Employing geographical principles for sampling in state of the art dialectological projects

The aims of this paper are twofold: First, we locate the most effective human geographical methods for sampling across space in large-scale dialectological projects. We propose two geographical concepts as a basis for sampling decisions: Geo-demographic classification, which is a multidimensional method used for the socio-economic grouping of areas. We also develop an updated version of functional regions that can be used in sociolinguistic research. We then report on the results of a pilot project that applies these models to collect data regarding the acceptability of vernacular morpho-syntactic forms in the North-East of England. Following the method of natural breaks advocated for dialectology by Horvath and Horvath (2002), we interpret breaks in the probabilistic patterns as areas of dialect transitions. This study contributes to the debate about the role and limitations of spatiality in linguistic analysis. It intends to broaden our knowledge about the interfaces between human geography and dialectology

Understanding the impact of the Cheshire Children’s Fund: Findings from 11 family case studies

The Children’s Fund was created in 2000 as part of the Government’s commitment to tackle disadvantage amongst children and young people. The aim of the Fund was to facilitate the development of more extensive and better co-ordinated early intervention services for children and young people aged 5 to 13 years who were at risk of social exclusion. Cheshire Children’s Fund, the local response to this national initiative, is guided by the Children’s Fund Partnership which is made up of representatives from local voluntary and statutory organisations. The aim of this research was to explore the impact of a number of projects which had received funding from the Cheshire Children’s Fund, specifically to learn how these projects had worked with children and families where there had been a positive outcome. The objectives of the research were to identify, for each child or family, the reasons for the provision of a service, the type of service that had been provided, and the impact that it had had on their lives. The research explored the factors that enabled a positive outcome for each family: the similarities and differences between the cases were also examined to determine whether any contributing factors were present across the services. The 11 projects were selected to cover a range of themes to reflect the breadth of the Children’s Fund work in Cheshire. They provided a range of services under the headings of crime prevention, promoting inclusion, success in schools and family support.Cheshire Children’s Fun

Lancashire Britishness : Patriotism in the Manchester Region during the Napoleonic Wars

Peer reviewe

Technologies of identification under the Old Poor Law

In this important article Steve Hindle, the leading historian of the local state and the pre-1834 Poor Law, considers the different ways in which parish and township authorities labelled and identified paupers. His paper is closely based upon the lecture which he gave to the British Association for Local History in June 2006. Steve Hindle gives an accessible and comprehensive explanation of the background and rationale for the various ways in which the poor could be categorised, and discusses in fascinating detail the methods which were used, drawing his evidence widely from different parts of the country. His review covers four main categories of identification: first, licences to beg, which were issued to paupers and provided them with the means to obtain an ‘honourable’ livelihood; second, the vagrant’s passport, which was a means of allowing a pauper to move, or be moved, from one part of the country to another; third, the settlement certificate, which specifically identified the place which was legally responsible for a pauper; and fourth, the parish badge, an outward physical identifier of pauper status. He makes clear the administrative procedures whereby these four methods were implemented, and emphasises the advantages and disadvantages of each for the pauper and the ‘system’ alike. In this article Hindle gives prominence to the pragmatic and responsive nature of the Old Poor Law. The article is a major contribution to the literature on the functioning of the Poor Law as it affected individuals, and as such deserves to be widely-read by local historians

The early modern demographic dynamic : celibates and celibacy in seventeenth-century England

