Tenants, Tenures and Transfers

This thesis examines the impact of different customary manorial tenures on the land transfer activities of rural tenants between 1645 and 1705. The study of land transfer has formed part of the attempt by historians to establish how and why England developed from family-based subsistence farming into large-scale commercialised agriculture before many of its Continental neighbours. A key element in any study of land transfer is the property rights of those undertaking the transfers. England had a variety of customary tenures, and little research has focussed on how they operated and impacted on rural tenant transfer behaviour in the early modern period. This study uses evidence from eight manors in Hampshire with four different types of tenure to explore how they affected what land transfer options the tenants had, and how transfers were used to further family and economic objectives. The types of tenure were copyhold of inheritance; copyhold for three lives; copyhold for three lives where the first could act alone; and a form of customary freehold. The main documentary sources are manorial records augmented by parish, probate, survey and taxation material. The tenurial and landholding structure of the manors is established for 1645 using the Cromwellian Parliamentary Surveys of confiscated ecclesiastical estates. The analysis of subsequent tenant land transfers through to 1705 then examines their volume and any correlation with prices and population movements. The permanent transfers of death/inheritance and the inter vivos land market are analysed to assess the extent to which tenants were attached still to family, or taking part in an active extra-familial investment and sales market; and whether this led to changes over time in farm holding size and distribution. The temporary transfers of sub-letting of land and sub-tenure of dwellings are then analysed. The latter has not been studied before, and uses the Hearth Tax returns to compare occupiers of dwellings with formal tenants. Finally a detailed study of mortgages is made. Previous studies of the use of land as collateral for a mortgage loan have often overlooked the rural tenant as a participant in the credit market, and changes in the laws of usury at the end of the sixteenth century produced a significant uptake of mortgaging in the seventeenth, which makes this study timely. The research reveals that the tenants were very active with their transfers, but that the way in which they were active was determined by tenure. Those with copyhold of inheritance tenure had many options including inheritance, sale, mortgaging, sub-letting, splitting holdings, and conditional surrenders to provide for old age or several children. Those with copyhold for lives were restricted to after-death transfers, shuffling of reversion lives, or sub-letting. However, they adapted, and while Inheritance-tenured tenants adopted mortgages with enthusiasm, Lives tenants sub-let on a large scale. Both thereby acquired financial support from their lands, so that although the land-family bond was not absent, the bond was strongest in terms of using the land as an economic asset. The sub-letting of dwellings enabled Lives tenants to accommodate a landless workforce, where their tenure prevented the splitting of parcels for sale as manorial smallholdings. Aggressive accumulation of land was largely absent, and purchasers of land and mortgage lenders were overwhelmingly local. Some polarisation of holding size was found, but sub-tenure meant that actual farmed units were probably very different. It is concluded that differences in tenure significantly shaped the transfer behaviour of the tenants, so that any future research involving customary tenants must take tenure into account. However, their economic ambitions were found to be similar whichever tenure they had, so that they had to take different means to the same end

SLDLT: une technique de mise à jour de la décomposition LDLT pour l'accélération des simulations de Monte Carlo dans le cas de champs stochastiques non uniformes

National audienceSee http://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/docs/00/59/29/54/ANNEX/r_79AK56I8.pd

Approche probabiliste pour l'analyse des tolérances des produits hyperstatiques – application à une pompe

International audienceL'analyse des tolérances des mécanismes a pour but d'évaluer la qualité du produit lors de sa phase de conception. La technique consiste à déterminer si, dans une production de grandes séries, le taux de rebuts des mécanismes défaillants est acceptable. Deux conditions doivent être vérifiées: une condition d'assemblage et une condition fonctionnelle. La méthode existante se base sur le couplage de la simulation de Monte Carlo avec un algorithme d'optimisation qui est très couteuse en temps de calcul. De ce fait, nous proposons une méthode plus efficace basée sur des approches probabilistes. Ces travaux ont permis le développement d'une nouvelle méthode de résolution basée sur la méthode de fiabilité système FORM (First Order Reliability Method) système. Cette méthode permet de traiter uniquement le problème fonctionnel. Ces performances sont illustrées sur un cas industriel : une pompe à débit variable

Effect of Short-Term Supplementation with Ready-to-Use Therapeutic Food or Micronutrients for Children after Illness for Prevention of Malnutrition : A Randomised Controlled Trial in Nigeria

