 Mae'r ysgol yn entymology, i ddwy'rmorgylu poprwag ac oedd yn gweithio gyda'r unigfeyddion mew whitwyrr. Mewn roi, roi pob ar gwaith. Rwy'n credu bod pobl yn chyfrinant arall achos erioed. Felly, yn ymddur y têf ychydig, mae'n ei wneud gan ymateb, a'n ymdyn nhw yna ar y cyrfin dod o'r ddechrau yma i ddarparu hynny sy'n gweithio ar gyfer y maen nhwy ar y wych, ond hyn yn ydyn nhw'n ddwy'n yw ddwy. Yn bod nhw'n ddweud i chi'n mynd i'ch gwybod yma, ynglŵr gyllid yn ynnw'n gwyro. A'r rherwydd, rwy'n gweithio'r rhaid i'ch gweithio oeddwn, ac rwy'n rhaid i'ch gweithio'n gweithio'n gweithio am eu bod yn rhaid i'ch gweithio'n gweithio'r rhaid, mae'r rhaid i'ch gweithio oherwydd yma o'r rhaid i'ch gweithio'n gweithio ym mynd, wrth gwrs, mae'n gwneud o'r rhaid i'ch gweithio, that's the angle I'm coming from. It can be applied to many aspects of the environmental movement. The title, the Green Revolution, was first coined in 1968 by the U.S. Government. It was used as a new revolutionary way that crop production was being carried out. That was through mechanisation of farming, enhancements, irrigation felly gofio amgunwysau gallu ond y rhiwg. A gwyd wrefydd o'r gyrsdraeth lawer o'r pethauを popeth yn unigodd. Yn ymnoedd o'r pethau, mae angen i fynd rhywbeth ar y holl hammernau bod ymmwneud hwnnw ar gyfer y llwyddau ond yn gennym, mae'n cymryd e i'r gyrsdraeth sef hyd oaur roedden nhw'n ddwy. fewyrd yn cael caelmam gysylltiad, felly, oerasi lliwyrdd yma diwedd yn y cael cyflydd, fel hwnna o ffrinddd ddim yn maenol y cyflydd â'r rhaglau a'r supplier-failu wdd ynser yn rubos whichever phi i mi wneud sy'n gw contactsiais o d�� ac cjon. iawn o gyda mwyaf i niesiae ac ystafell i gweithio unrhyw unrhyw unrhyw unrhyw unrhyw unrhyw. Dyma yw'r ysgolion? Mae bryddoedd, mae'r hynny'n gyfoedd ymgylchedd. Mae'r hynny'n gydweithio cerddol. Yn ymgylchedd yma mae'r gweithio'r penderfyniadau, mae'r cyfrifio'r gweithio'r penderfyniadau, ymgylchedd yma mae'r cyfrifio'r cyfrifio'r penderfyniadau. Ac wedi'i gwurdu'r lluniau petrogenius o ran y lluniau petrogenius, o'r lluniau homogenius fydd â petrogenius. Rydw i'r lluniau homogenius yw'r lluniau petrogenius, yn y drechau gwleig o gyhoedd ac yn digwydd y lluniau petrogenius. Fy enw'r rhau'r clynydd ychydig o'r Prifyddiadau Pryddiad a'r Prifyddiadau Llyfyniad. Pryddiadau ddewch yn schyfiadau i ddydd mae'r ffordd yn ddefnyddio i gael gennymau, ydych chi'n ffordd ar hyn o'r hyffordd yn ddefnyddio, ac mae oeddwn i ddweud yn y cam, mae'n ddweud nad o'n gweithio gyda trafolion i gweithio, mae'r ffordd mae'n ddechrau, mae'r ffordd yn ddweud yn ddechrau, mae'r ffordd yn ddweud, mae'n ddweud yn roedd yn llwythau. A'r hyffordd yn gyhoeddcaeth yn gweithio'n gwahanol, ac rhai o yma o'r genedlau gwahod o'r ddau cyffredinol, o ddau gwahod o'r genedlau gwahod o'r genedlau gwahod. Mae'r reisyn oherwydd mae'n gweithio oherwydd yma o'r tuig o'r gwahod o'r gwahod, mae'n gweithio oherwydd mae'n gweithio o'r gwahod o'r gwahod o'r gwahod o'r gwahod. Yn ymgyrch chi'n cyffredinol o'r gwahod, bioneyr gwaith yw Charles Roth Child, We set up Society of the Promotion of Nature Reserve back in 1912 ..and their real focus was to simply identify and protect what we would now call by-de-vesti hotspots. So they described it as the best places for wildlife. The SPNR now you would recognise as the Wildlife Trust. So that's what that organisation developed into. And it was actually a result of the actions of the society, the promotion of nature reserves, which led to the government setting up statutory nature reserves, which was revolutionary in its day and effectively was the foundation for conservation in the UK as it stands today. Unfortunately, these statutory sites, you'll probably know your local national nature reserves or SSI sites of special scientific interest. They only cover less than 10% of the United Kingdom and in the period especially after the Second World War when there was this real drive for an intensification of crop production. These sites were basically surrounded by the intensification of land use which led to habitat loss and fragmentation. For example, in the last century we've actually lost 97% of our flower rich meadows. And through this fragmentation there's been this increasing isolation between habitats which effectively impedes the species ability to shift between areas and that effectively reduces the viability of the populations. So this map shows the Upper Thames floodplain, this sort of very pale green area. And you can see that the statutory sites which are illustrated in blue are extremely fragmented here in the south east. And I just want to focus on one particular site where my research over the last six years has been focused and that is down in the west wing of the Upper Thames floodplain at Chimney Meadows Nature Reserve. Now this site is now 250 hectares but I just want to focus to start with on the original 50 hectare SSI Nature Reserve which was established in 1968. And it boasts a very rare floodplain community which under the national vegetation classification we would know as Mesotrophic Grassland 4. And it actually only covers 1500 hectares in the entire of the UK. So an extremely special community. So this community is extremely susceptible to changes in water levels, changes in nutrient levels and also requires very specific management types. Now as part of the natural system of these communities they would normally have, you've probably all been down to Port Meadow for example where they're sort of flooding during the winter time. This is a natural part of the cycle where nutrients come on during that period. The issue with this photograph is that it was taken in the summer of 2007. And there were two statistic events, summer 2007 and 2008. So this flooding is hitting in the peak of the reproductive period for many, many species and it had a devastating effect on this particular site. This was the aftermath after the flooding dropped away. This algal scum was left which is extremely nutrient rich. It