Note 44 — Chapter III
Reading edition
The first statute on this subject, in 1628, used the term "commissioners" (I Hening, Statutes, 133). In 1662, this term was replaced by "justices". P. A. Bruce, Institutional History of Virginia in the Seventeenth Century, (New York: Putnam, 1910), I, 488. However, Porter, County Government, p. 170, states that "justice of the peace" was the full title during most of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.