County Courts

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Virginia Standards

Program Information

Program: Judicial Independence in the New World
Segment Number: 4 (Watch entire program)
Duration: 00:04:37
Year Produced: 2009
Description:

When the population in Virginia began to rise in the late 1620's and into the early 1630's, the volume of litigation is what ultimately lead to the movement to create the county courts as the ultimate institution of local governance.

The court system is an ever-changing and evolving entity, and there are key moments of history when Virginia's people and its judicial system made everlasting impressions on the country. JUDICIAL INDEPENDENCE IN THE NEW WORLD tells the story of the development of the court system in the early years of our nation's history. Historians take us back to the Court Days and Pre-Revolution and Post-Revolution periods to explain the rule of law and the basics of the court system we know today.

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Transcript

Pagan:
The first assembly meets in 1619 and begins to enact laws for the colony. The Virginia Company in London continued to send instructions and play a role in government, and then it essentially went bankrupt in 1624. The company collapsed and the crown took over. And ever after Virginia was a royal colony.

Billings:
The original understanding, I think, of the Virginia Company, when it made the charter revisions in 1618, was that the governor and council would act as a court. The only court. But that proves not a very effective thing almost from the beginning because it was predicated on the idea that people would stay close to Jamestown.

Once you begin to have sufficient population, the volume of litigation is more than a dozen men can handle. You know, what happens when somebody dies and leaves a will? How is it to be probated? In the early period you had to take it back to England—run it through the English Probate Court. Well that’s kind of unhandy. It would take years to settle. It’s one of the things, I think, that ultimately gives rise to the movement in the late 1620s and into the early 1630’s to create the county courts as the ultimate institution of local governance.

Pagan:
As settlements were dispersed throughout the countryside following the development of tobacco as a crop, the settlers needed local justice as well. They needed to have a ready-access to a tribunal that could adjudicate disputes and enforce the law. And so starting in the 1620s, local courts developed, originally called “monthly courts.” They were based in the various areas: Charles City County, the Eastern Shore. And then in the early 1630s, the general assembly divided Virginia into counties or shires. At that point, county courts were established. We have records of the county court on the eastern shore beginning in January of 1633, and those records continue right up to the present day.

Billings:
As population moved further and further away from where the presiding magistrate was, it became inconvenient because the difficulties of overland travel. If you were gone for more than a day, you were away from managing your business, your plantation or whatever. The proximity has something to do with it. And usually what would happen is that a number of voters and big men would petition the general assembly for the right to create a new county.

Shepard:
That was often the way that they would determine what appropriate geographical boundaries might be set. If you could get to court in a day, that seemed to be a reasonable distance, and so that’d be on horseback, presumably. But a, although a lot of people did walk to court. The idea was that the county should not be too large to inhibit that kind of travel. They needed to be able to get to someplace that was very critical to them and the ordinary operations of life and community.

Billings:
For much of the 17th century there were no courthouses as such. Usually where the court met was in the presiding justice’s front parlor. They would bring in the other members of the court and they’d probably take his dining room table. The front parlor was the biggest room in the house. And they’d array the judges. The senior one would sit in the middle and then on either side in descending order of seniority they would be there.

Pagan:
These courts at the provincial level in Jamestown, and then at the local level in the various counties, did their best to apply English law as they remembered it and to apply the acts of the legislature in Jamestown. And in many instances, the justices of the peace who held court at the local level also sat as burgesses at Jamestown. So they were making the laws that they were applying at the local level.

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