xxx                Somerset County.

        justices of the newly created county, with Johnson added to the quorum (Arch.
        Md. iii, 553-555).
          The boundary dispute, although not settled, had quieted down when the new
        county was erected in 1666, so that the period covered by these Somerset County
        court proceedings was politically so quiet as to require no special comment.
        The group of men who were members of the commissions which governed the
        territory within the bounds of Somerset, both before and after its establish-
        ment as a county, are, however, worthy of some notice. The interested reader
        is referred to Clayton Torrence's Old Somerset on the Eastern Shore of Mary-
        land, 1935, for admirable sketches of these early commissioners or justices, as
        well as for the story of Somerset during the remainder of the seventeenth
        century. The writer is largely indebted to this valuable work for the biographi-
        cal data about them which follows:
          Stephen Horsey (Horsi) (c. 1620-1671), was first appointed on the court
        of the lower Eastern Shore in February 1662/3. He had appeared in 1643 as
        a headright for land in Northampton County, Virginia, and in 1662 signed a
        protest against certain actions of the authorities at Jamestown in matters of
        taxation. He probably came into Maryland late in 1661, for early in 1662 he
        had surveyed for him in Annemessex 650 acres of land under the name of
        “Coulbourne “. Horsey was an aggressive non-conformist and unquestionably
        was obliged to leave Virginia because of his religious and political activities.
        He was in trouble with the Northampton court in 1653 for having spoken of the
        justices as “asses & villanes “. Edmund Scarburgh, writing of him in 1663,
        declares that he was “once elected a Burgess of the Common Crowd & thrown
        out by the Assembly for a factious and tumultuous person, A man repugnant
        to all Govmt “. The Virginia records show his election as a burgess in 1653.
        It would appear that his refusal to pay tithes was the immediate cause of his
        leaving Virginia. He was appointed on the “commission for the peace” of the
        lower Eastern Shore of Maryland, February 4, 1662/3, and was recommis-
        sioneci in May 1664, when he was named first on the commission. When
        Somerset County was established in 1666, he was appointed to head the new
        court, continuing to serve as the presiding justice until his death in 1671. He
        acted as the clerk of the Eastern Shore court a few months before the erection
        of Somerset County, being succeeded by Edmund Beauchamp. From August
        1666 to June 1668, when he was High Sheriff, he does not seem to have sat
        on the court. He was elected to the Assembly from Somerset County in Feb-
        ruary 1668/9, but does not appear to have taken his seat. Horsey seems to
        have been the leader of the Annemessex group of Quakers which most ac-
        tively opposed Col. Edmund Scarburgh when the latter invaded the lower
        Eastern shore in October 1663, in a fruitless attempt to establish the authority
        of Virginia there. Although an active non-conformist and almost certainly
        a Quaker, no conclusive proof of his Quakerism has been found. Scarburgh
        thus contemptuously describes Horsey's religious tendencies: “Of all sects
        yet professedly none, Constant in nothing but opposing Church Govmt, his
        children at great ages yet unchristened . . . .“. The Somerset court record
        shows that “Stephen Horsey, Senr died and was buried at his plantation in
        Annemessex 8 August 1671 “.