actually multiplied the phosphorus levels up by four times what is withstandable by this particular community. And this algal scum actually created this thick mat so it impeded management. Obviously you can no longer hay cut this meadow and you can certainly no longer graze it. So this mat remained on top of these meadows for two years impeding the growth of the less competitive herbaceous plants. And through my work down at chimney meadows we established that the initial impact on the key plant species in these communities was a drop off of 40% coverage of the key species from that particular community. And devastatingly the ground beetles and rove beetle populations crashed by 85% in these meadows and similarly the worm densities crashed by 63%. So from that diagram I showed earlier on regarding the food webs the impact of the loss of these lower trophic levels had a devastating effect on the high trophic levels. And so breeding waders such as the curlew were completely lost from this area at that time. So what does this highlight? Well basically those statutory reserves if they remain isolated they are vulnerable to these environmental impacts. And in part my research has been interested in looking at the impacts of those environmental variations but also the recovery. That's what's important now because as climate change marches on these floodings are apparently going to become much more frequent. So if it takes 10 years for these communities to recover yet these floodings are going to occur every 10 years then clearly these habitats are not viable in their current location in the long term. So what is the answer? Basically restoration, buffering and linkage. And down at Chymni Meadows Nature Reserve 70 hectares of X arable land was actually reverted using green hay from the National Nature Reserve back in 2004. And part basically to create a buffer for the SSI. And that's been the major part of my research is actually looking at the effectiveness of this restoration over the last five to six years. I unfortunately don't have time to show you all of that data I would love to but just to keep in tune with the general theme I just wanted to show you one key graph. Basically on the different meadows in which the reversion happened I had the control plot where no seed was sown out and then I had treatment plots and basically were effectively the rest of the field where the seed had actually been sown. And over the first three years of the reversion we showed quite starkly a shift in the community towards the target community down at the National Nature Reserve where the seed came from in the first place. So it is possible to overcome these dispersal limitations of species particularly the botanics by shifting seed from one place to another where the environmental variables allow. Some species can obviously fly in and some spider species can obviously balloon in on their silk. Not all species unfortunately are so lucky and this is to Marker to Nebrikosa and unfortunately this individual has to walk between sites it's the only way it can colonize. And so this is a really good species to look at the impacts of fragmentation of the landscape on the colonization and restoration of sites. And so the data I was collecting from Timney meadows went into a collaboration we had with the Centre of Ecology and Hydrology being led by Dr Ben Woodcock. Plus eight other sites into a multi site landscape study on the impacts of the quality of the habitat type in the surrounding area on the restoration of the phytofagus beetles. Now there is a hypothesis and some of you might laugh but it's called the field of dreams and it basically means if you build it they will come and that was actually coined in the 1990s. And from the data gathered through this project when we plotted restoration for plants against the success of the phytofagus beetles you can see there is no clear relationship. So simply by creating these meadows you haven't established the full community the beetles can't just turn up. So there's something more complicated going on here. So when we looked at the wider landscape and we looked at the proportion of species rich grassland in the surrounding landscape these habitats which these beetles need to shift from site to site to colonize. There was a much sharper relationship between the proportion of species rich grassland and the success of the phytofagus beetles. So there's obviously a very large implementation in terms of what's going on at the wider scale rather than just on a single site. So connectivity is a vital part, vital property of the landscape not only for allowing species to shift between sites but also enabling ecosystem services such as nutrient cycling to occur. And this was highlighted in the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment in 2005 which went through in great detail the key ecosystem services offered to us by our natural environment in order to maintain our well-being. Now the ideology of conserving single species which was obviously started as I spoke about at the beginning by Charles Rothschild has been utterly revolutionized. Now the focus is a landscape scale and this is being driven forward by organizations particularly the Wildlife Trust with their national programme called the Living Landscapes. And here they are specifically focused on restoring, recreating and reconnecting and they're doing that by engaging not only landowners because don't forget that 70% of our land is agriculture in this country but also local communities trying to re-engage them with their local environment with schools, with businesses and so on and so forth. And it's a real push, a national push to try and create this connectivity which will be fundamental as we move forward with climate change to permit species and habitats to shift in response to these climatic changes. And also absolutely fundamental for maintaining these key ecosystem services. Thank you very much. The problem is obviously the agriculture was already