Book excerpt: Excerpt from The History of Truro Parish in Virginia When the English colonists made their first permanent settlement on the shores of Virginia they came to establish themselves as an English people in America. They did not emigrate for purposes of robbery, nor yet to escape conditions which were not to their liking at home, but they brought with them all they could of the old England, including, as a matter of course, the English Church and English law, ecclesiastical and civil. They brought, too, as the event was to prove, the English genius for adapting old forms of government to new conditions of life. Thus in process of time the Parish and the Vestry in Virginia became quite different from the same institutions in the old country, though still based upon the broad sanctions of the ecclesiastical law of England. The Parish was established and its bounds were fixed not by tradition, but by statute, and the Vestry, from an annual meeting of all the ratepayers to choose Churchwardens and discuss parochial affairs, became practically a close corporation of twelve of "The most able and discreet persons" in the Parish. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.