OBSERVATIONS

MANORS

Three Great Patents of Central Westchester, granted to Heathcote and associates on the basis of purchases from the Indians, and by the patentees gradually subsold, mainly to settlers who in I he course of time occupied the lands. In the nine estates and patents thus enumerated were contained, at a rough estimate, about 225,000 of the 300,000 acres belonging to the old County of Westchester. It will be observed that with the single exception of Pelham the six manors of the county long retained their territorial integrity. A small portion of the Manor of Philipseburgh, it is true, was transferred by the Philipses to the younger branch of the Van Cortlandts, but this was a strictly friendly conveyance, the two families being closely allied by marriage. Even in the three manors where no second lord succeeded to exclusive proprietorship -- Cortlandt, Fordham, and Scarsdale -- sales of the manorial lands in fee to strangers were extremely rare, and it was an almost invariable rule that persons settling upon them, as upon Philipseburgh, Morrisania, and Pelham Manors (where the ownership devolved upon successive single heirs), did not acquire possession of the soil which they occupied, but merely held it as tenants. The disintegration of the manors, and the substitution of small landed proprietorship for tenantry, was therefore a very slow process. Throughout the colonial period tenant farming continued to be the prevailing system of rural economy outside of the few settlements and tracts which from the start were independent of the manor grants -- a system which, however, did not operate to the disadvantage of population in the manor lands. Upon this point de Lancey, the historian of the manors, says : " It will give a correct idea of the great extent and thoroughness of the manorial settlement of Westchester County, as well as the satisfactory nature of that method of settlement to its inhabitants, although a surprise, probably, to many readers, when it is stated that in the year 1769 onethird of the population of the county lived on the two manors of Cortlandt and Philipseburgh alone.