in place when these were designated. So it's not that you know someone went through, Charles Rothschild didn't go through the whole of the UK saying right we are going because they obviously couldn't buy all of the key areas. They had to just take the key biodiversity hotspots as they were at the time. If money allowed I'm sure Charles Rothschild would have loved to have bought every single piece of land that was available to him. And actually the Cambridge Fenn that many of you might have visited that was the very first reserve actually. Now in the hands, yes not with the Wildlife Trust now but that was their first nature reserve. Well that's basically what the Wildlife Trust are now doing. So they're starting with their own sites which covers 800,000 hectares in this country. And they are scaling that up. So at the moment they have 100 living landscape projects and that covers 1.5 million hectares in this country. So it's a phenomenal scale. But of course we can't retract from the agriculture that's already in place. So ideally yes we would love to have 50% biodiversity areas. So that's why this programme is pushing forward negotiating with farmers to make sure for example hedros are managed sympathetically to provide corridors between woodland areas. Rather than you can't just suddenly take that land out of agriculture. We're obviously under massive pressure at the moment. I started by talking about the Green Revolution. The second Green Revolution is now here. And whether people like it or not it will be biotechnology that moves that forward. In some instances there are exciting things that you might not have heard of like vertical farms for example. I don't know if any of you have heard. It was a discussion on radio for last year actually. So basically they're talking about moving agriculture into cities and having sort of tall massive tall buildings effectively where all the plants will be grown by aeroponics which basically means it's just sprayed with water which contain all the nutrients that they need. The water will come from grey water from the city. It will all be processed in the one building actually sold on the shop floor and all the wastage will then be re-churned back into that building through firing or something like that. And then the power will also come from solar energy as well. So in fact there's a very small example at Paint and Zoo. That's how they produce the food products for the animals down there. They're about this high but they still produce them with aeroponics. So there are loads of new dynamic ways of moving forward. So potentially if that move forward and more of these crops products could be produced in the cities then potentially maybe there could be more set aside specifically for biodiversity. But the focus of the wildlife project is to actually engage with urban environments and to engage with business, engage with farmers for it to be a continuous landscape. It doesn't have to just be poctored areas and as I've just shown that doesn't work and it won't work in the long term. It's also worth mentioning that there's a huge drive now to involve local communities in the conservation projects and the recent government-wide paper and all the emphasis on it is on trying to get local involvement to recreate and restore habitats and to try and create that connectivity in the landscape. So increasingly local groups and local projects and restoration projects have to have creation projects happening locally in that part of the living landscape project. It is, that's right. We're working with the communities. Big society has been here for years. I was going to say, what contribution is being run in the constituency scheme making to this? Yes, it's massive in the sense that through the Wildlife Trust work with the living landscape that's part of the engagement. They do lianden elieson work with farmers trying to encourage them to partake in high-level schemes because obviously they in themselves are promoting sympathetic management of hedgerows, having set-asides, et cetera, as well, of which is a huge amount of evidence, obviously that that enhances biodiversity. We've been working on stewardship from the heritage point of view. I was wondering what sort of take-up you've got for the impossible response. I would have to get an actual value from one of the lianden elieson officers rather than off the top of my head, and it wasn't part of my research. Obviously I was focused on that particular site. But in terms of, yes, I wouldn't know in terms of natural England. Do you work with natural England? We do work with it, yes. I mean, I don't know off the top of my head what their uptake is of the agri-environment schemes, I have to say, but I do know that through various projects like up at the River Ray, the project officer up there has been engaging with local farmers and encouraging them, and I think the last time I saw the map, it was sort of 15 out of 20 landowners were engaged at that time. So just to give you a rough gauge. So people are coming on board, and there is still a lot of research that needs to be undertaken in terms of looking at the effectiveness of those schemes. But in terms of creating this connectivity, then it's a real positive and it's being engaged, so. Just before we move on to Peter's point of view, can I advise you just to reflect back on Tom's point about relationship between book learning and being in Paris Commune, because you're very much different from your time between practice. Yes, I was thinking about that actually when Tom brought that up, because I was having a discussion with the students and in terms of, you know, if they had someone lecturing to them that had never been in the field, never carried out restoration projects, they wouldn't have accepted that, basically. To have the experience, you have to be out on the ground to understand how restoration projects work. There is no other way, you can't just learn from textbooks. So certainly in this field, you have to