The subtitle of this booklet claims that it is "The Whole Story" of the 1346 Battle of Neville's Cross. I'd say it bears the same relationship to the entire history of the battle that an angelfood cake bears to a balanced meal: It's light, fluffy, and incomplete.

For starters, the book is only 108 pages long, with large type and large margins! And much of that 108 pages is devoted to sources -- Andrew of Wyntoun's Chronicle, the Lanercost Chronicle, Froissart, other documents. Those sources are probably the best part of the book -- but they leave room for just forty pages of description of the actual battle. That leaves little space for background, little space for the political context, little space for what came after -- and little space to sift the sources. Nor are there any footnotes to let the reader do the sifting for one's self.

And there are certainly errors, often the sort of thing that would have been caught by the knowledgeable editor that this book clearly didn't have. An example comes on page 50, where the author refers to the 1746 Battle of Culloden as a fight between the English and the Scottish. Which it assuredly wasn't; it was the final battle of what might perhaps be called a civil war in Great Britain. It is true that all but a handful of troops on the Jacobite side were Scots -- but the Hannoverian side, although commanded by an English general, included many Scots who were loyal to the king in London.

To sum up, I'm not sure I learned any more from this book than I did from the chapters on Neville's Cross in full-length histories of Scotland that had far more to cover -- but that also were so much larger that they could devote as much text to Neville's Cross as did this pamphlet-sized document.

That doesn't mean you shouldn't buy this book. It's easy to find copies of Froissart, but Andrew of Wyntoun and the Lanercost Chronicle and the rest aren't easy to locate. And this is a decent read that will give you a decent overview of an often-overlooked event. If the book had been called something like The Battle of Neville's Cross: A Very Short Introduction, I would surely treat it more kindly. But the title is simply not true, and if the title isn't true, how can you trust the truth of the rest of the book? ( )