Reclaiming Land. The available technology limited the size of the village. All the land its residents worked had to be within close enough walking distance for the peasant to be able walk back and forth to his field and do a full day's work within twelve to fourteen hours. In other words, most of the land that peasants farmed was within a one-hour walk from the village, and much of it was closer. These limitations meant that a medieval village could quickly become pressed for land as its population grew, and some techniques were developed to extend a village's arable land or at least to make it more fertile. Large-scale land reclamation in the form of dikes and other drainage projects did not occur in Europe until the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but certain areas, such...