The Central Uplands of Buchan – a distinctive agricultural zone in the thirteenth century: fact or fiction?

Rural History ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 41-75
Author(s):  
Colin Shepherd
Keyword(s):  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
Limited Range ◽  
Export Trade ◽  
Low Countries ◽  
Secondary Importance ◽  
Documentary Sources ◽  
Arable Farming ◽  
Per Capita ◽  
The Rich ◽  
Pastoral Farming

AbstractIt can be argued, based upon a limited range of surviving evidence, that the land-locked centre of Buchan formed a distinctive upland zone functioning alongside and interwoven with the surrounding lower lands during the thirteenth century. The area can be characterised as less densely settled and engaged in extensive pastoral farming regimes that contrasted with contemporary arable farming of a more intensive nature on the lower-lying lands. Subsequent demographic and agricultural changes have rendered that former environment invisible and the limited documentary sources of the thirteenth century have compounded its mystery. Although a relatively remote upland area, its economy was at least as successful per capita than the rich grain lands surrounding it. Rather than representing a place of secondary importance, it may well have been instrumental in fuelling Aberdeen’s rich thirteenth-century export trade of sheep products to the Low Countries and, perhaps, shared a symbiotic relationship with the lower, arable lands.

New Technologies to Combat Herbicide Resistance

2020 ◽  
Vol 31 (2) ◽  
pp. 90-92
Author(s):  
Rob Edwards
Keyword(s):  
Winter Wheat ◽  
Herbicide Resistance ◽  
Cover Crops ◽  
New Technologies ◽  
Green Revolution ◽  
Arable Land ◽  
Limited Range ◽  
Cultural Control ◽  
Arable Farming ◽  
The Uk

Herbicide resistance in problem weeds is now a major threat to global food production, being particularly widespread in wild grasses affecting cereal crops. In the UK, black-grass (Alopecurus myosuroides) holds the title of number one agronomic problem in winter wheat, with the loss of production associated with herbicide resistance now estimated to cost the farming sector at least £0.5 billion p.a. Black-grass presents us with many of the characteristic traits of a problem weed; being highly competitive, genetically diverse and obligately out-crossing, with a growth habit that matches winter wheat. With the UK’s limited arable crop rotations and the reliance on the repeated use of a very limited range of selective herbicides we have been continuously performing a classic Darwinian selection for resistance traits in weeds that possess great genetic diversity and plasticity in their growth habits. The result has been inevitable; the steady rise of herbicide resistance across the UK, which now affects over 2.1 million hectares of some of our best arable land. Once the resistance genie is out of the bottle, it has proven difficult to prevent its establishment and spread. With the selective herbicide option being no longer effective, the options are to revert to cultural control; changing rotations and cover crops, manual rogueing of weeds, deep ploughing and chemical mulching with total herbicides such as glyphosate. While new precision weeding technologies are being developed, their cost and scalability in arable farming remains unproven. As an agricultural scientist who has spent a working lifetime researching selective weed control, we seem to be giving up on a technology that has been a foundation stone of the green revolution. For me it begs the question, are we really unable to use modern chemical and biological technology to counter resistance? I would argue the answer to that question is most patently no; solutions are around the corner if we choose to develop them.

Contesting the City

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christian D. Liddy
Keyword(s):  
Urban Politics ◽  
Low Countries ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
Urban Citizenship ◽  
Town Government ◽  
Medieval Europe ◽  
Political Narrative ◽  
Classical Models ◽  
The Rich ◽  
The City

The political narrative of late medieval English towns is often reduced to the story of the gradual intensification of oligarchy, in which power was exercised and projected by an ever smaller ruling group over an increasingly subservient urban population. This book takes its inspiration not from English historiography, but from a more dynamic continental scholarship on towns in the southern Low Countries, Germany, and France. Its premise is that scholarly debate about urban oligarchy has obscured contemporary debate about urban citizenship. It identifies from the records of English towns a tradition of urban citizenship, which did not draw upon the intellectual legacy of classical models of the ‘citizen’. This was a vernacular citizenship, which was not peculiar to England, but which was present elsewhere in late medieval Europe. It was a citizenship that was defined and created through action. There were multiple, and divergent, ideas about citizenship, which encouraged townspeople to make demands, to assert rights, and to resist authority. This book exploits the rich archival sources of the five major towns in England—Bristol, Coventry, London, Norwich, and York—in order to present a new picture of town government and urban politics over three centuries. The power of urban governors was much more precarious than historians have imagined. Urban oligarchy could never prevail—whether ideologically or in practice—when there was never a single, fixed meaning of the citizen.

