there was an inn at Jamestown; only a few years before, Governor Harvey had complained that he could with as much justice be called the host as the Governor of Virginia from the number of people entertained by him in the absence of a public house.[1]
Berkeley arrived in Virginia in 1642. The seventeenth clause of his instructions as Governor of the Colony conferred upon him and his Council the power to lay off the site of Jamestown in such a manner as should appear to them most advisable. Every person to whom a lot was granted was required to construct a residence of brick sixteen feet in breadth and twenty-four feet in length. There was to be a cellar under each house. The Governor was authorized to erect a building in which the Council and himself might convene and consult on affairs of public interest and decide cases. It was perhaps the most notable feature of Berkeley’s instructions that the Governor and Council, with the advice of the Assembly, could remove the capital of the Colony if the dilapidation of the houses at Jamestown and the unwholesomeness of the spot were sufficiently great to justify it; the new town, if the determination were favorable to its erection, should still be known by the old name.[2]
There still remained at Jamestown many lots unused as building sites, and as they were eligibly situated and their practical abandonment interfered very seriously with the extension of the town, it was provided by law that whoever should erect a residence on one of these lots should be protected in his occupation whether his title to the ground was valid or not, the only condition imposed being that he