Chapter One begins by locating the rise in celibacy within the demographic context of Tudor and Stuart England. The most prominent feature of population change in the seventeenth century was the stagnation that occurred around 1650, following on as it did from a hundred years of almost uninterrupted national expansion. Though the significance of changes in nuptiality, here defined as patterns in the timing and incidence of marriage, had been a feature of demographic analysis since its inception in the 1660s, the spectre of increased mortality as a result of overpopulation, which was first articulated in the writings of Thomas Malthus at the very end of the eighteenth century, had entered into the history of population change in the nineteenth century and succeeded in capturing the academic high ground. Thus for many years shifts in mortality, largely as a result of variations in patterns of disease, were the dominant interpretative element in explanations of early modern population change. The problem was essentially one of measurement - there was a distinct lack of accurate information on fertility change - and even though the role of fertility was mooted in modem demographic texts from as early as the 1950s, it was not until the 1980s that robust estimates of shifts in fertility became available. Nevertheless the patience of the pro-fertility lobby was amply rewarded: the publication in 1981 of Wrigley and Schofield's first volume on population history revealed the general dominance of fertility movements in directing population change throughout the early modern period. 8 More significantly in terms of this project however, it revealed that the contraction of the population in the mid-seventeenth century could most realistically be interpreted in terms of a fall in the rate of marriage, revealing celibacy in the process as the demographic dynamic of the Tudor and Stuart periods. Chapter Two seeks to locate the rise in celibacy in its social context by highlighting the strength of the marriage discourse. In this chapter the discourse of marriage is revealed as a potent force, drawing its ideas and authority from a wide range of spheres of thought, including those of religion, medicine, law, gender and sexuality. By the seventeenth century, shifts in marriage theory, having their origins in the humanist movement of the early sixteenth century, had raised the profile of marriage above that of celibacy, for the benefit of the individual and also of society at large. In the social arena, marriage gained credibility on account of the fact that it provided units of productive and reproductive activity that were capable of securing inheritance, expanding the numbers of the church and state, and legitimising and controlling sexual desire. In the personal arena, marriage, for women in particular, came to represent the pinnacle of social achievement, since it was understood that entry into it served above all to fulfil their scriptural and biological destiny. To this end social customs and practices developed that detached married people of both sexes from their single counterparts, by linking personal identity, social status and full community participation to the institution of marriage. Moreover, in establishing marriage as a valuable and honourable estate of lifelong dimensions, the discourse encouraged the development of a theory of marital choice, which, if faithfully adopted, could provide the basis for a stable and permanent marital union. Despite demographic evidence of falling marriage rates, therefore, the institution itself appears to have retained a position of considerable power in the contemporary imagination.Nevertheless, as historical demographers have indicated, there was a rise in the proportion of those who did not marry during the course of the seventeenth century. Chapter Three then seeks to examine existing explanations of marital decline, and in addition offers a further analysis of the roots of change. Current interpretations, heavily influenced by the strength of the marriage discourse, have tended to direct attention towards a number of factors that were likely to discourage entry into marriage, the most common of which appear to have been economic: couples either lacked the financial resources required in the process of setting up and running a new household, or they were prevented from marrying by local officials who feared they would become a burden on the poor rate. Shifts in the sex ratio as a result of migration and emigration, largely occasioned by structural shifts in the economy or death from disease or war, are also a feature of the explanatory framework. But Chapter Three also considers the possibility that a greater number of individuals may have preferred to remain single, a factor that to date has received little historical attention. For there was a discernible broadening of the discussion on the relative merits of marriage versus celibacy in the later seventeenth century, both in the religious and the secular spheres, which, when taken alongside an increasing emphasis on the role of marital choice, may have had considerable implications in terms of individual action. Though later seventeenth century concern over falling marriage rates was articulated largely in terms of the increasing preference of men for the state of celibacy, such ideas were themselves a function of discursive understandings of womanhood in which female adult identity was formulated exclusively in terms of marriage and motherhood. Yet single women were equally likely to have provided the dynamic. The inability of historians to conceptualise a shift in female attitudes to celibacy arises in part from their uncritical approach to contemporary ideas about female adulthood, and in part from their belief that women's inferior economic status - at least for the majority of those below the level of the gentry - precluded any serious element of choice. The most novel feature to emerge from this project, therefore, has been the discovery that single women of middling status with access to liquid capital were heavily involved in the process of money-lending for profit. Whereas previous understandings of the labour market have marginalized the role of single women to the point at which economic independence was largely unattainable, the discovery that a considerable number may have had the capacity to maintain an independent existence requires that historians look again at female motivation.# Chapter Four shifts the focus of the dissertation to the sexual lives of early modern celibates. The marital discourse would have enjoyed little validity in the Tudor and Stuart periods had access to procreative intercourse outside of marriage been acceptable. The fact that both legitimate and illegitimate fertility fell in tandem with marriage rates, however, suggests that restrictions on all extra-marital procreative intercourse were successfully enforced. This chapter therefore examines the extent to which early modern celibates were able to indulge in procreative intercourse outside the bonds of matrimony, while also considering the relative role of the church, the state and the community in the maintenance of sexual continence. Though there has been much debate as to whether religion or economics constituted the more significant element in deterring undesirable sexual activity, the fact that it was the cultural setting in toto that conspired to suppress extra-marital sexual incontinence reveals once again the pervasiveness and strength of the marital discourse. However, this chapter is also concerned to problematise the historiographical image of celibate sexual activity. By interpreting marriage as a life-cycle phenomenon with procreative sex as its ultimate aim, historians have given primacy - whether wittingly or unwittingly - to the act of intercourse between man and a woman, and relegated a range of other sexual activities to a position of lower value. In contrast, this chapter argues not only for the presence of other forms of sexual gratification within Tudor and Stuart society, but suggests in addition that rather than view them as the precursor to full penetrative intercourse, they should be understood as satisfactory and fulfilling expressions of sexuality in their own right.The final chapter examines the role of the marriage discourse in directing the employment opportunities, social status and cultural identity of single people in seventeenth century England. Here the effects of the discourse, which sought to promote the inevitability of entry into marriage as a general truth, are revealed in a gendered approach to training and employment, differential levels of access of men and women to land and property, and a concept of personal and social identity that for women was linked almost exclusively to marriage as a lifecycle phenomenon. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the extensive social and cultural ramifications of a rise in the proportion of lifelong celibate females, a situation that, regardless of its causes, required single women to reassess the image of themselves as wives and mothers and construct an alternative personal and social identity outside the standard marital paradigm

