The conventional picture of early Virginia suggests an almost exclusively male population, intent on personal profit, ruthlessly ignoring social considerations, lacking stability. This article argues that such a picture is an exaggeration, and draws attention to three communities, the inhabitants of which more closely resembled the rural English societies from which they had come. Particular attention is paid to the Neck of Land in Charles City, upriver from Jamestown close to the falls. The survival of administrative records makes possible an account of this small community between 1613 and 1629, revealing a hamlet of healthy married families whose concerns were sex, land, and status, rather than death and disease or the neighbouring Indian menace; and where stability in the 1620s did not, however, mean the absence of social tensions. Thus the Neck of Land, taken together with the communities at Point Comfort and on the Eastern Shore, demonstrates the inadequacy of current perceptions of early Virginian society.