They broke their neighbors out

What happened

Lord Carteret, now the Earl of Granville, held a huge block of northern North Carolina, more than half the province, and his agents charged excessive fees, demanded quitrents in coin and issued fraudulent deeds. In January 1759 some twenty-five landowners and officeholders from Halifax, Edgecombe and Granville counties rode to Edenton, seized the agents Francis Corbin and Joshua Bodley, and held them at Enfield until they agreed to refund the fees and open the land records. Once free, Corbin took his captors to court, and some of them were jailed at Enfield. On 14 May a crowd broke open the jail and let them out. Rothbard, who dates the rising a year early, reads the whole affair as an armed rising of settlers against a fee-gouging proprietary. The Assembly urged prosecution, but Governor Arthur Dobbs denounced the earl's agents and sided with the people, so the rioters remained at liberty (CiL, p. 591). Granville removed his agents and Corbin lost his seat on the council. When Granville died in 1763, his son let the land office lapse, and newcomers settled without paying either taxes or quitrents. Historians later called the Enfield riot a forerunner of the Regulator movement.