This is no more than a placeholder and a start of an idea, but here goes:

Ridge and furrow is often a feature of medieval Common / Open / ‘Champion’ field systems.  Surrounded by its fields, the village settlement is tightly grouped around a fixed point – morphologically classified as a ‘nucleated settlement’.  But we know that in the Bronze Age and post-Roman periods, settlements were widely dispersed and small scale – individual farmsteads and hamlets within a network of fields – with buildings perhaps every few hundred meters across the landscape.  What changed, when, and why?  How long would it take to create ridge and furrow in a field system?