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Russia and during the Mongol period one feature ofsociety was the prevalence of collective arrangements bypeasant communities (whether of the joint family, ofgroups of such families, or of wider groups) for regulatingthe transference of land and in many cases its utilization(for instance, meadows, bee or fishing grounds, orpasture), and for dealing with newcomers. Such agriculturalcommunes must, in all probability, have beenvery different from their later successors (usually) withthe nucleated village, the three-course open fields andperiodical redistribution of holdings, since the presentavailable evidence shows that still in the sixteenth centuryscattered settlements of not more than eight or ninehouseholds at a maximum were the usual form ofagricultural village, and that the three-course open fieldswere only beginning to be usual in central Muscovy andNovgorod about 1500.Periodical redistribution followed, but it did notbecome the outstanding feature of the agriculturalcommune throughout most of the Russian parts of theempire until the eighteenth century or even later. Itwas not by any means the sole mark of communallandownership or utilization, but it was of very greatsignificance, and its encouragement (in some regions itsintroduction) by the state and the serf-owners assistedthe growth of the peasant's idea that he had a right tobe provided with some land. Periodical redistributionand the three-course open fields gradually developedowing to increasing pressure of population upon naturalresources, to the tying down of the peasants throughserfdom, to the weight of the services of the serfs totheir masters, and to the increase in and methods ofdirect taxation by the state.The practice of redistribution became slowly extendedoutwards from the more thickly settled portionsof central Muscovy as these same factors, and especiallypressure of population on natural resources, madethemselves felt in this or that region. In much of theUkraine and White Russia, however, this extension wasfar from regular, partly owing to the effects of Polishrule, and other forms of landownership and communal157