In March 1646, measures were taken to discourage the sale of liquors on the island, and a system of licensed ordinary keepers was adopted. Later in the year, houses for the encouragement of linen manufacture were projected for Jamestown. In 1649, the General Assembly established a market and near the market area was the landing for the ferry that ran across the James to Surry County. Even this new action, however, failed to develop a town of any great extent. The same was true of the Act of 1662 which attempted to encourage a substantial building program for the capital town. Only a few houses were erected before the new impetus had spent itself, and, in 1676, it is known that the town was still little more than a large village. One of the more detailed descriptions at this time relates that “The Towne ... [extended] east and west, about 3 quarters of a mile ... [and] comprehended som[e] 16 or 18 houses, most as is the church built of brick, faire and large; and in them about a dozen families (for all the howses are not inhabited) getting their liveings by keeping of ordnaries, at extreordnary rates.” THE COMMONWEALTH PERIOD. The decade of 1650-60 corresponds to the period of the Commonwealth Government in England. Virginia, for the most part, appeared loyal to the crown, yet in 1652 the colony submitted to the new government when it demonstrated its power before Jamestown. Governor Berkeley withdrew to his home at Green Spring, just above Jamestown, and the General Assembly assumed the governing role, acting under the Parliament of England. Virginia was given liberal treatment, with considerable freedom in taxation and matters of government. The governors in this interval, elected by the assembly, were Richard Bennett, Edward Digges (an active supporter of the production of silk in Virginia), and Samuel Mathews. In 1660, on the death of Mathews, the assembly recalled Berkeley to the governor’s office, an act that was approved by Charles II, who was restored to the English throne in that year. The decade passed quietly for the colony, although, in the years that followed, it had occasion to remember the liberal control that it had enjoyed. It had witnessed an increased wave of immigration that brought some of those who were fleeing from England, and this more than offset the loss of the Puritans whom Berkeley had forced out of the colony prior to 1650.