The New History of Scotland

Series · 5 books · 1981-1984

By Jenny Wormald, G.W.S. Barrow, Alfred P. Smyth, and more

Books in series

Warlords and Holy Men

Scotland AD 80 - 1000

1984

Basing his work strongly on documentary and archaeological sources, Alfred Smyth covers traditional topics in a thoroughly unconventional manner.Winner of the 1985 Spring Book Award for Literature (Scottish Arts Council)

Kingship and Unity

Scotland 1000-1306

1981

A history of the forging of the Scottish kingdom. In AD 1000 the Scottish kings embarked on a dramatic expansion of their territories. Geoffrey Barrow describes the evolution of Scottish kingship and government during the period. He examines the character of Scottish feudalism, considers how Scotland's landscape influenced its society and outlook on the world, and traces the growth of a sense of national identity up to 1306 and the coronation of Robert the Bruce as Robert I.

Independence and nationhood

Scotland, 1306-1469

1984

Challenging traditional assumptions of general late-medieval decline, Alexander Grant demonstrates how the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries were a crucially important period of change and growth for Scotland. Under Robert Bruce and his successors, Scotland maintained its independence from England and developed its sense of nationhood, with a profound effect upon domestic and foreign affairs. Dr Grant argues that this led to the evolution of a distinctive Scottish government, nobility, Church and economy, and puts Scottish history into the international context of the Hundred Years War, the plague and pre-Reformation Christianity.

Court, Kirk, and Community

Scotland 1470-1625

1981

Describing the last period of Scotland's existence as an independent kingdom, the major focus of this volume is the events and consequences of the Reformation, that crucial episode which ushered in tremendous spiritual and secular change. Professor Wormald shows how Scotland's rulers, all formidably powerful (with the exception of Mary) and highly cultured, governed a society whose economic and social bonds were still in many ways 'medieval'.

No Gods and Precious Few Heroes

Twentieth-Century Scotland

1981

Harvie analyzes the pressures and influences that, over the past ninety years, have eroded Scotland's position as a world industrial power.

Authors

Geoffrey Wallis Steuart Barrow (born 1924) DLitt FBA FRSE is a British historian and academic. He is Professor Emeritus at the University of Edinburgh, and arguably the most prominent Scottish medievalist of the last century. The son of Charles Embleton Barrow and Marjorie née Stuart, he was born on 28 November 1924, at Headingley near Leeds. Barrow attended St Edward’s School, Oxford, and Inverness Royal Academy, moving onto the University of St Andrews and Pembroke College, Oxford. He became Lecturer in History at University College, London in 1950, remaining there until 1961 when he became Professor of Medieval History at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne, and then in 1974 Professor of Scottish History at the University of St Andrews. He was Sir William Fraser Professor of Scottish History and Palaeography at the University of Edinburgh from 1979 to 1992. He married, in 1951, Heather Elizabeth née Lownie, with whom he had one son and one daughter. He began his work by studying the nature of feudalism in Anglo-Norman Britain, but moved on to specialize more thoroughly on Scottish feudalism. His work has tended to focus on Normanisation in High Medieval Scotland, especially in reference to governmental institutions.

Professor Christopher Harvie is a Scottish historian and author. He was Professor of British and Irish Studies at the University of Tübingen, Germany and a Scottish National Party Member of the Scottish Parliament for Mid Scotland and Fife from 2007 to 2011. Harvie grew up in the Borders village of St. Boswells and was educated at Kelso High School and the Royal High School in Edinburgh. He studied at the University of Edinburgh, where he graduated in 1966 with a First Class Honours M.A. in History. He received his PhD from Edinburgh in 1972 for a thesis on university liberalism and democracy, 1860-1886. As a historian, Harvie was the Shaw-Macfie Lang Fellow and a tutor at Edinburgh University from 1966 to 1969. He joined the Open University in 1969 as a history lecturer, and from 1978 he was a senior lecturer in history. His publications include Scotland and Nationalism (1977, revised 1994), Fool’s Gold: the Story of North Sea Oil (1994), Broonland: the Last Days of Gordon Brown (2010), and Scotland the Brief: a Short History of a Nation (2010).