In Elizabeth City of twenty-seven estates recorded during the years from 1684 to 1699 sixteen were without servants or slaves; of twenty-six recorded in York during the period from 1694 to 1697 thirteen had no servants or slaves; of twenty-three recorded in Henrico from 1677 to 1692 fourteen were without servants or slaves.[3-53] It is true that these inventories and wills, since they would usually pertain to persons of advanced age, perhaps do not furnish an absolutely accurate gauge of the average number of servants held by each planter. On the other hand, it is equally probable that a larger proportion of big estates than of the small found their way into the records. At all events it is evident that a goodly proportion of the landholders, perhaps sixty or sixty-five per cent possessed no slaves or indentured servants, and trusted solely to their own exertions for the cultivation of their plantations. Thus vanishes the fabled picture of Seventeenth century Virginia. In its place we see a colony filled with little farms a few hundred acres in extent, owned and worked by a sturdy class of English farmers. Prior to the slave invasion which marked the close of the Seventeenth century and the opening of the Eighteenth, the most important factor in the life of the Old Dominion was the white yeomanry. _CHAPTER IV_ FREEMEN AND FREEDMEN It is obvious that the small planter class had its origin partly in the immigration of persons who paid their own passage, partly in the graduation into freedmen of large numbers of indentured servants. But to determine accurately the proportion of each is a matter of great difficulty. Had all the records of Seventeenth century Virginia been preserved, it would have been possible, by means of long and laborious investigation, to arrive at strictly accurate conclusions. But with the material in hand one has to be satisfied with an approximation of the truth. It must again be emphasized that the indentured servants were not slaves, and that at the expiration of their terms there was no barrier, legal, racial or social to their advancement. The Lords of Trade and Plantations, in 1676, expressed their dissatisfaction at the word "servitude" as applied to them, which they felt was a mark of bondage and slavery, and thought it better "rather to use the word service, since those servants are only apprentices for years."[4-1] "Malitious tongues have impaired it (Virginia) much," Bullock declared in 1649, "for it hath been a constant report among the ordinary sort of people that all those servants who are sent to Virginia are sold into slavery, whereas the truth is that the merchants who send servants and have no plantations of their own doe not only transferre their time over to others, but the servants serve no longer than the time they themselves agreed for in England, and this is the ordinary course in England, and no prejudice or hurt to the servant."[4-2]