get out on the ground in answer to that question, definitely. That's a bit of a challenge for Peter, because he's talking about a few more times than that. I was more thinking of a challenge for you bringing it all together. The documents, family property, and apparently he provides all sorts of insights into how the local, the feedback and response to normal localisation and Peter is also doing fascinating things with his next-gen databases to visualise patterns in textual resources. Unfortunately we're not going to hear about, I don't think much of either of those things because he has stuck to the brief, which is to look at a particular interesting facet of his work about the concept of revolution. It was built as a radical perspective, a sense of how the labour revolution can distort our understanding of history. Apparently the term feudal is of much significance as revolution, what Peter's got to say. Over to you kids. Thank you very much indeed. I've started this talk at the Temple of the British Worthies at Stowe Landscape Gardens for two reasons. The first is that it's just five miles down the road from home and emphasises that this is a presentation about a personal journey involving my research and is not a learned dissertation on historical writing about the feudal revolution. Though this will feature rather as a story within a story. Indeed as I hope you will see the word feudal revolution in my title used with a touch of irony. I should also make it clear that they're not my words but they were used in inverted commas in the title of an article by Thomas Bisson. The second reason for starting at Stowe is that it is perhaps the supreme example of an allegorical garden with a political agenda. It exemplifies the way in which English and apart from one Dutchman the worthies themselves are English. History writing in England after the Reformation had been shaped by an impetus or desire to reinforce the story of exceptionalism. The Dutchman incidentally emphasises the strong connection with the revolution of 1688. Moving rapidly forward in time I thought I'd make a connection with an example of figurative or metaphorical use of language relating back to the last seminar involving risks in financial markets. The use of such a rhetorical device adds colour and in this instance an emotional charge as well as perhaps allowing the author to avoid the necessity of having to understand what he or she is actually writing about. This is a relevant example because both words, revolution and feudal were initially used in the historical or political context as metaphors. Both words have become deeply embedded in the modern political and historical discourse not least as a result of the writings of Karl Marx and in the Wigg grand narrative of English history. I'll come back to this linguistic theme. To give some context my research is about 12th and 13th century property deeds. These relate to a single family, the Okovers of Okover Staffordshire. This area shows Sheffield, Nottingham, the M1 runs up somewhere here. We're talking about an area down in the left-hand corner near a town called Ashbourne and the River Dove which runs along the borders between Derbyshire and Staffordshire. In this map here we're talking about this area here. So an area tucked away right in the middle of the country. Okover Staffordshire is just at the bottom end, the southern end of Dovdale. It's absolutely beautiful countryside and as far as I can tell the family have occupied Okover since before the Norman conquest and their direct descendants are still there today. That's unusual in itself but what makes them exceptional is that their records of early land transactions have also survived. In the Bodleian Library there is a cartulary which is just a bound volume and that bound volume contains medieval Latin manuscripts, copies of the texts of their land deeds. Secular cartulars are relatively scarce and this one was not only quite early, it was put together in the early 14th century but contains a geographically compact set of records for this one family starting from the early 12th century. Not only this but some of the original records have also survived and these are examples of the Latin copies of these deeds and also a cartulary for Burton Abbey and this is a picture of Burton Abbey in the early 1600s and Tupbury Priory, Tupbury Church and also the Deferres family who held Tupbury Castle, the honour of Tupbury and the Okovers held land from all of these and their surviving records supplement the Okover material and our understanding of it. Having stumbled upon this incredible collection of 12th and 13th century material I began to try to work out what to do with it and from the start my greater interest has been in the documents and I'm trying to understand their creation and the evidence they contain rather than the history of the Okovers themselves interesting though that may be. So my first idea was to try to see how this material fitted into the framework of the law relating to land as it existed at the time and this is really where my problems began the most relevant author on the subject, Milsen was interested in the emergence of the common law his thesis was that the common law emerged from customary and feudal law sometime in the 13th century however he provided very little evidence of the feudal law and how it functioned or how the common law that followed it actually differed from it and that's another story of English exceptionalism I looked through the surviving writings of the most authoritative legal writers through the years and could find nothing that referred to the feudal hierarchy of land holding until Blackstone's commentaries on the law of England in the 18th century Milsen himself quotes Maitland the great 19th century legal historian has been very doubtful about the concept of feudalism at all joking that it really originated in the 17th century as the creation of Sir Henry Spellman and I was particularly confused by the difficulty that