Making Modern England: the ‘New Domesday’ and Estate Landscapes during the Late-Nineteenth Century

The landed estate was the pre-eminent cultural landscape across Britain until at least the 1880s. It was both ubiquitous and socially significant, but its form and character varied over time as did its relative importance within the wider landscape. However, despite numerous local or specific estate studies there has not been a systematic re-interpretation of the national data on estates and landholding. Instead, the data have most often been deployed as an index of social status amongst the elite, rather than a detailed examination of the impact of estates on the landscape. This paper offers the first landscape interpretation of the estate in its national context. At the heart of the estate was the country house or seat, which from the seventeenth century, looked out over gardens and parkland, and beyond the park pale lay the wider estate landscape. The house and grounds have long attracted the attention of scholars from various disciplines, as have the families who owned them since they held the reins of power and wealth into the twentieth century. However, the estate has not attracted the same degree of attention as a form of landscape with its own historical characteristics. One would have known instinctively if one was entering or crossing an estate since ownership was written on the landscape in various ways and through various forms of social performance. Estates had a distinct character created by the manipulation of the landscape on a micro level - such as the colour of the estate livery for carts, waggons and buildings - and on the marco level - such as the control and limitation of housing, the character of farmsteads and the provision of woodland

Overlaps in dimensions of poverty

The Poverty and Social Exclusion Survey of Britain made it possible first time to explore poverty using three different measures applied at the same time on the same sample. The measures were: lacking socially perceived necessities; being subjectively poor and having a relatively low income. These approaches are all commonly used to identify the poor and to measure poverty but rarely if ever in combination. In this article we have found that there is little overlap in the group of people defined as poor by these dimensions. There are reasons for this lack of overlap, connected to the reliability and validity of the different measures. However the people who are defined as living in poverty by different measures of poverty are different. This inevitably means that the policy response to poverty will be different depending on which measure is employed. We have attempted to analyse overlap in two ways. First, by exploring the dimensions of poverty cumulatively, we have found that, the more dimensions people are poor on, the more they are unlike the non-poor and the poor on only one dimension, in their characteristics and in their social exclusion. Second, by treating particular dimensions as meriting more attention than others, we explored three permutations of this type and concluded that, while each permutation were more unlike the non-poor than those poor on a single dimension, they were not as unlike the non-poor as the cumulatively poor were. These results indicate that accumulation might be a better way of using overlapping measures of poverty than by giving priority to one dimension over another. The implication of the paper is that it is not safe to rely on one measure of poverty – the results obtained are just not reliable enough. Surveys, such as the Family Resources Survey or the European Community Household Panel, which are used to monitor the prevalence of poverty, need to be adapted to enable results to be triangulated – to incorporate a wider range of poverty measures

Harewood House and the destruction of the Gawthorpe Hall

In England, where manorial rights had been commuted to cash from the fifteenth century, the spatial arrangements in the landscape reflected new relationships between owners, land and power. In this article Dr. Jonathan Finch descibes the the demolition of Gawthorpe Hall and the construction of Harewood House and the associated re-landscaping of the estate as the epitome of the new relationships of a modern, capitalist society

Sex and flowers: testing the resource-dependent selection hypothesis for flower sex allocation

Context: Monoecious plants can adjust their proportional investment in male and female flowers to maximise reproductive fitness. The female reproductive function (seeds) often has greater resource costs than the male (pollen). Larger plants are generally thought to have greater resource availability and should have a female biased sex ratio, referred to as the size-dependent selection hypothesis. However, empirical tests of this hypothesis have found mixed support. This may be because size alone is not always a reliable proximate value for resource availability, which can be influenced by other abiotic factors. Aims: Breynia oblongifolia (Phyllanthaceae) is a perennial monoecious plant with unisexual moth-pollinated flowers from eastern Australia. Fruit production in Breynia is heavily influenced by rainfall, which is highly variable. We hypothesised that where soil moisture limits female function, Breynia would produce more male flowers (i.e. resource-dependent selection). Methods: We used a multi-year observational dataset to look for evidence of resource-dependent flower sex ratios in a wild population and conducted a manipulative glasshouse experiment to test alternative hypotheses for flower sex selection. Key results: In both our manipulative glasshouse experiment and observed wild population, decreasing soil water content resulted in higher proportions of male flowers, supporting the resource-dependent sex selection hypothesis. Conclusions: Soil moisture influences flower sex ratios but plant size does not. Implications: Future studies should not assume that height equates to resource wealth, as this is often overly simplistic and ignores the potential for key resources, like soil moisture or light, to fluctuate

Fishing for flies : testing the efficacy of "stink stations" for promoting blow flies as pollinators in mango orchards

Pollinator communities are composed of diverse groups of insects, with radically different life histories and resource needs. Blow flies are known to visit a variety of economically important crop plants. Larval blow flies develop by feeding on decaying animals. Some fruit growers are known to place carrion on farms during the flowering season to attract adult blow flies (Calliphoridae). However, the efficacy of these “stink stations” has not been tested. We conducted a series of experiments to determine: 1) if stink stations promote the abundance of blow flies in mango orchards (Mangifera indica L.), 2) if any increases in the abundance of flies acts to promote pollination and fruit set in Australian mango orchards. Farms with stink stations had approximately three times more flies than control farms. However, the increased abundance of blow flies did not result in increased fruit set. Although stink stations increased the abundance of blow flies, we found no evidence that their use improves mango yield. This may be due to pollination saturation by a highly abundant native hover fly, Mesembrius bengalensis (Syrphidae), during our study. We hypothesize that stink stations may only be beneficial in years or regions where other pollinators are less abundant

Scratching the surface: the use of sheepskin parchment to deter textual erasure in early modern legal deeds.

UNLABELLED: Historic legal deeds are one of the most abundant resources in British archives, but also one of the most neglected. Despite the millions that survive, we know remarkably little about their manufacture, including the species of animal on which they were written. Here we present the species identification of 645 sixteenth-twentieth century skins via peptide mass fingerprinting (ZooMS), demonstrating the preferential use of sheepskin parchment. We argue that alongside their abundance and low cost, the use of sheepskins over those of other species was motivated by the increased visibility of fraudulent text erasure and modification afforded by the unique structure of their skin. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1186/s40494-021-00503-6

ELITE FEMALE CRICKET POWER-HITTING BATTING TECHNIQUE DIFFERS BETWEEN FAST AND SPIN BOWLING DELIVERIES

The purpose of this study was to determine if elite female cricket batters’ body or bat kinematics differed when facing fast or spin bowling in a power-hitting task. Six elite female cricket batters completed a straight drive power hitting task against both fast and spin bowling, captured by a 3D motion capture system. Select kinematic variables were analysed using Visual 3D software. Elite female batters may use the increased movement time afforded by the slower spin bowling speed to enhance bat-ball impact, bat speed and launch angle through reducing distance from the pitch of the ball to impact, and increasing thorax-pelvis separation (X-Factor) and top wrist ulnar deviation compared with facing fast bowling