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Since we are accustomed to look upon the village as a quaint primitive relic of a bygone age, we do not readily see that its form was dictated by social and economic conditions. Where the village had to defend itself against Indians, it was necessary to lay it out completely, so that it might be surrounded by a stockade, and so that the meeting-house might be such a rallying center as the bell-tower or the castle was in Europe, or as the high temple site was in classic times. But in the eighteenth century the Indian figured less in the scheme of colonial life, and along the seacoast and river—as at Wells Beach in Maine or Litchfield in Connecticut—the village became a long strip upon a highroad, and the arable land stretched in narrow plots from the house to the water, so that the farmer might better protect his crops and his livestock from the fox, the wolf, the woodchuck, the hawk, the skunk, and the deer.

I emphasize these points of structure because of the silly notion superficial observers sometimes carry away from the villages of Europe or New England; namely, that their irregularity is altogether capricious and uneconomical, associated only with the vagaries of the straying cow. It would be more correct to say that the precise reverse was true. The inequality in size and shape of plots shows always that attention was paid to the function the land was to perform, rather than to the mere possession of property. Thus, there was a difference in size between home lots, which were always seated in the village, and purely agricultural tracts of land, which were usually on the outskirts; and in Dedham, for example, married men had home lots of twelve acres, while bachelors received only eight. Another reason for the compactness of the village was a decree of the General Court in Massachusetts, in 1635, that no dwelling should be placed more than half a mile from the meeting-house in any new plantation. Even irregularities in the layout and placement of houses, which cannot be referred to such obvious points as these, very often derive from an attempt to break the path of the wind, to get a good exposure in summer, or to profit by a view.