The paper is aimed at regulated medieval settlements in Scandinavia (named mostly, although not always correctly solskifte). These systems comprehend green villages and row villages as well as regular chessboard-like field arrangements. In these systems each farmer had strips in each furlong. The location of his strip within the furlong was constant in relation to that of other farmers and was determined according to the sequence of houses in the village, counting with reference to the apparent course of the sun across the sky and beginning mostly in the south and east. Widths of the house plots were proportional to fiscal assessment of their farmsteads. For further description of those concepts see English references. Recent research in the Czech Republic revealed signs of applying similar planning principles. This is especially the case of the village of Nová Lhota, founded probably in the first half of the 16th century. Ordering of field strips mirror here the sequence of house plots in the village. Better understanding of genetic links between Scandinavian concepts of medieval landscape planning concepts and similar principles found in central Europe is thus the major task of future research.
Extensive medieval and Early Modern field systems have been preserved in English countryside. The article aims at achieving synopsis on English research for the purpose of explaining similar traces of past agricultural activities in the Czech Republic. In England, majority of preserved field systems consist almost exclusively of ridge and furrow, whilst in the Czech Republic strip lynchets and field boundaries are mostly detected. However, local ridge and furrow is mentioned many times in Bohemian documentary evidence. Comparison with British field systems already helped to put Czech research into a broader context (Dohnal 2003; 2006). The author therefore recommends employing British research in explaining Bohemian archive and iconographical materials on local ridge and furrow. The article describes the main results of exploring English ridge and furrow, its appearance, date of origin, purpose and variations. Other remnants of medieval landscapes (strip lynchets) are discussed as well. Special attention is paid to “reversed S” shape of many medieval fields, hardly explained phenom-enon related probably to complicated maneuvering with plough teams.