made a court of record. Its sittings were held on the last Wednesday of June, and first Wednesday of November. The No vember session was at Jamestown, where the chief justice resided. The circuit was held at New Dartmouth. Sullivan says this court had jurisdiction of ecclesiastical affairs. In disagreements of opinion, Chief Justice Jocelyn decided. William Sttirt was clerk of court at its Jamestown sessions; and Walter Philips, at the New Dartmouth sessions, who resided in Newcastle, near the bridge. The records were described " Rolls and acts and orders, passed at sessions, holden in the territories of the Duke of York." John Allen of Sheepscot was high sheriff. This important record has not yet been found. May it not yet exist among the title papers in the royal family or archives of York in England? The precepts of this court, with a dec laration of claim, authorized a capias of the body of respondent. We have notes of one trial for murder at Pemaquid, in No vember, 1680. Two parties were arraigned, Israel Dymond and John Rashley, for the murder of Samuel Collins, master of a ves sel called the Cumberland, by drowning him. Of final results, we have no record. But we have record of this court of the trial of John Seleman of Damariscove in the New Dartmouth shire, Nov. 16, 1686, for assault on the sheriff, and threats of murder of his wife. On pica of not guilty issue was found for the king; Seleman was fined and placed under bonds for future good behavior. The civil existence of the county of Corn wall was, however, ended in the catastro phes of French and Indian assault upon the capture of Jamestown and fall of Fort Charles of Pemaquid, 1689; collapse of the Stuart dynasty, involving the tragic death of Chief Justice Thomas Giles at Pemaquid Falls, and the capture of his wife and children. Town and court records, title deeds, and public papers were all scattered and de
stroyed; the country made desolate and waste. The ancient plantations of the du cal province became solitudes, and so re mained till 1716, when Georgetown, em bodying the Arrowsic Island resettlements of 1714, was incorporated by Massachusetts and made the shire of a new county called Yorkshire. Anno Domini, 1728, Samuel Denny, be came a citizen of the New Town, and had his Garrison House near the Wates Fort, head of Butler's Cove, where a meeting house stood in a hamlet of some twenty or thirty homesteads. Denny was an educated Englishman, industrious and thriftful, and also a civil magistrate. There he held a court and, it is said, acted as his own bailiff. John Stinson, also, was a Yorkshire mag istrate, whosejtirisdiction covered Wiscasset, and Jonathan Williamson of Wiscasset was a deputy sheriff. But no court of record existed till the organization of Lincoln county, June 19, 1760. The interest and influence of the old Ply mouth land company fostered the new county development, caused to be incor porated a new town on its lands, called Pownalboro, as a shire town of the new county of Lincoln, and erected a court house and jail on the east bank of the Kennebec, built of hewn timber. Lincoln succeeded to the jurisdictional territory of old Cornwall, the ducal province of 1664, embracing the kingdom of Pema quid, of the colonial transactions of 1607. The organization of a court of record for Lincoln in 1762, laid the foundations of Lincoln bar. The court retained the style of the old Cornwall courts, court of sessions, with sittings in June and September on the second Tuesday. Samuel Denny, William Lithgow, Aaron Hinckey and John North, were i{s first judges. Its first session opened as follows "Lincoln viz : SS. Anno Regni Regis tirtii, Magnae Brit-
