Nearly all superstitions—perhaps we may briefly say, all —are different forms of nature worship. When the Hebrew teacher warned his people not to look up at the stars and worship them he was dealing with a strong temptation of his age; for indeed, of all inanimate creatures, none could be more worthy of man's worship, and none, in fact, did attract it more. Let us look upon Old England now from this point of view—man and nature. The surface of the country, as we have seen, was far wilder than it is now. There was far more forest and fen; and, although a great deal had been done by pioneers in the past, plenty of clearing still remained to be done. We see this, for instance, in some of the enormous parishes in the North or in the Fenland. On the Yorkshire moors, at first, there were villages only at the very edge. Then, as in the cases of Blackburn and Whalley, the hinterland of moor was gradually exploited, and the priest found himself parson no longer of a handful of parishioners, but of several hamlets also, with their attendant chapels. So again at Doddington, on the edge of the Cambridgeshire Fens. That parish, by gradual draining, became so large and so rich that within the last century the tithes of the rectory were worth £10,000 a year. Everywhere, then, the population was thinly scattered in the Middle Ages, and yet in one way less scattered than it is now.