Because Berkeley granted the best public lands in large tracts to his favorites, freedmen could rarely obtain their own farms after 1665. Instead, most had to rent land from the wealthiest planters at the rate of 10 to 25 percent of their tobacco crop. Such tenants composed about a third of Virginia’s population by 1675. A crown investigation reported that land-hoarding was “one of the most apparent causes of the misery and mischiefs that attend this colony by occasioning the Planters to straggle to such remote distances when they cannot find land nearer to seat themselves but by being
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