Administrative Information

Access Restrictions

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Use Restrictions

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Preferred Citation

Mathews County (Va.) Judgments, 1854-1902. Local government records collection, Mathews County Court Records. The Library of Virginia, Richmond, Virginia.

Acquisition Information

These records came to the Library of Virginia in shipments of court papers under accession 54190 and other transfers from Mathews County.

Processing Information

Series I: Judgments, 1861-1902, were processed and indexed by S. Walters in 2011. Series II: Judgments, 1854-1899, were transferred as part of accession 54190 under the title “Mathews County Common Law Dead Papers.” They have undergone minimal processing and have not been flattened, foldered, mended, or separated by suit.

Encoded by S. Walters: March 2011; updated by V. Brooks: August 2025.

Historical Information

Context for Record Type: Judgments are identified as civil suits, often involving debt, heard by a jury on the "law" side of the court as opposed to the "chancery" (or equity) side. Should the defendant not have funds to repay the debt, the court ordered their property (including enslaved people) to be seized and sold to repay the debt owed to the plaintiff. Judgments also contain suits brought by enslaved people seeking to gain their freedom.

In Judgments, an assumpsit or declaration (sometimes referred to as a narratio) lays out the plaintiff's grievance as a petition acted as a formal application to the court requesting judicial action. Judgment suits also generally included record types like subpoenas, summons, and exhibit. Judgments may also include additional documentations such as executions, bonds, and various kinds of writs.

Judgment suits make up a large quantity of a locality's records; consequently, they provide a great deal of information concerning the activities and interests of the people who lived in the locality. Since the vast majority of judgment suits relate to financial matters, they are a valuable resource in studying the economic and social history of Virginia localities and are the impotence for many chancery suits.

Locality History: Mathews County was named for Thomas Mathews, of Norfolk, the Speaker of the Virginia House of Delegates when it was formed from Gloucester County by a statute passed on 16 December 1790 to take effect on 1 May 1791.

Lost Locality Note: Most Mathews County records were burned on April 3, 1865, in Richmond, where they had been moved for safekeeping during the Civil War.

Scope and Content

Mathews County (Va.) Judgments, 1854-1902, contain civil cases in which justice was administered on the strictly formulated rules of common law. The majority of cases in this record series relate to matters of debt.

Series I: Judgments, 1861-1902, has been flat-filed and indexed with the names of the plaintiffs and defendants.

Series II: Judgments, 1854-1899, has undergone minimal processing and consists of the following record types: office judgments, pleas of trespass, capias, covenants, assumpsit, detinue, ejectments, SciFas (scire facias), complete judgments, executions, pleas of debt, pleas of damage, narratios, forthcoming bonds, attachments, declarations, summons (concerning judgments), FiFas (fieri facias), CaSas (capias as satisfaciendum), Accounts, and writs of ad quod damnum. One notable suit is an 1899 debt case, J. W. D. Haynes vs. Supervisors of Mathews Co., regarding the county's failure to reimburse Haynes' treatment of the Thomas family for smallpox.

Arrangement

For descriptive purposes, the collection has been divided into two series:

Related Material

Additional Mathews County Court Records can be found on microfilm at The Library of Virginia web site. Consult "A Guide to Virginia County and City Records on Microfilm."

See the Lost Records Localities Digital Collection available at Virginia Memory.

Adjunct Descriptive Data