praisal of the relative value of this short-lived system would be based on insufficient 
data concerning a small number of appeals. 
EARLY CONCILIAR CONTROL OF COLONIAL JUSTICE 
Having thus described the development of the Privy Council's appellate jurisdiction 
for the Channel Islands before the Restoration, we shall now examine 
conciliar control of justice in the English colonies. The extensive authority 
over the administration of justice in the various colonies that was exercised 
by the Privy Council in the eighteenth century was the result of a slow accretive 
process. The early agencies of English exploration and colonization 
were individuals and companies operating under patents granted by the King. 
These patents usually conferred a large degree of autonomy, including broad 
judicial powers. 263 The problem, therefore, of settling a judicial system in 
such plantations and the supervision of the administration of justice therein 
was primarily of private, not public, concern. When governing bodies possessed 
of judicial powers were established in overseas plantations, it was to be 
expected that relief from judicial acts of these overseas bodies would be sought 
by application to the directing body of a company or individual patentee 
in England. This procedure merely followed the precedent of at least one 
of the older great chartered trading companies 264 —a group from which the 
exploration and colonization companies borrowed liberally in charter forms 
and in methods of organization and operation. 265 Even when the crown retained 
some degree of control, as by the instrumentality of a Council of 
Virginia under the 1606 Virginia patent, no endeavor was made to establish 
an appellate system; the 1606 royal instructions to the colonial presidents and 
councils provided only that judicial proceedings should be summary and 
verbal, that the judgment or sentence alone be recorded. 266 Obviously any 
effective appeal from such proceedings would have been difficult. 
Failure to reserve an appeal to the King was no startling omission from the 
early charters to colonization companies. In the early seventeenth century to 
a great extent the entire practice of colonial grants was based on Chancery 
referred to the Committee on Appeals from 
Guernsey to report {ibid., 1656-SJ, 100). See 
also Anley v. Le Febvre (ibid., 331) where 
a certificate returned by the governor and the 
bailiff of Guernsey was confirmed. 
263 g ee jnter alia 1 Thorpe, Federal and State 
Constitutions (1909), 51 (Gilbert), 55 
(Raleigh); 3 ibid., 1680 (Maryland), 1833 
(New England), 1858 (Mass.); 7 ibid., 3801 
(Virginia); 1 Lefroy, Memorials of the Bermudas 
(1877), 95. 
264 Acts and Ordinances of the Eastland Company 
(11 Camden Soc. Pub. [3d ser.J, 1906; 
ed. M. Sellers), 52-53. 
265 1 Records of the Virginia Company of 
London (ed. S. M. Kingsbury, 1906), 12; 
Goebel and Naughton, Law Enforcement in 
Colonial New York. (1944), c, i, n. 10. 
266 1 Brown, Genesis of the United States 
(1897), 70-71. The 1606 patent made no 
mention of judicial powers (7 Thorpe, op. at., 
3783)-