Penitents and the Institutionalization of Penitential Life in the Thirteenth Century

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alison More
Keyword(s):  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
Spiritual Care ◽  
Religious Life ◽  
Spiritual Climate ◽  
The World ◽  
The Rich

The first chapter focuses on the wider spiritual context from which penitential movements developed. The rich and vibrant spiritual climate of the early thirteenth century saw the emergence of a number of new expressions of religious life. These new forms of devotion were predominantly characterized by a desire to live according to the gospel while remaining in the world. Throughout Europe, groups of laywomen ran alms houses, cared for lepers and practised other forms of active charity. From the middle of the thirteenth century onwards, the fact that these women did not fit traditional categories was seen as increasingly controversial. Consequently, those responsible for the spiritual care of such groups encouraged them to adopt many external signs of religious life such as a recognized habit, a rule, and even some degree of enclosure.

scholarly journals Globalization and educational inequality during the 18th to 20th centuries: Latin America in global comparison

2010 ◽  
Vol 28 (2) ◽  
pp. 279-305 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joerg Baten ◽  
Christina Mumme
Keyword(s):  
Developing Countries ◽  
Latin America ◽  
Strong Evidence ◽  
Educational Inequality ◽  
Gdp Per Capita ◽  
Positive Effects ◽  
Global Comparison ◽  
Per Capita ◽  
The Rich

AbstractThis paper explores the inequality of numeracy and education by studying school years and numeracy of the rich and poor, as well as of tall and short individuals. To estimate numeracy, the age-heaping method is used for the 18th to early 20th centuries. Testing the hypothesis that globalization might have increased the inequality of education, we find evidence that 19th century globalization actually increased inequality in Latin America, but 20th century globalization had positive effects by reducing educational inequality in a broader sample of developing countries. Moreover, we find strong evidence for Kuznets’s inverted U hypothesis, that is, rising educational inequality with GDP per capita in the period until 1913 and the opposite after 1945.

Do the rich pollute more? Mexican household consumption by income level and CO2 emissions

2019 ◽  
Vol 13 (3) ◽  
pp. 694-712 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mónica Santillán Vera ◽  
Angel de la Vega Navarro
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Household Consumption ◽  
Mitigation Strategies ◽  
Consumption Patterns ◽  
Content Type ◽  
Income Levels ◽  
Alternative Approach ◽  
Per Capita ◽  
The Rich ◽  
Using Data

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to quantitatively examine if varying household consumption activities at different income levels drove CO2 emissions to different degrees in Mexico from 1990 to 2014. Design/methodology/approach The paper applied a simple expenditure-CO2 emissions elasticity model – a top-down approach – using data from consumption-based CO2 emission inventories and the “Household Income and Expenditure Survey” and assuming a range of 0.7-1.0 elasticity values. Findings The paper results show a large carbon inequality among income groups in Mexico throughout the period. The household consumption patterns at the highest income levels are related to significantly more total CO2 emissions (direct + indirect) than the household consumption patterns at the lowest income levels, in absolute terms, per household and per capita. In 2014, for example, the poorest household decile emitted 1.6 tCO2 per capita on average, while the wealthiest decile reached 8.6 tCO2 per capita. Practical/implications The results suggest that it is necessary to rethink the effect of consumption patterns on climate change and the allocation of mitigation responsibilities, thus opening up complementary options for designing mitigation strategies and policies. Originality/value The paper represents an alternative approach for studying CO2 emissions responsibility in Mexico from the demand side, which has been practically absent in previous studies. The paper thereby opens a way for studying and discussing climate change in terms of consumption and equity in the country.

