When William and Mary directed their Governor to call General Assemblies, with the advice and consent of the Council, .md the first Assembly held in New York, under those sovereigns, met in April, 1691, that Assembly, in the second act it passed, declaring the rights and privileges of their Majesties' subjects to their Province of New York, enacted "That all the Lands within the Province, shall be esteemed and accounted Land of Freehold and Inheritance, in free and common Soccage, according to the tenor of East Grermcich in their Majesties' Realm of England.'" And it is owing to these facts that this subject has been so fully dwelt upon, dry as it must necessarily be to the general reader.

The confirmations by the English Governors of the Dutch groundbricfs, transports, and othergrants, were rendered necessary, by the change of the Sovereign Power. The Dutch instruments, under the Dutch law, it will be remembered, required their grantees to take the oaths of allegiance to the West India Company and to the States-General of the United Provinces. Of course when the country became a British possession, and the Duke of York became its Lord Proprietor, the terras on which the Dutch grantees held their lands required to be changed in this respect, so as to

0 Sullivan's Mnss. Land Titles, (iO.

' II. Bradford's Laws, N. Y., ed. 1710, p. 4.

HISTORY OF WESTCHESTER COUNTY.

conform to the actual change of the owners of the ulterior sovereign right of eminent domain.

This was provided for in that very ablj' drawn, liberal, and just "Code of Laws," enacted and promulgated at the first meeting of delegates of the people of the Towns of the Province of New York under the English rule, held at Hempstead, in Queens Cuunty, on June 24th, 1665, nine months only after the Dutch surrender, known as " The Duke's Laws." This code, the earliest of the codes of New York, full, clear, and complete, is well arranged in an alphabetical division of its subjects.