As most of these Scotch-Irish immigrants were very poor, many paid for their passage by selling their services and labour for a term of years, becoming a part of that flood of "indentured servants" which we shall soon consider. Fairfax Harrison in his _Landmarks of Old Prince William_ vividly describes their advent and early distribution in the Northern Neck. As soon as the earlier arrivals had worked out their contracted years of servitude, Colonel Robert Carter, about 1723, began seating them around Brent Town and Elk Marsh. But as their numbers grew, they soon shewed a disinclination to become tenants, preferring to push further into the wilderness "where they could and did take up small holdings on the same terms that Colonel Carter took up his great ones and in that process they scattered."[30] Being too poor to purchase negro slaves and the supply of "redemptioners" or indentured servants by that time beginning to diminish, they bought the cheaper convicts for labourers and the Piedmont backwoods of the Proprietary acquired a reputation for turbulence and lawlessness to which both master and servant contributed his share. But they settled the land, planted tobacco and corn as persistently and relentlessly as did their more prosperous neighbours and in common with them laboured to develop the future Loudoun.
[30] _Landmarks of Old Prince William_, I., 235.
To understand the status of the "indentured servants," who were so numerous in the Virginia Colony and were such a large and important factor in the population of the Northern Neck, it is well to first consider the meaning of the term. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the word servant was not at all confined to one who was engaged in a menial task but broadly referred to anyone who, for compensation, rendered service to another and it was customary in all occupations, calling for especial training or instruction, to take on apprentices "bound to serve for a certain time in consideration of instruction in an art or trade"--the apprentice to be fed, lodged and clothed by the master during the term and to give his labour and services in compensation for his support and instruction. This custom obtained not only in the various crafts and trades but even in the professions as well, lawyers and doctors taking students on similar terms. In modern England the broader and older meaning of the word persists in the expression "civil servant" in reference to a government clerk or employé in what in America, too, is known as the Civil Service.