I was having in relating what I was seeing in my documents the actual history of the time to a system of feudal law which apparently had existed in the 200 years since the Norman conquest it was about this time in my thought processes that I had a dream I've already heard about the importance of dreams in research though it's not really an accepted part of research methodology but I do find that dreams do sometimes give me access to a clarity of thought which is not always there when I'm awake and in this dream I saw with absolutely total clarity that feudalism, whatever it was was completely superfluous to my study of the documents and I saw it would be possible to proceed by relying on the words in those documents and using them to build an understanding and placing those documents in the cognate collection of documents from Burton, Deferos and Tupry and that would provide a context within which I could make comparisons I should add that my current supervisor Richard Sharp has been at pains to point out to me there's been no systematic study at all of 12th century non-royal secular landchartas and so there is no other basis for comparing what I have got and indeed a recent book on medieval conveyancing suggested that there were no lake harchur or is at all containing copies of non-royal documents of an earlier date than the late 12th century and that is patently untrue following my realisation that feudalism was irrelevant as a concept for adding to my understanding of the documents I began to discover that I was by no means the first person to go down that particular path and quite apart from Maitland a 1974 article by Peggy Brown The Tyranny of a Concept proposes that the use of the word feudalism be deposed and at the same time laments the reluctance of many historians to discard its use in their writing Soon Susan Reynolds in a 1994 book Pheafs and Vassals undertook a thorough study of medieval evidence across much of Europe to try to later rest the concept of feudalism on empirical grounds and in a very interesting book in 2008 Kathleen Davis examines with considerable imagination the impact on our thinking of hidden assumptions or attributions of discourses that involve words such as feudalism and secularisation Now it's possible to approach the problem posed by the use of a word such as feudalism or indeed revolution in a number of ways I'll look at two, the first to search back in the historical writing to find out when the word came into use and Davis amongst others does this to some effect finding that the word feudalism starts to appear in English at the start of the 17th century in the writings of men such as John Selden and Sir Henry Spillman This was a time of great political upheaval but what makes sorry, it's a particular interest that the use related to a case involving Irish land rides and the search for precedent by the crown to extract greater revenue from Ireland This involved a body known as the commission for defective land titles rather reminiscent of Dickens's great office for circumlocution and as Davis describes it the commission was reorganised by Charles I in order to increase revenue from or confiscate land held by the old English or Catholic landholders which it did with some success Selden and Spillman differed on whether feudal law had originated before or after the conquest More than a century later Blackstone's involvement with feudal law again centred around a case involving colonial land holding this time in India land acquired by force belonged to the crown while land purchased belonged to the East India Company A problem apparently developed around the Diwani the right to collect territorial revenues of Ben Golbihar and Barissa the company claimed that the land was still a jury in the sovereignty of the Mughal Emperor whilst de facto it clearly held the sovereign power and this appears to be an early example of the use of a nominee holding Davis develops this considerably greater length and they are fascinating but technical arguments for the purposes of today I think the central point is the strong link between feudal narrative and the problems of legitimacy of land holding acquired by conquest and colonisation The second approach is a more linguistic one As I observed at the start both feudal and revolution are words with a figurative origin when used in political or historical discourse they are therefore abstract in that they do not relate to any concrete object or group of objects sharing similar physical characteristics as in the case of classification of species so any meaning attaching to their use in historical writing has to be a matter of agreed definition In the case of revolution that meaning may be attributed by exemplification based on certain types of events such as the glorious, the French or the Russian revolutions as can be seen in the Oxford English Dictionary However, this process of attribution may involve an element of politics and therefore disagreement and we can observe in say Syria at the moment that Westerners revolution is the regime's armed insurrection incited incidentally by the West Revolution is a useful word for conveying a veneer of approbation and legitimacy to what in reality is a violent user-patient of power That sense of reassurance comes from the original use of the word describing daily revolution of the earth or the rotation of machinery so conveying an aura of regularity or inevitability to an event that is far from regular or even inevitable Now the origins of the word feudal are even more convoluted You can identify two stems one English and one French In English it appears to derive from the Latin ffiodum or feudum which is a word found in early land deeds and which we know today in English property law as the word fee as in fee simple used for freehold property In France or at least in the English take on the French origin of the word the stem relates to the word feud in the sense of serious disagreement or vendetta Interestingly though I find a