How many of the colonists who migrated to Virginia between 1618 and 1624 went by agreement with such associations as these is difficult to say, but there can be no doubt that they were a very large part of the total. The Virginia Company, which had served theretofore as the immediate colonizing agent, was becoming more and more a supervisory body for the encouragement of individual and associated adventurers in their own colonizing efforts. For itself, the company looked forward to a continuing revenue from quitrents to be paid, at the rate of two shillings per hundred acres after a term of seven years from the original grant, by all save the ancient adventurers and the planters who had migrated before 1616 at their own costs. To this revenue from quitrents could be added the benefit to be expected from the company's control of the colony's trade.
As in 1609, there seems to be no doubt that all plans looked ultimately to the establishment of individual land titles. Where the record has survived, the associated adventurers clearly intended that their common grant would in time be divided. In the case of Berkeley Hundred, the evidence suggests too that the associates used the promise of a share in this division for the recruitment of their first tenants. Yeardley's instructions reaffirmed the company's promise of a headright in terms inviting the migration of individual settlers at their own cost.
To understand the plans of 1618, the modern American needs to dismiss any idea that the isolated farm house of later America represented the ideal toward which men looked at this time. He should think rather of the English village community, or of the New England town, where men lived together with the advantages of a close social relationship and where the land they cultivated lay close at hand to the village and its church. If the associated adventurers continued to depend for a time on variations of the original joint-stock plan, it was not merely because they wanted to share the risk of a still uncertain venture or because they were seeking some useful device for meeting the problems of management. It was also because the plantation they hoped to establish was to have at its heart a town, and it was thought that the town could best be built through some common effort.