PENN, William.
William Penn Signed Land Indenture.
London: January 18, 1681/82.
$12,500.00
In Stock
Item Number: RRB-153493
+$500
William Penn Signed Land Indenture Granting Five Hundred Acres in Pennsylvania to Francis Dove
Original land indenture signed by William Penn. Dated the eighteenth day of January 1681/82, in the thirty-third year of the reign of King Charles the Second, between William Penn of Worminghurst in the county of Sussex and Francis Dove of Westminster, chandler, an early settler in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, conveying five hundred acres of land in the Province of Pennsylvania to Dove for the sum of five shillings. Partially printed on a large vellum membrane with an elaborate calligraphic heading and a scalloped top edge, the deed is a bargain and sale for a term of one year, the first part of a lease and release, granting Dove possession of the tract at a yearly rent of one peppercorn so that he might accept the release and conveyance of the land. It refers to the Conditions or Concessions agreed between Penn and the first purchasers on the eleventh day of July 1681. Signed “Wm Penn” at the foot, with the red wax seal intact. Docketed on the verso in the hand of Herbert Springett, Penn’s chief lawyer. In near fine condition with creasing from old folds and light soiling. The piece measures 13.25 inches by 18.25 inches.
William Penn received the charter for Pennsylvania from King Charles the Second on March 4, 1681, in settlement of a debt of some sixteen thousand pounds owed by the Crown to his late father, Admiral Sir William Penn. A Quaker who had been imprisoned for his faith, Penn conceived the province as a “holy experiment” in religious liberty and representative government, and to finance it he sold tracts of land in England to so-called First Purchasers, many of them fellow Quakers, before a single acre had been surveyed. Deeds such as this one, issued in the months after the charter and before Penn himself sailed for America in the summer of 1682, are among the founding documents of the colony, and the purchasers they record were among the earliest settlers and investors of Pennsylvania. Penn published his Frame of Government in 1682, laid out the city of Philadelphia, and concluded his celebrated treaty of friendship with the Lenape, establishing a colony whose principles of toleration and self-government would later shape the founding of the United States.
William Penn Signed Land Indenture.
$12,500.00
In Stock