scholarly journals Out-of-Pocket Expenditures on Health: A Global Stocktake

2020 ◽  
Vol 35 (2) ◽  
pp. 123-157 ◽  
Author(s):  
Adam Wagstaff ◽  
Patrick Eozenou ◽  
Marc Smitz
Keyword(s):  
Health System ◽  
Low Income ◽  
Poverty Line ◽  
Low Income Countries ◽  
Two Measures ◽  
Per Capita ◽  
Summary Measures ◽  
The Rich ◽  
Catastrophic Expenditures ◽  
Highly Correlated

Abstract This paper provides an overview of research on out-of-pocket health expenditures by reviewing the various summary measures and the results of multi-country studies using these measures. The paper presents estimates for 146 countries from all World Bank income groups for all summary measures, along with correlations between the summary measures and macroeconomic and health system indicators. Large differences emerge across countries in per capita out-of-pocket expenditures in 2011 international dollars, driven in large part by differences in per capita income and the share of GDP spent on health. The two measures of dispersion or risk—the coefficient of variation and Q90/Q50—are only weakly correlated across countries and not explained by our macroeconomic and health system indicators. Considerable variation emerges in the out-of-pocket health expenditure budget share, which is highly correlated with the incidence of “catastrophic expenditures”. Out-of-pocket expenditures tend to be regressive and catastrophic expenditures tend to be concentrated among the poor when expenditures are assessed relative to income, while expenditures tend to be progressive and catastrophic expenditures tend to be concentrated among the rich when expenditures are assessed relative to consumption. At the extreme poverty line of $1.90-a-day, most impoverishment due to out-of-pocket expenditures occurs among low-income countries.

The dialectic between Occitania and France in the thirteenth century

1997 ◽  
Vol 16 ◽  
pp. 1-53 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Aubrey
Keyword(s):  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
The Rich ◽  
The University ◽  
Short Time

The thirteenth century was a time of turmoil in Occitania, starting with the buildup to the Albigensian Crusade during the first decade and its eruption in the second and third, which resulted in the establishment of the university in Toulouse in 1229, the founding of the Order of Friars Preachers a short time later and the unleashing of several decades of inquisition led by these Dominicans, and ultimately the dissolution of the powerful county of Toulouse. France profited both economically and politically from this plundering of the rich culture to its south: the consolidation of power by the late Capetian monarchy owed much to the absorption of Occitania into its holdings. The inhabitants of the Midi continued to demonstrate their fierce independence from their conquerors in myriad ways, some overt, some subversive. But the tempestuous events in their homeland caused some trauma among the troubadours, and although this did not necessarily result in a general deterioration in the quality of the songs that they produced, it probably is at least partly to blame for a decline in the number of both songs and composers.

The twelfth-century castle at Ascot Doilly, Oxfordshire: Its history and excavation

1959 ◽  
Vol 39 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 219-273 ◽  
Author(s):  
E. M. Jope ◽  
R. I. Threlfall
Keyword(s):  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
Twelfth Century ◽  
Window Glass ◽  
Valley Bottom ◽  
Documentary Sources ◽  
Natural Surface ◽  
The Village ◽  
The Church ◽  
Small Mound

SummaryThe castle of Ascot Doilly appears from documentary sources to have been put up c. 1129–50. Excavation in 1946–7 of a small mound on this manorial site showed that it had contained a stone tower 35 ft. square which had been built up from the natural surface of a 4-ft. rise of Lias clay protruding through the gravel of the Evenlode valley bottom. Round this tower, as it was raised, had been piled a low mound of clay; thus the impression of a tower on a mound was created. Beside it are remains of a bailey and contemporary paddocks. The tower had been deliberately demolished, probably c. 1180.The excavation thus revealed a new principle in smaller defensive building of the period, a mound piled round a stone tower. It also yielded a useful series of mid- to later twelfth-century pottery and other objects, and evidence of domestic window glass in the twelfth century.There are remains of thirteenth-century and later buildings in the bailey area. The village of Ascot represents a dual holding, with two mound-and-bailey castles at opposite ends 800 yds. apart, and between them the church (with twelfth-century work). There is also evidence of pottery-making in the village, at least in the early thirteenth century.

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