The book titled "Fauquier During the Proprietorship" by H. C. Groome (LoC Card #77-88164), 1st pub 1927 and since twice reprinted, has several interesting paragraphs at the beginning of Chap. 3 which relate directly to the exchange (& some good info by several individuals) on this list about 2 wks ago. I have copied (hopefully verbatim) several paragraphs below for your interest: ======================================================================== In the Northern Neck .... "as in other parts of VA, the land system adopted at the time of the Jamestown settlement and continued throughout the entire colonial period, was the form of freehold tenure which in the seventeenth century prevailed in England and was generally styled 'free and common socage' (correct: "socage"). Feudal land tenure, of which socage tenure was a survival, was based on the principle that the sovereign was the supreme lord of all the land and that everyone held under him as a tenant. The terms were fealty and direct service to the Crown by the overlord who, so long as such service was faithfully discharged, held his fief, practically and in relation to all under tenants, as owner of the land. The under tenants, in turn, held under his overlord by a military tenure, such as Knight's Service, or, in the case of the humbler obligations of the villein to his landlord, by labor performed for so many days in each week or by payment in kind from the produce of his land and stock. Servile tenure of the latter form gradually gave place to a system under which labor service was commuted into money payments, and contemporaneously all military tenures were abolished. The indicdents of socage tenure, or tenure in fee simple, thus evolved, were fealty and a fixed rent, called the quit rent, by the payment of which a tenant was quit or free from all other feudal services. Although the render of this rent constituted an acknowledgment of the higher title of the landlord, it in no way affected the freeholder's control of his property or his right to alienate or bequesth it subject to the terms of his own tenure. In VA, titles to land held in free and common socage were descendable fee titles absolute in the grantee and subject only to the payment of the quit rent, which was reserved in the patent, or deed, and the non-payment of which within a certain period, gave the grantor the right to resume possession of the land as in the case of a leasehold. ====================================================================== In the Preface, the author has the following to say ........... ====================================================================== In presenting this compilation of the early records of Fauquier, it is believed that the conditions under which the seating of the county occurred can not properly be understood without some reference to the land system of the proprietors and to devolutions of the proprietary title which at times seriously confused contemporary conveyancing. The colonization of the county was also materially affected by the practice of the proprietors' agents, and later of Lord Fairfax himself, of taking grants for their personal accounts of large tracts of land which were held by them as 'manors', and of which the occupation was deferred by the conditions of settlement until late in the eighteenth century. ====================================================================== I haven't finished the book (242 pages), but for those not familiar with the book, it appears to be more of a "broad brush overview", and has relatively few surnames and thus almost no specific genealogical detail.