to overwhelm the legal machinery. Orange County, with some forty present-
ments, and Goochland, with twenty or so over a span of about forty years,
afford similar examples of sporadic grand jury attention.35
Not surprisingly, the Mountain counties at the farthest remove both spa-
tially and culturally, with the most recently arrived, mobile, and heterogeneous
populations, and with formidable physical impediments to setting up and
maintaining local institutions afford only slight evidence of regular parish
church attendance, much less any effort to enforce the attendance law. Fred-
erick County, one of the older of the montane jurisdictions with extant court
records from 1744 to the Revolution, recorded only one presentment for non-
attendance (no explanation supplied) in more than thirty years. Similar evi-
dence for Amherst, Bedford, Botetourt, and Loudoun lends additional sup-
port to this characterization of the Mountain counties. However, in Fauquier
County in the five years following its formation in1760, grand juries presented
155 persons (144 men and 11 women). There is no readily apparent explanation
for Fauquier behavior or for the puzzling contrast between its practice and
that of its neighboring counties.36
Order Book entries typically offer no information beyond the name of the
person presented and the offense charged. So little can be learned about who
the nonattenders were. They were not slaves. Whether slaves attended church
or not was left to the discretion of their owners and perhaps, in some instances,
to their own inclinations. Slave masters were never called to account on this
score. Nor were minors charged. The law applied only to adults.
As for women, only a puzzling few were charged, about11percent of present-
ments overall. The 5 percent average in Northumberland and Essex Counties
was on the low side; Princess Anne s 35 percent was anomalous. One possible
explanation is that adult white women more regularly satisfied the attendance
requirement, although there is no contemporary evidence of women compris-
ing the majority of worshipers.37 A second possibility is that grand juries may
have desisted because women s domestic responsibilities childbearing, nurs-
ing infants, caring for young children, and, more generally, supervising the
household meant recurring periods when church attendance could not be
expected.Westmoreland County justices, for example, dismissed presentments
against two women because one was busy as a midwife and the other had   Chil-
dren to Look after.  38 Custom and reason, if not the law, would recognize the
futility in such circumstances of arraigning women for missing Divine Service.
A third explanation centers not on the distinctive circumstances of women
but upon the preeminent social and legal status of men. As the major actors
.
Adherents 247