In 1649 Baltimore made another and last attempt for his initiative. He sent over a learned and complicated code of sixteen laws which he asked the assembly to adopt; but they rejected his work and sent him a code of their own, begging him in their letter not to send them any more such "bodies of laws, which served to little end than to fill our heads with jealousies and suspicions of that which we verily understand not." The next year, 1650, a constitutional system was perfected not very different from the plan adopted in the mother-country and Virginia. The assembly was divided into two chambers, the lower consisting exclusively of burgesses representing the different hundreds, and the upper of the councillors and those specially summoned by the governor.[17] [Footnote 1: Brown, _Genesis of the United States_, II., 841.] [Footnote 2: _Cal. of State Pap., Col._, 1574-1660, pp. 83, 93, 100.] [Footnote 3: _Cal. of State Pap., Col._, 1574-1660, p. 104; _Md. Archives_, III., 17.] [Footnote 4: _Md. Archives_, III., 19.] [Footnote 5: Heath's grant, in _Cal. of State Pap., Col._, 1574-1674, p. 70.] [Footnote 6: Neill, _Founders of Maryland_, 46, 47.] [Footnote 7: Neill, _Terra Mariae_, 53; Ogilby, _America_, 183.] [Footnote 8: _Md. Archives_, III., 21.] [Footnote 9: Fiske, _Old Virginia and Her Neighbors_; Bassett, _Constitutional Beginnings of North Carolina_; Lapsley, _County Palatinate of Durham_.] [Footnote 10: _Calvert Papers_ (Md. Hist. Soc., _Fund Publications_, No. 28), p. 132.] [Footnote 11: _Md. Archives_, III., 23.] [Footnote 12: White, _Relation_ (Force, _Tracts_, IV., No. xii.); letter of Leonard Calvert, _Calvert Papers_ (Md. Hist. Soc., _Fund Publications_, No. 35), pp. 32-35; Baltimore, _Relation_ (London, 1635).] [Footnote 13: Winthrop, _New England_, I., 166.] [Footnote 14: Neill, _Founders of Maryland_, 80.] [Footnote 15: Johnson, _Old Maryland Manors (Johns Hopkins University Studies_, I., No. iii.).] [Footnote 16: _Md. Archives_, I., 1-24.] [Footnote 17: _Md. Archives_, I., 32, 74, 243, 272.] [Illustration: MARYLAND IN 1652] CHAPTER VIII CONTENTIONS IN MARYLAND (1633-1652) The delay in the constitutional adjustment of Maryland, while mainly attributable to the proprietors, was partially due to the prolonged struggle with Virginia, which for years absorbed nearly all the energies of the infant community. The decision of the Commissioners for Foreign Plantations in July, 1633, disallowing the Virginia claim to unoccupied lands, was construed by the Virginians to mean that the king at any rate intended to respect actual possession. Now, prior to the Maryland charter, colonization in Virginia was stretching northward. In 1630, Chiskiack, on the York River, was settled; and in August, 1631, Claiborne planted a hundred men on Kent Island, one hundred and fifty miles from Jamestown.[1]