Green, Roger

fl. 1653

Roger Green, Anglican clergyman in Virginia and grantee of land in North Carolina, may have been the one of this name from Norfolk, England, who matriculated at St. Catharine's College, Cambridge, at the Easter term in 1631 and was graduated with a B.A. in 1635. He received the M.A. degree in 1638 and was ordained in Norwich on 9 March 1639. In 1653, the Virginia Assembly acted favorably upon a petition from Roger Green, "clarke," when he sought a grant of 10,000 acres of land for himself and a hundred inhabitants of Nansemond County who would settle on the Moratuck or Roanoke River on the west side of the Chowan River. Green was to have 1,000 acres for himself in addition to the larger grant. His people were to select a secure site for their settlement and be prepared to defend it. The location would be chosen by Green but would be "next to those persons who have had a former grant." The Assembly added that its action was taken "in reward of his charge [expense], hazard and trouble of first discoverie, and encouragement of others for seating those southern parts of Virginia."

There is no evidence that Green settled on his land. He appears to have been more interested in seeing a system of towns established in Virginia in contrast to the scattered haphazard farms and plantations of that colony. It is apparent that he was in Virginia in 1656, as he recorded that on 27 March of that year "in my hearing" some members of the new Assembly expressed regret at the repeal of an act to establish central market places in each county. Five years later he was in London to deliver to the bishop of London a statement "to show the unhappy State of the Church in Virginia" and to enter a plea for towns as the solution to several evils that he saw in the colony. His report was printed in 1662 in a pamphlet entitled Virginia's Cure: or An Advisive Narrative Concerning Virginia. In this work he referred to the colony of Virginia as being bound "on the North by the great River Patomak, on the South by the River Chawan . . . and [it] contains aboove half as much Land as England."