land, there was some permanent pasture-land, waste [unutilized land] and, in non-steppe areas, woodland as well.) Each household held its arable land as a number of strips scattered throughout the fields. The strips were periodically redistributed by the mir (plural miry) so as to maintain equality among the households (see Repartition). The strips were supposed to be the length a horse-and-plough team could travel without `pausing for breath'. They were also narrow. In the Central Agricultural Region they were normally 80 sazhen (560 ft) long and 3-4 sazhen (21–28 feet) wide; in the Central Industrial Region strips 70–100 feet long and 7–14 feet wide were common. The number of strips for each household varied from region to region. In the centre and north there could be as many as 40 or 50. Large numbers of narrow strips were the consequence of a strict egalitarianism in sharing out land of differing qualities. Sometimes strips were too narrow for a harrow to travel along. In the large southern communities the problem was rather the distance of the strips from the household; in the Lower Volga it could be 15 kilometres or more. To farm such strips, temporary `camping out' was employed. In dry areas (which included most of the black-earth belt) strips were divided from one another by grass borders and access paths. The amount of arable occupied by these borders has been estimated as high as 7%. In moist and rainy areas (the non-black earth) the basic strip-units were formed as a ridge-and-furrow system. As in medieval western Europe, perennial ploughing had gradually produced a `corrugated' landscape of raised ridges or selions with ditches or furrows between them. The furrows acted as drainage. Such a system was necessary before the introduction of modern under-field drainage. Common field system Miry usually practiced the common-field system, in which all peasants grew the same crop in the same part of the mir's arable at the same time. Thus the whole harvest on a particular area could be gathered at the same time. This was necessary because of the peasants' custom of pasturing their livestock on the stubble. To preserve soil fertility on the arable, the mir generally employed a crop-rotation with fallow. The distribution of different crops would be `cycled' around from year to year. The most widespread system in use was the three-course or triennial rotation. One-third of the land was dedicated to