The ceremony had an important practical purpose. Checking the boundaries was a way of preventing encroachment by neighbours; sometimes boundary markers would be moved or lines obscured, and a folk memory of the true extent of the parish was necessary to maintain integrity of borders by embedding knowledge in oral traditions. For a village man dwelling in champion country, under the traditional open field system, George Homans remarks, "the bounds of his village were the most important bounds he knew." Village and parish were coterminous. The modern system of metes and bounds operates fundamentally similarly, giving a prose definition of a property as if walking about it.