Scotland from the Earliest Times to 1603

A New History of Scotland #1

by William Croft Dickinson

This history remains, for the general reader as well as for the student, of great interest as a single-volume history of the independent kingdom.

Genres: History

454 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1961

About the author

William Croft Dickinson (1897 ~ 1963) was an English historian and writer. He was one of the foremost experts in the history of early modern Scotland (his first scholarly work appeared in The Scottish Historical Review in 1922) and the author of both fiction for children and ghost stories for adults.

Dickinson's first volume of supernatural stories, The Sweet Singers, and Three Other Remarkable Occurrents, was published by Oliver and Boyd in 1953. The four stories that book contained (The Sweet Singers, Can These Stones Speak?, The Eve of St. Botulph, and Return at Dusk) were later republished, along with nine other tales, in Dark Encounters, by Harvill Press in 1963. A second edition of Dark Encounters, with identical contents aside from the addition of an introduction by Susan Dickinson, the author's daughter, was published by John Goodchild in 1984 (see the image below). Written in the tradition of M.R. James, his stories have been referred to as Ghost Stories of a Scottish Antiquary.

Reviews

[Lauren Albert · Rating 4 out of 5]

I thought this was a very good introduction although don't expect much in the way of social history. The book is very much a political and religious history. But I do think it a good introduction to the topic and I thought the relationship between Scotland and France and Scotland and England were well and comprehensively described.

[David Akin · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was a textbook assigned to me in the mid-1980s that, er, I had not yet got around to reading until, er, now. (Do I still get credit?) In any event: Very solid work but definitely assumes a working knowledge of some British and European history from the Viking Age until Shakespeare's time.