Welsh Journals

REVIEWS A HISTORY OF SCOTLAND. By Rosalind Mitchison. Methuen University Paperbacks, No. 332. London, 1970. Pp. 468. £ 1.40. It is a pleasure to welcome this accomplished piece of historical writing. To encompass the history of a country within the covers of a single volume is always an exacting commission, but it is one which Mrs. Mitchison appears to have executed with great success-I write 'appears' only because I have no competence to pronounce in detail on the whole of Scottish history, and not because I have any serious doubts about the worth of the book. Its prime merits are unmistakable even to someone who knows all too little of Scottish history: the smooth, well-ordered narrative, interspersed with lucid social and economic analyses; the crisp, incisive judgment on men and events; the extensive and up-to-date knowledge of European and English, as well as Scottish, history; and the lively and attractive quality of the writing. A few brief quotations may convey something of the flavour of the book. On James VI and I's education: 'It was as if James had taken first-class honours at a modern university in all the older and non-expanding subjects.' The preliminaries to the union of 1707 are 'like a quarrel within a marriage. Each side had done the most they could to hurt the other, and for the same reason that quarrels within the marriage are worse than those outside, because the partners are fighting not only against each other but against the fact of the marriage that holds them together.' Or again, 'The influence of population growth on an economy, like that of a bump on a ski slope, enormously helps the performance of those sufficiently skilled to take advantage of it, but throws the beginner off balance.' The balance of the book is unusual since it is weighted heavily in favour of the seventeenth century, and out of twenty-three chapters nine are devoted to the years from 1603 to 1707. This is a pattern deliberately adopted on the not unreasonable grounds that this is 'the key period for the understanding of modern Scotland'. It has to be admitted that the treatment of this period is outstandingly good, with a cool, detached, but not unsympathetic, critique of many of the myths that have so long passed for patriotic history in the Scottish consciousness. Yet such a disproportionate amount of space and emphasis is less than wholly convincing, and it may be occasioned by a reluctance to abandon that political history that is regarded as 'real' history. The changes wrought by the Industrial Revolution seem to the reviewer to have transformed Scottish life at least as drastically as the great dramas of the seventeenth century, and Mrs. Mitchison's two excellent chapters on the Industrial Revolution and the Victorian Age give ample evidence of her capacity to have handled these major themes in greater and more satisfying depth. Welsh readers may be particularly interested in some of the parallels which Scottish history offers with Welsh history: Edward I's attitude