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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 5741817" data-attributes="member: 4937">This is all good thinking, but you need to take it one step further.Assuming we have a uniform stretch of arable land, each farmer will want to minimize the distance between the themselves and their fields.  Thus, what you will tend to see is a uniform distribution not of settlements, but of individual farms.  What clusters is not farms, but markets - that is the place where farmers go to exchange their goods for goods that they cannot produce themselves.  Since farmers don't need to go to market every day, markets can afford to be up to one day's journey away from a farm.  If the market is any further away, it risks loosing market share to a market that develops closer.  An example of this in the USA might be someplace like Kansas or Iowa, where you have uniform arable land across a broad region.  Settlements in those regions occur about every 20 miles, which is the run of a stagecoach at the time they were settled.  The farm houses themselves are more uniformly distributed, and were probably even more uniformly distributed before mechanized transport changed the behavior and requirements of the farms.One village per 2 miles is very typical of Europe, but is a not an approximation of settlement generally.  Hamlets are much more typical of settlement in the Northeast USA, for example, than they are of settlement patterns in the USA generally.</blockquote>