‘With Our Backs to the Ocean’: Land, Lordship, Climate Change, and Environment in the North-West European Past

This collection of ten essays celebrates the life and career of Dr Alasdair Ross, one of Britain’s foremost environmental historians, who died in 2017. Inspired by Ross’ own research interests, the chapters gathered here explore interlinked themes of land management and property rights, terrestrial and aquatic resource exploitation, mortality crises, and environmental change, viewed largely through the lens of the Scottish experience within the broader context of the eastern North Atlantic region and covering a chronology that spans from the sixth century ce up to the present. Including a previously unpublished paper by Ross himself, which overturns long-held perceptions of fiscal regimes in medieval Scotland, the contributors present radically revisionist or wholly new analyses of key documents and datasets, mostly through applying an interdisciplinary ‘environmental turn’ to primary record and narrative sources, or advancing new methodological approaches to systems analysis. From saintly interactions with nature to monastic exploitation of natural resources, charter records of land-ownership to the physicality of the landscapes recorded on parchment, and the human cost of subsistence and mortality crises, these papers humanize the discourse around historical climate and environmental change.