Lawes Divine, Morall and Martiall

Lawes Divine, Morall and Martiall was the disciplinary code propagated by Sir Thomas Dale in Jamestown as the Virginia Company tried to make its failing colony productive through coercion. Its severe penalties governed settlers’ movement, access to food, and dealings with goods, while the work regime around it placed land and rations under company control. The attempt to compel labor proved unsustainable: settlers had alternatives to company rule, and the company could not force them to work indefinitely on subsistence provisions.

Origins and colonial purpose

The Virginia Company had been established as a moneymaking enterprise, but after two disastrous years in Jamestown it had seen no sign of profit. It responded by replacing the colony’s ruling council with a single governor, appointing Sir Thomas Gates. The new arrangement reflected an effort to change how the colony was governed, but the crisis deepened during the winter of 1609–1610, remembered as the starving time.

John Smith had already argued that Virginia could not be exploited like Mexico or Peru. In the absence of precious metals, and without the ability to force Indigenous people to supply food or labor, he believed the colonists themselves would have to work. He had urged the company to send practical workers rather than more goldsmiths. But Smith left Jamestown in the autumn of 1609 after the new governorship left no place for him. Without his resourcefulness, and with Wahunsunacock restricting the food supply, the settlement collapsed toward starvation: of the five hundred people who entered the winter, only sixty remained alive by March.

The company’s response was not simply a change of governor. Gates and his deputy, Dale, imposed a system that sought to extract labor from the English settlers themselves. Dale propagated Lawes Divine, Morall and Martiall as part of this attempt to discipline the colony and protect the company’s claims. The code’s harsh sanctions expressed a governing premise: if the Indigenous population could not be exploited, the settlers might be made to work instead.

Prohibitions and penalties

The clauses described in the account relied on the threat of death to police several kinds of conduct. A man or woman who ran away from the colony to live with Indigenous people could be executed. The code also threatened death for stealing from a public or private garden or vineyard, or taking ears of corn. A separate clause prohibited colonists from selling or giving colonial commodities to a captain, mariner, master, or sailor for that person’s private use in transporting them out of the colony.

Together, these rules reached beyond the punishment of ordinary theft. They attempted to prevent settlers from leaving the company’s authority, to protect crops and provisions, and to restrict the private movement of goods out of the settlement. The provisions also reveal the tension at the heart of the project: the company needed settlers to produce and preserve resources, yet its effort to secure that labor rested on coercive rules and the threat of execution.

The code operated within a broader labor regime. The Virginia Company claimed ownership of all the land; men lived in barracks and received rations set by the company. Work gangs were selected and supervised by company agents. The account characterizes the arrangement as close to martial law, with execution the punishment of first resort. In that context, the prohibition on running away was particularly significant: living with local people offered one possible escape from the company’s work demands.

Limits of coercion

The company’s authority was limited not only by the possibility of joining local communities but also by the sparsely populated frontier beyond its direct control. Settlers could contemplate going it alone outside the company’s reach. The company could threaten and punish, but it could not reliably compel English colonists to perform hard labor for subsistence rations. The prohibition on flight therefore marked a weakness as much as an assertion of power: the company needed a rule against departure because its control was not secure.

The contrast with the Spanish experience in central Mexico and Andean Peru helps explain why the same extractive approach was not feasible in Virginia. At the time of the Spanish conquest, population density in much of what became the United States was at most three-quarters of a person per square mile, apart from a few pockets. In central Mexico and Andean Peru, it reached as high as four hundred people per square mile—more than five hundred times greater. The company could not reproduce in Virginia a model of exploitation that depended on a much denser population.

The crisis under the new regime was stark. After Smith’s departure and the tightening of the food supply, Jamestown’s inhabitants faced starvation, and the account reports that they resorted to cannibalism. The episode exposes the distance between the company’s formal rules and its practical ability to sustain the settlement: a code backed by capital punishment could not itself create food, secure willing labor, or make the colony viable.

Retreat and institutional change

It took the Virginia Company time to accept that its initial colonial model had failed, and longer for the failure of Lawes Divine, Morall and Martiall to become clear. Beginning in 1618, the company adopted a substantially different strategy. Since it could coerce neither the Indigenous population nor the settlers effectively, it turned to incentives.

Under the headright system introduced in 1618, each male settler received fifty acres of land, with an additional fifty acres for each member of his family and for each servant the family brought to Virginia. Settlers received houses and were released from their contracts. In 1619, the colony also introduced a General Assembly, giving all adult men a say in the laws and institutions that governed them. These measures shifted the colonial project away from the company’s attempt to command labor through company-owned land, controlled rations, supervised gangs, and capital punishment.

The significance of Lawes Divine, Morall and Martiall therefore lies partly in the failure it makes visible. Its penalties were an instrument of extractive rule, but the social and demographic conditions of Virginia limited the company’s ability to enforce that rule. The change that followed combined material incentives with a measure of political participation; the book identifies the General Assembly as the start of democracy in the United States. The code stands at the coercive end of that contrast: an effort to make settlers productive by threat, followed by a strategy that had to offer them land, release from contracts, and a voice in governance.