Court-day crowds in colonial Virginia

ABSTRACT

For a generation, legal historians investigating colonial Virginia have emphasized the dramaturgy of court day. According to the dramaturgical school of interpretation, administrative and judicial activities of county court officials amounted to theatrical performances that simultaneously enforced economic order and stabilized traditional social relationships. Such interpretations assume a large audience routinely attended county courts to observe legal dramas. Often, however, only a small number of persons can be documented as present during court day. The independence theorem from probability theory suggests that the number of documentable attendees is a useful and easily calculated estimate for actual total crowd size. If so, some Virginia court sessions were attended by hundreds of people, while others drew only a few participants. A variety of factors apparently inhibited court attendance in older Virginia counties. By contrast, in newer frontier counties, mid-eighteenth-century revisions of court calendars produced heavy attendance at court day. Regardless of the number of people in attendance, any Virginia county court could still effectively enforce credit contracts.