A "topping people"

This book is the first comprehensive study of the political, economic, and social elite of colonial Virginia. The author studies twenty-one leading families from their rise to power in the late 1600s to their downfall over one hundred years later. These families represented the upper echelons of power, serving in the upper and lower houses of the General Assembly, often as Speaker of the House of Burgesses. Their names--Randolph, Robinson, Byrd, Carter, Corbin, Custis, Nelson, and Page, to note but a a few--are still familiar in the Old Dominion some three hundred years later.