=Summary.=--The earliest _farmhouses_ began as settlers' huts in such forest regions as the Weald. _Squatters_ gradually got little holdings near lonely heaths and commons. _Separate farms_, with farm-buildings and labourers' cottages attached to them, date from about the middle of the eighteenth century, when the _old common fields_ began to be enclosed. _Fields and hedgerows and country lanes_, as we see them now, mostly began then. _New hamlets_ sprang up by main roads as coaches came into use: an ale-house and a forge were usually the first buildings. _New towns_ have sprung up in manufacturing districts and round railway-stations. FOOTNOTES: [1] Also between Hitchin and Cambridge, at Clothall, in Herts, in the Chiltern Hills, on the steep side of the Sussex Downs, in Clun Forest, in Carmarthenshire, and in Wilts. [2] Spinneys are plantations of trees growing closely together. [3] A diocese is the district over which a bishop rules. [4] In the Fens. [5] When we speak of Saxon work in buildings we mean work done between the time of King Cnut and the Norman Conquest--the first half of the eleventh century. [6] The Cistercian houses here in England, however, were always known as _abbeys_, though Citeaux, their head-quarters, was in France. [7] _founded_, that is, established. [8] _found_, that is, discovered. [9] _feaden_, that is, feed. [10] _pullen_, that is, poultry. [11] The Jews were expelled from England A.D. 1290. [12] That is, whipped at a cart's tail. [13] _Terra-cotta_ is a compound of pure clay, fine sand, or powdered flint. [14] See the picture on p. 162. [15] _Jacobean_ means of the time of James I and on to James II. End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Our English Towns and Villages, by H. R. Wilton Hall