word like feud in the modern French dictionary I can only find ffiod which looks like the same stem as the English word In England feudalism is apparently associated with strong central kingdom introducing a hierarchical system of landholding emanating from the king In France on the other hand feudalism is exemplified by a breakdown of centralized government and the assumption of powers by feuding local magnates It sounds like a story of English exceptionalism and it probably is Medieval history is perhaps the last bastion of the Wink grand narrative Regardless in English historical writings two different interpretations of the word feudal coexist leading to a range of different definitions and uses sometimes it appears in just the same article As one writer has observed there's something humpy-dumptyish about this and it even makes me think that the postmodernists may actually have something in their more extreme claims of indeterminacy a useful part in historical discourse if it has come to have a widely accepted meaning in whatever context it is used and that seems to me is clearly not the case Now I suggested earlier that Kathleen Davis has another interesting take on this She sees the attribution of descriptive words such as feudal and religious when counterpointed against modern and secular as in my loose terms part of a process by which we define ourselves If we go further and then attach the words feudal and religious to a previous and distant period of time then we distance ourselves from that time and add applied legitimacy to our own way of doing things Her slightly cumbersome title periodisation and sovereignty reflects this thought She does however set out her arguments with great clarity and I've probably not done full justice to them However, Davis goes further and observes the tendency in modern discourse to apply the words feudal and religious to other contemporary societies and I think you'll be able to think of a few cases where you've seen newspaper articles where this is done and her point is that sloppy and arrogant my words not hers use of such high level abstract attributions does not respect or do justice to those we are dealing with or indeed help us to understand what we are dealing with I have the same sense with respect to my research It's easy to make abstract attributions when one doesn't really understand what one is dealing with but I think much more rewarding and indeed valuable to make the more difficult attempt to find out what is actually going on and that brings me neatly back to the use of nuclear language in financial markets and from there remarkably back to Stowe where it's possible to see that the temple of British worth is part of a wig narrative of British history laid out in the greater landscape Across the park from the worth is is the Gothic Temple which I take to be a pastiche incorporation of what is ancient and perhaps feudal in the 18th century imagination History is recognised but at the same time it's transformed and confined into what is in effect an idealised stereotype that ignores many inconvenient truths Just up the Elysian Fields from the worth is and this is a picture of the church at Stowe which is surrounded by planting so that it's pretty well invisible from anywhere else in the gardens The surviving medieval church and there I stop Thank you very much Take up some questions and then perhaps we could get if Tom and I could just come up consider the front of all and use the remaining minutes for a general review I think I've got a question which really relates it to three and I think produces a specific question for each one of the speakers The way I'm taking my cue from you Peter and thinking about the word revolution which is the banner headline here and thinking about the etymology of the word revolution Middle English, early modern English it means rotate and move round and end up in the same place as you started Common image is the revolution of a wheel and then it's applied to a semester of objects My reading of it is not until the 1680s that it becomes a political term roughly synonymous with coup d'etat but the really significant shift I think is in the 1780s and 1790s with the French Revolution where it then becomes the notion of an all-encompassing or very fundamental transformative political and social change along the lines Tom that you were mentioning and so that in my mind produces three, as I said a question for each of the speakers for Tom it raises in my mind the interesting question about the use of the word revolution in the context of Spain for example in the 1930s and the difficulty which you gesture at when you said that part of the problem is the counter-revolution before the revolution so who is talking about revolution how they characterise it and doesn't this point to some problems in the notion of as I would say the modern political polemical definition and use of the word revolution question I had for Kerry was it seems to me no accident that there is a political polemical origin to the phrase green revolution that it's a political as you say in North America late 60s phrase we now talk about the second green revolution but the thought that occurs to me is to what extent is labelling all these very important issues versus the green revolution and therefore dressing it up to some extent in a political polemical with a political polemical label to what extent is that a help but also a hindrance to some of the issues that one wants to bring to light and the third question I had for you Peter I think the feudalism I agree with it is the same with revolution in the context of the middle ages it's a post hoc construction which is read back on it and so I wanted to ask you to say a bit more about the motion of revolution as opposed to rebellion or other words or revolt and other things that are used in the middle ages so there's a focusing on the word revolution and I wanted to ask you to go first Thanks a lot Angus it's a helpful way of encompassing the