The size of land patents gradually increased during the seventeenth century with the peak being reached in the third quarter. During the last quarter of the period there was a definite trend toward the breakup of large estates by distribution to heirs and by sale of small segments of the larger patent. Whatever the variation in size, the small landholder constituted the major group in seventeenth-century Virginia and assumed a more important role in the socio-economic pattern of the colony than is evident from the descriptions of plantation life by romantic writers.
By the end of the seventeenth century the use of the headright as the major means of land distribution began to give way to acquisition of title by purchase in all of Virginia other than the Northern Neck. For the Northern Neck which was granted to various proprietors who were faithful to the King during the civil war, the headright never served as the basis of the land system. Rather the distribution of land by the "treasury right" was employed in the seventeenth as well as the eighteenth century.
The abuses of the land system and lax enforcement of its major principles brought forth a detailed discussion of its many facets by the Board of Trade near the end of the century. Reforms were proposed that would enhance the royal revenue by collection of the quitrent and would prevent the accumulation of large estates. But the existence of vast areas of unoccupied land on the frontier militated against the restriction, and there was considerable opposition to feudal tenures and to the payment of rents to the crown. The proposed reforms did not prevent the acquisition of large landholdings; the few large estates of the seventeenth century increased both in number and size in the eighteenth century and from them were developed the large plantations of some of the well-known Virginia leaders of the American Revolution.
Virginia Land Patents. Forty-two volumes. Records of the Virginia State Land Office now in the custody of the Virginia State Library, Richmond. Indispensable source for the study of land grants in Colonial Virginia. Nine volumes cover the period to 1706 with two additional volumes for the Northern Neck beginning in 1690: Northern Neck Grants No. 1, 1690-1692 and Northern Neck Grants No. 2, 1694-1700.