ABSTRACT
THE previous chapter has shown how the new plot, or large-scale plan, began to supplant the verbal description of boundaries. During the medieval centuries it was at the boundaries of a village territory that disputes were likely to arise, and if memory and a simple written bounder were sufficient to record those boundaries, it is not surprising that there were so few attempts to picture houses and fields in the same period: for there were few occasions when any major revision of the village features were projected. Houses decayed, and were rebuilt within the same crofts; streets ran where streets had always run; the church and the churchyard were stolidly placed as if to face eternity; the windmill saw no reason to change its position so long as winds still blew from the same quarter; the watermills were unlikely to move until streams failed them; and if-most fickle of all the buildings-the manor house sought a new position suited to changing tastes, then its position was of little interest to anyone except its owner.
