B. HISTORICAL NOTES ON THE EARLY GOVERNMENT AND LEGISLATIVE COUNCILS AND ASSEMBLIES OF PENNSYLVANIA, BY BENJAMIN M. NEAD. PART I. From the first European Settlement on the Delaware to the acquisition of the country by Penn, 1623-1681. PART II. From the acquisition of the country by Penn to the close of the century, 1681–1700. "Nescire quid antea quam natus sis Acciderit, id est semper esse puerum."-Cicero. NOTE. The editor of the following pages takes this opportunity of tendering his acknowledgments to STOUGHTON GEORGE, of Harrisburg, for valuable assistance rendered in collating the matter of the second part of the Historical Notes. To the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, the editor's thanks are also due, for their many courtesies extended to him in the prosecution of his work. PART I. From the first European Settlement on the Delaware to the Acquisition of the Country by Penn, 1623-1681. CHAPTER I. INTRODUCTORY. The field presented to the writer from which he is to glean widely scattered facts, and bind them into a history, of the legal and judicial customs in early Pennsylvania colonies and province, is by no means a promising one, prolific of the germs of confusion, as it is at the present day. Important of subject and rare as the records of those days were, we have yet to deplore the loss, and sometimes willful destruction, of most valuable ones by the carelessness or crime of the carlier settlers, as well as by the accidents and vandalism of later days. But enough remain to give something of an insight into the subject, and where details fail us, there is a satisfaction in the contemplation, in general views, of those early struggles for life, in the New World, of civilized man's conception of law and order. There are items of evidence scattered all through the fragmentary history of the varied fortunes of the early European adventurers upon the shores of the Delaware-around the borders and within the confines of present Pennsylvania-which tend to prove that each company of new comers, whose aim was permanent colonization, and not a mere temporary enterprise in trading, came armed with full authority to promulgate laws for the protection of the rights of persons and of property, and to establish tribunals for the administration of justice. These laws and judicial forms, if such they may be called, were part, in every case, the common law of the mother country, and peremptory, and part advice to be adopted, modified, or rejected, as the exigencies of actual circumstances might demand; such circumstances as might arise from the daily intercourse, sometimes hostile, sometimes friendly, of the representatives of totally different nations with each other, and with the savage inhabitants of the soil, and which naturally tended to a harmonizing of analogous laws, the toning down of conflicting ones, and the mutual recognition, of salutary customs. So precarious was the existence of those earlier germs of colonies, that the representatives of no particular nation remained unmolested long enough in the enjoyment of its assumed rights to impress its individual character alone upon any establishment of law or administration of justice. Almost uniformly was this the case from the days of the Patroonship of Godyn, Blomaert and the hardy De Vries, the fate of whose little colony in the "Valley of the Swans" was so unhappy, down to the period of the reduction of the Dutch colonies on the Delaware, and the establishment of English authority in 1664. It is true, that after the conquest of the Swedes upon the Delaware by the Dutch, in the year 1655, the affairs of the last mentioned people assumed a more settled condition, and the promulgation of law and judicial customs began to take more definite shape, but the records are not satisfactory enough to justify any attempt at analyzing this conglomerate condition of law and justice during the period referred to with the view of accurately marking out the particular code and practice combined of any one nation predominating therein. The establisment of English law in the colonies on the Delaware was by no means the work of a day. Compromises, some of them the most radical, with the customs of the country in vogue, were found to be absolutely indispensable, and a full decade was necessary to nurture the seeds of English jurisprudence, implanted in this section of the New World's soil, into even a stunted growth. And whether the courts of justice with their "Book of Lawes,"_attributed by the fanciful to the versatile pen of the Earl of Clarendon,-which Governor Androsse was enabled to hand over to Penn's lieutenant, William Markham, in 1681, were distinctively English, is susceptible at least of doubt. Under l'enn, with his first laws, "agreed upon in England," the founda tions of the Government of Pennsylvania were rapidly laid upon English principles, and law after law, as it appeared upon his statute books, failed not to bear the marks of its English parentage. Adverting to the various conflicting elements of society at work during the early settlement of the Pennsylvania colonies, as one of the most important of these, mention must be made of the Indians. To dignify any assemblage of savages with the appellation of a court, or to denominate as law and the execution of justice their usages for the protection of their persons and property, and their rude mode of adjusting differences between themselves, and punishing crime, is scarcely warrantable; yet a glance, in passing, at their own habits and customs, and their agreements with the white settlers in this respect, will doubtless prove of some interest. The Lenni Lenapees or Delaware Indians, who inhabited the shores of the Delaware, were like the great mass of the aborigines of the New |