Background Globally, Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) treats more than 300,000 severely malnourished children annually. Malnutrition is not only caused by lack of food and poor infant and child feeding practices but also by illnesses. Breaking the vicious cycle of illness and malnutrition by providing ill children with nutritional supplementation is a potentially powerful strategy for preventing malnutrition that has not been adequately investigated. Therefore, MSF investigated whether incidence of malnutrition among ill children <5 y old could be reduced by providing a fortified food product or micronutrients during their 2-wk convalescence period. Two trials, one in Nigeria and one in Uganda, were conducted; here we report on the trial that took place in Goronyo, a rural region of northwest Nigeria with high morbidity and malnutrition rates. Methods and Findings We investigated the effect of supplementation with ready-to-use therapeutic food (RUTF) and a micronutrient powder (MNP) on the incidence of malnutrition in ill children presenting at an outpatient clinic in Goronyo during February to September 2012. A three-armed, partially-blinded, randomised controlled trial was conducted in children diagnosed as having malaria, diarrhoea, or lower respiratory tract infection. Children aged 6 to 59 mo were randomised to one of three arms: one sachet/d of RUTF; two sachets/d of micronutrients or no supplement (control) for 14 d for each illness over 6 mo. The primary outcome was the incidence of first negative nutritional outcome (NNO) during the 6 mo follow-up. NNO was a study-specific measure used to indicate occurrence of malnutrition; it was defined as low weight-for-height z-score (<−2 for non- malnourished and <−3 for moderately malnourished children), mid-upper arm circumference <115 mm, or oedema, whichever came first. Of the 2,213 randomised participants, 50.0% were female and the mean age was 20.2 (standard deviation 11.2) months; 160 (7.2%) were lost to follow-up, 54 (2.4%) were admitted to hospital, and 29 (1.3%) died. The incidence rates of NNO for the RUTF, MNP, and control groups were 0.522 (95% confidence interval (95% CI), 0.442–0.617), 0.495 (0.415–0.589), and 0.566 (0.479–0.668) first events/y, respectively. The incidence rate ratio was 0.92 (95% CI, 0.74–1.15; p = 0.471) for RUTF versus control; 0.87 (0.70–1.10; p = 0.242) for MNP versus control and 1.06 (0.84–1.33, p = 0.642) for RUTF versus MNP. A subgroup analysis showed no interaction nor confounding, nor a different effectiveness of supplementation, among children who were moderately malnourished compared with non-malnourished at enrollment. The average number of study illnesses for the RUTF, MNP, and control groups were 4.2 (95% CI, 4.0–4.3), 3.4 (3.2–3.6), and 3.6 (3.4–3.7). The proportion of children who died in the RUTF, MNP, and control groups were 0.8% (95% CI, 0.3–1.8), 1.8% (1.0–3.3), and 1.4% (0.7–2.8). Conclusions A 2-wk supplementation with RUTF or MNP to ill children as part of routine primary medical care did not reduce the incidence of malnutrition. The lack of effect in Goronyo may be due to a high frequency of morbidity, which probably further affects a child’s nutritional status and children’s ability to escape from the illness–malnutrition cycle. The duration of the supplementation may have been too short or the doses of the supplements may have been too low to mitigate the effects of high morbidity and pre- existing malnutrition. An integrated approach combining prevention and treatment of diseases and treatment of moderate malnutrition, rather than prevention of malnutrition by nutritional supplementation alone, might be more effective in reducing the incidence of acute malnutrition in ill children

Inpatient Mental Health Services in Rural Hospitals of the United States and Canada: A Case Study of Maine and New Brunswick

An important resource for mental health patients is their nearest hospital, and this is especially true in rural regions where outpatient mental health services may be lacking. In the United States, policies are in place which limit the ability of small, rural hospitals to provide inpatient psychiatric services cost effectively, leading many hospitals to forgo offering the services at all. This project compares the situation in the United States with that of Canada—where similar policies are not present under a vastly different healthcare system—to see if inpatient psychiatric services are more or less prevalent in rural Canadian hospitals and whether this is associated with different mental health outcomes. To study this relationship, Maine and New Brunswick are used as a case study due to their close comparability in terms of demographic, socio-economic and geographic characteristics. This project focuses on rural hospitals in Maine and New Brunswick, the provision of inpatient psychiatric services therein, and mental health outcomes in the surrounding regions. The results of this project may help policy makers and healthcare administrators looking to better understand the implications of policies on the provision of rural inpatient psychiatric services, in addition to providing a base for future research on this topic