they had to build their own land. They heaped up hillocks on the marshes, built on them, and the hillocks became permanent settlements all the year round: the terpen. They owned the land outright as peasants never could in the feudal systems around them, and they were settled and at home; you can tell because houses were rebuilt again and again, twice or more in a century, but always on exactly the same site.17 They also had to co-operate, house to house, terp to terp, if only because finding sweet water was never easy, not even when wells replaced the old clay-lined reservoirs for collecting
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