A state of society developed similar in many respects to that in Virginia.  Baltimore, accustomed to the type of life in England, expected the settlements in Maryland to grow into towns and cities; and, under this impression, in January, 1638, he erected the population on the south side of St. George’s River into a “hundred,” and afterwards created other hundreds in other parts of the colony.  But the wealth of watercourses and the cultivation of tobacco caused the population to scatter, and made society from the first distinctly agricultural and rural.  St. Mary’s and St. George’s Hundred, in Maryland, shared the fate of Jamestown and Bermuda Hundred, in Virginia, and no stimulus of legislation could make them grow.

The application of the powers of the palatinate intensified these conditions by creating an agricultural and landed aristocracy.  There was a council like that in Durham, whose members, appointed by the lord proprietor, held all the great offices of state.

Outside of the council the most important officer was the sheriff, who, like the sheriff of Durham, executed the commands of the governor and the courts, of which there were (in addition to the council) the county court and the manorial courts, answering respectively to the court of quarter-sessions and the courts baron and leet in Durham.  As for the manorial courts, feudal relicts transplanted to America, they sprang from Lord Baltimore’s attempt to build up an aristocracy like that which attended upon the bishop in his palace in Durham.  In his “Conditions for Plantations,” August 8, 1636, after providing liberally for all who brought emigrants to the colony, he directed that every one thousand acres or greater quantity so given to any adventurer “should be erected into a manor with a court-baron and court-leet to be from time to time held within every such manor respectively.”

There were many grants of one thousand acres or more, and Maryland “lords of the manor” became quite common.  These “lords” were the official heads of numerous tenants and leaseholders who were settled on their large estates.  Yet the manor, as a free-governing community, was a stronghold of liberty.  At the courts baron and leet the tenants elected the minor officers, tried offences, and made by-laws for their own government.  Later, when negroes substituted white laborers, these feudal manors changed to plantations worked by slaves instead of free tenants.[15]

Even great office-holders and a landed aristocracy were insufficient to sustain the regal dignity to which Lord Baltimore aspired.  Apparently, his right of initiating legislation and dictating the make-up of the assembly ought to have been sufficient.  But political and social equality sprang from the very conditions of life in the New World; and despite the veneering of royalty, Maryland came soon to be a government of the people.  The struggle began in the assembly which met in February, 1635, but not much is known of the proceedings of this assembly beyond the fact that it assumed the initiative and drew up a code to which Lord Baltimore refused his assent.