whole thing and slotting into these different contributions and I think you're right about the fundamental change that takes place with the French Revolution and I guess the point I would make there would be that in a sense every revolution after the French Revolution people are living a kind of trope of revolution they're enacting something which has happened before very self-consciously and I would say in the 20th century in Spain elements on the left you can read their literature to see that they believed they were reenacting the Russian Revolution not all of them but many of them were when I was in Nicaragua I met people there who quite clearly felt they were reenacting the Spanish Civil War and so I think this sense of revolution not only as we're being something as you say is fundamental but also which has such a powerful impact on the imagination of the left in particular and I suppose that's consolidated through the writings of Marx in particular and it's no coincidence that the last image I showed of the Commune was a Marxist image that Marxism and Marx's writings I think absolutely enshrined that in effect modern history is a series of revolutions that the followers of Marx in particular felt they were living through and dreaming of and of course I'm going to go to Peter's point I suppose the important difference is that in the postmodern era I think that Brian Larch that imaginary revolution no longer exists I don't think people do see Syria as a revolution in the sense of the French Revolution or the Russian Revolution I mean it is, people describe it generally as an uprising or something like that but It's part of the Arab revolution I don't think many people are using the term revolution I think it would be very difficult to do that because I don't think that what's taking place there would really fit in with the revolution if people talk about the events of 1989 in Eastern Europe being it's often been described as an anti-revolution because it was a kind of revolution for normality it was a revolution to restore ideas of normality based on what people saw elsewhere in Europe I think if there was a period that began in 1789, as Angus suggests I think it probably ended in around 1968 I don't think possibly with Nicaragua and I think Nicaragua is the tail end of that but I don't think people actually still have many of those component elements in their imagination or of revolution I hope you'd like to give a name to that period I pick up the point about the green revolution it's highly political it was obviously instigated originally by the United States Government to feed to the world India was brought out of the brink of starvation after they had three failed harvests actually that whole process of pushing crop production forward did save them and poverty did shift from one in five to one in three people so politically that was positive to start with but it's recognised now that that is absolutely unsustainable into the future because of the slide that I show showing the mechanisation, the change in irrigation systems and this use of pesticides it is not sustainable into the long term in order to create this massive intense production of crops too much water was drawn some of the massive lakes in eastern Europe are dried out because of that push for crop production and still even with the cotton industry now has a devastating environmental impacts and that's why I said the next revolution, the second revolution is really going to be sort of a biotechnological approach because people are obviously recognising that the first approach was effective in what it tried to achieve I mean in Mexico it was very effective as well Latin America they shifted the tonnage from something like around 33 million tonnes to 144 million tonnes over a 20 year period it was extremely effective, it never worked in Africa and there's a lot of political talk as well about the next drive they call that the second revolution as well but they're specifically focusing on Africa at the moment very very different by a sort of biotechnological approaches are going to have to be taken there's obviously focused on some of the adaptations of the crops were very special they worked for India, they worked for South America but they didn't work in Africa and also the other key thing was that a lot of these crops were driven forward by a lot of breeding programs as well so it came out of the states and now there are large scale multi corporate companies like Monsanto which are politically in the limelight because many of these seeds they only last the one crop year and then they have to purchase more seeds from these companies and use their pesticides and stuff so it is highly politically driven and it would take an entire seminar series probably discuss that in its own light I was particularly interested in was the benefits and the drawbacks of applying a specific political level label revolution to all of that process which is a very complicated very variegated and quite a long drawn out process with a set of issues and it was that it was pinning the word revolution to what I was interested in but beating it I just look, yes, because I need to have quite a picture I mean in the Oxford English Dictionary I think it's Thomas Moore who first uses the word revolution and I think he's using it figuratively probably in a political sense but he's specifically referring to the revolution of the earth the daily revolution of the earth but in terms of specific events I think it's 1688 where it's used pretty well immediately afterwards as far as the earlier period the medieval period is concerned I think the point is that attaching the labels to it actually conceals more than it reveals I was at a fascinating seminar the other day looking at dispute resolution in 15th century Italian and Flemish cities and trying to categorise the different ways in which these cities actually handled their disputes and I think making the point quite strongly that for that period of time we