their time of service. For a second offense, the law ordered branding with the letter “R.”
“the third being a negro named John Punch shall serve his said master or his assigns for the time of his natural Life here or elsewhere.”
H. R. McIlwane, ed., Minutes of the Council and General Court of Colonial Virginia 1622–1632, 1670–1676 (Richmond: Library of Virginia, 1924), 466.
1661 General Assembly Law: This law added additional time of service on top of the normal penalty for white servants caught running away with Black servants.
1663 General Assembly Act: This act regulated the movements of servants, stating they must have permission to travel and could be punished for “unlawful meetings.”
1669 General Assembly Act “Against Runawayes:” This act offered a reward of “a thousand pounds of tobacco” to anyone who caught a runaway and required runaway to repay the cost of the reward through additional time of service “to the country.”
1670 General Assembly Act “Concerning Runaways”: This act reduced the reward for catching a runaway to two-hundred pounds of tobacco, because the cost of the original amount was too great. It also instructed each constable who had custody of a runaway to “whip them severely” and imposed a penalty on constables who let runaways escape. Individuals who ran away more than once were required to cut their hair short to be more easily identified.
Related Notes:
One of the important parts of this project is that it contextualizes both enslaved people and indentured servants and ranges from people of Indigenous, African and European descent. By including as many people as possible, we are better able to contextualize the act of being a runaway, including how, even as early as the 17th century, the legal system was already being used to draw line based on race. By including multiple races and statuses of servitude in this project, there are more opportunities to make these kinds of connections.
