Many of these grants were made, and in a few instances the manorial courts duly held their sessions.  For St. Clement’s Manor, near the mouth of the Potomac, for example, court records between 1659 and 1672 are extant.  John Ryves, steward of Thomas Gerard the proprietor, presided; Richard Foster assisted as the elected bailiff; and the classified freeholders, lease-holders, “essoines” and residents served as the “jury and homages.”  Characteristic findings were “that Samuell Harris broke the peace with a stick”; that John Mansell illegally entertained strangers; that land lines “are at this present unperfect and very obscure”; that a Cheptico Indian had stolen a shirt from Edward Turner’s house, for which he is duly fined “if he can be knowne”; “that the lord of the mannor hath not provided a paire of stocks, pillory and ducking stoole—­Ordered that these instruments of justice be provided by the next court by a general contribution throughout the manor”; that certain freeholders had failed to appear, “to do their suit at the lord’s court, wherefore they are amerced each man 50l. of tobacco to the lord”; that Joshua Lee had injured “Jno.  Hoskins his hoggs by setting his doggs on them and tearing their eares and other hurts, for which he is fined 100l. of tobacco and caske”; “that upon the death of Mr. Robte Sly there is a reliefe due to the lord and that Mr. Gerard Sly is his next heire, who hath sworne fealty accordingly,"[19]

[Footnote 19:  John Johnson, Old Maryland Manors (Johns Hopkins University Studies, I, no, 7, Baltimore, 1883), pp. 31-38.]

St. Clement’s was probably almost unique in its perseverance as a true manor; and it probably discarded its medieval machinery not long after the end of the existing record.  In general, since public land was to be had virtually free in reward for immigration whether in freedom or service, most of the so-called manors doubtless procured neither leaseholders nor essoines nor any other sort of tenants, and those of them which survived as estates found their salvation in becoming private plantations with servant and slave gangs tilling their tobacco fields.  In short, the Maryland manors began and ended much as the Virginia particular plantations had done before them.  Maryland on the whole assumed the features of her elder sister.  Her tobacco was of lower grade, partly because of her long delay in providing public inspection; her people in consequence were generally less prosperous, her plantations fewer in proportion to her farms, and her labor supply more largely of convicts and other white servants and correspondingly less of negroes.  But aside from these variations in degree the developments and tendencies in the one were virtually those of the other.