regarded as aberrant behaviour but for that time I mean these were normal conflict was a normal way of dispute resolution and putting it into that wider context certainly seemed to make more sense to me than sort of trying to pin it down into a single framework which applied across the whole of Europe which is what happens with feudalism and as you've suggested the use of the word revolution today in terms of quick labels of things that you've talked about do you know when they first started using the word reformation you mean in connection with the religious recognition I think it's an early 19th century the original meaning was to reform that was the origin of the word but I think it's just a fascinating study to look at which one you use which then frame these concepts which we work with and as in the case of feudalism as in the case of revolution you know you can then as Peter was suggesting superimpose it on events in retrospect that are four or five hundred years away in terms in which contemporaries would never have conceived it they would never have in the same you could apply to the industrial revolution to I think the industrial revolution was another prime case for the construction of the revolution a very good case in point is the recent work by Cliff Davis at Waddon looking at the idea of the Tudor era and really what he's shown recently is that the term the Tudors was coined many years after the time of the Tudor Monarchs and certainly people living at that time didn't believe they were living in some kind of Tudor age and of course as soon as you realise that it's quite striking because for us that was the Tudor era but it wasn't for them it raises also some interesting questions it always constructively you have to positively think about the cutting age of developments that whatever they were doing was brand new that were being done before not so really in a part I mean the thing that brought brought that the history home to me was in the library of Corpus Christi College the Parker Library at Corpus Christi College Cambridge looking at the manuscripts of Matthew Park at the Archbishop in Elizabeth's time scratching out references to the Catholic Church history was being rewritten then to fit a new political reality Thanks Peter for enlightening me but as I didn't know before that the whole concept of feudalism was now very much in question perhaps more of a reflection but when I relate that to Welsh experience when Winneth, the heartland of Welsh princes was eventually conquered by I think the first at the end of the 12th century there was no attempt whatsoever to impose any sort of typical feudal style regime at all really that the organisations and society there continued much as it had before with a few sort of English officials in there collecting in the money and sending it to the English crown rather than the Welsh princes as before and I just wonder how that fits in with the sort of thing that you were saying What I'm seeing in my documents is a large and the Abbey of Burton on Trent is a large number of continuing tenences which had existed before the conquest and continued to exist afterwards a system of land management which was continuous now that obviously isn't the whole picture because you did have colonising Normans arriving and being allocated large slabs of land but I think I said it's the distinction between land which was conquered and land which was purchased is quite a significant one in the feudal discourse and I think this is what subsequently is the problem that they were wrestling with and as Angus said they sort of reflected that back into the past into the past and what was happening there and made more of it than actually exists because I think I mean life went on as normal in many places Do you think there are examples of events where we use one term in the native population and what do the Russians call their evolutions say you've got the word tears I don't know but certainly with conflicts that's very much the case isn't it what different people call the Second World War this has been a very patriotic war in Russia I think there's a large section of the southern population of the United States referred to the war of the southern secession around the American Civil War a little French for the French Revolution Well perhaps we should perhaps we should wrap up so we can continue the discussion over Greece and over the same you know really fascinating connections between the different tours thank you all so much for managing to keep yourselves to time and still managing to convey so many thought provoking ideas I think that it's important to go back to the idea of distances coming up again I mean you're talking about the distance you travel to Nicaragua and the position can the foreign observer the foreign person what kind of view can they form when they drop themselves into a place where they don't understand the language and so on and yet the value of experiencing that kind of visceral and energising is part of what makes you able to be a historian in a sense a historian but we don't have the luxuries of distance with the Green Revolution because it's even in Oxfordshire the Green Revolution doesn't have that sense of geographic or other distance so it seems to raise some other issues about whether we're in it or not in it and what it means to us on Peter you were raising the question that even though going back in time you do not have a time machine a sense of distance where you've been distanced from what you're trying to do by a term a metaphorical term feudalism which is framing what you're doing you're trying to resist that frame and go to the words on the page but you're also trying to negotiate against a certain naivety in thinking that you could ever do that what are your other frames of reference that avoid the problem of feudalism but still make you able to interpret so it's all heavy stuff the theme land was in all of them wasn't it we all have inches of grass get a desperate look