Chapter 3.0. Texts of Early Colonial Charters, Introduction

The documents excerpted below come from the seventeenth century, during the first wave of English settlement in North America. There are five charters concerning the founding of the earliest colonies in Virginia, Massachusetts, Maryland, and Connecticut. For the full texts of many colonial documents, there are various reliable sites on the web, including the Colonial Charters page at Yale Law School’s Avalon Project: http://avalon.law.yale.edu/subject_menus/statech.asp .