Now look at some little sleepy country town, and you will see much the same arrangement as in the village. The wide open space in the middle, where the town pump stands, and where the market is held, answers to the village green. Though this is often spoken of as the Market Square, it is usually more like a triangle in shape than a square. The old houses round the market square are built very closely one into the other, and with queer narrow alleys leading to houses behind those in front; much in the same way as the houses are clustered round the village green. Round the outskirts of the town, at the back of the houses, are small green closes or paddocks. Beyond them are the larger meadows and pastures; then the wide corn-lands and woods; and, not far away, the heath or common. The Saxon settlements, the "tuns" or "vills", whether they afterwards became what we now understand as "towns" or "cities", or remained what we call villages, had all the same chief features. Just as ordinary schoolrooms and railway stations are all pretty much alike, because they all have to serve much the same purpose, so the Saxon settlements were very similar in their general plan. There was the open place, where people met and the folk-moot was held, surrounded by the houses of stone or wood in which the people lived. Around these lay the grass yards or common homestead; and, beyond them, the wide arable and pasture-lands, with patches of moorland and forest. But outside the actual "tun" there would be something connected with the Saxon settlement which you would be sure to notice. After you had passed the boundary to the tun, you would see no hedgerows or walls dividing the land into fields. The arable land was one huge field. Its position would depend, of course, upon the nature of the soil and the lie of the land. You would not expect to find it down in the water-meadows, through which the river flowed; it would be higher up, out of the reach of floods; perhaps on the hill-sides. Then you would see the huge field, ploughed in long strips, about a furlong in length, that is, a "furrow long",[5] and one or two perches in breadth. Between the ploughed strips would be narrow unploughed strips, on which, in places, brambles would grow. The heath-lands and moorlands were uncultivated tracts, where rough timber and underwood grew, which was cut and lopped by the people of the vill under certain conditions. There were no formal spinneys,[6] nor wide stretches of old timber, such as we nowadays expect to see in a forest. In places the forests contained old timber, and were thick with undergrowth, and infested with wild animals, such as wolves and boars. The name forest was often given to an uncultivated district, not much differing from a rough common, where sheep, cattle, and swine could pick up a living. [5] A furrow, or furlong, was, roughly speaking, the distance the plough would travel up or down the field before it was turned.