Culture, Conflict, and Northern English Fortification in the British Civil Wars, Circa 1638–1652

The dissertation is a study of the fortress garrisons of Northern England during the Wars of the Three Kingdoms. It combines cultural and administrative methodologies to explore the subject, linking it to as many different areas of Civil War historiography as possible to demonstrate the centrality of fortification to the conflict. It consists, broadly, as three separate components of unequal length divided into eight chapters. The first section introduces the subject, thoroughly exploring the historiography and outlining the method before moving on to the technical and physical aspects of fortification. The main body of the thesis applies both administrative and cultural historical approaches to explore the legal framework that royalist, parliamentarian, and covenanter garrisons operated under, their relationship with civic authorities such as civic corporations, and the relationship between governorships and the concept of lordship. This section is particularly important since it addresses the question of royalist military government. The dissertation will suggest that an alternative methodology, examining the interactions of military governments with civic authorities, can be used to partially reconstruct royalist administration even in the absence of garrison records – which were mostly destroyed during the conflict. The final part of the thesis explores fortification through the concept of trauma, arguing that garrisons acted as foci of violence and suffering, inflicted with varying degrees of discrimination on soldiers and civilians alike. The details of this suffering, inflicted through both physical violence and starvation, are explored before their wider ‘cultural’ significance is analysed. ‘Cultural’ impacts of traumatic fortification included the telling of ghost stories, the publication of articles of surrender and other details of prominent sieges, and the afterlife of fortresses long after the civil wars had ended

Worth, age, and social status in early modern England

This article introduces a new source for assessing the distribution of wealth in early modern England derived from witness depositions taken by the church courts. It discusses the accuracy of statements of ‘worth’ provided by thousands of witnesses between the mid-sixteenth and later seventeenth centuries, and uses the monetary estimates of worth in goods that the majority of deponents supplied to assess the changing distribution of personal wealth. We argue that this data supports recent claims that the pre-industrial English economy experienced significant levels of economic growth, while showing that its benefits were increasingly unevenly distributed between different social groups. In particular, the century after 1550 witnessed spectacular increases in yeoman worth that outstripped inflation by a factor of 10. The relative wealth of yeomen was also underpinned by its more secure distribution over the life cycle which further compounded the differences between them and other social groups

Informational Mode of the Brain Operation and Consciousness as an Informational Related System

Introduction: the objective of the investigation is to analyse the informational operating-mode of the brain and to extract conclusions on the structure of the informational system of the human body and consciousness. Analysis: the mechanisms and processes of the transmission of information in the body both by electrical and non-electrical ways are analysed in order to unify the informational concepts and to identify the specific essential requirements supporting the life. It is shown that the electrical transmission can be described by typical YES/NO (all or nothing) binary units as defined by the information science, while the inter and intra cell communication, including within the synaptic junction, by mechanisms of embodiment/disembodiment of information. The virtual received or operated information can be integrated in the cells as matter-related information, with a maximum level of integration as genetically codified info. Therefore, in terms of information, the human appears as a reactive system changing information with the environment and between inner informational subsystems which are: the centre of acquisition and storing of information (acquired data), the centre of decision and command (decision), the info-emotional system (emotions), the maintenance informational system (matter absorption/desorption/distribution), the genetic transmission system (reproduction) and info-genetic generator (genetically assisted body evolution). The dedicated areas and components of the brain are correlated with such systems and their functions are specified. Result: the corresponding cognitive centres projected into consciousness are defined and described according to their specific functions. The cognitive centres, suggestively named to appropriately include their main characteristics are detected at the conscious level respectively as: memory, decisional operation (attitude), emotional state, power/energy status and health, associativity and offspring formation, inherited predispositions, skills and mentality. The near-death and religious experiences can be explained by an Info-Connection pole. Conclusion: consciousness could be fully described and understood in informational terms