"Mammoth" is one word that comes to mind to describe Bruce McAndrew's ground-breaking investigation of Scottish heraldry: the book's 632 pages tip the scales at about 1.5 kg; there are more than two hundred tables and genealogies (many with colour); and, at $170 USD, the price is hefty too. But this is a book that makes a weighty contribution to its subject, and while the cost alone may exclude it from the bookshelves of all but the most specialist reader, it will no doubt prove to be a valuable addition to research collections and libraries and will bear consulting on a variety of issues.
McAndrew's stated aim in the book is to fill a fairly substantial gap in Scottish heraldic scholarship, particularly in regard to the analysis and interpretation of the armorial rolls, a principal source of information for the subject but one that has been under-utilized, especially for the early centuries of heraldry in Scotland. This is undoubtedly where the book makes its biggest contribution, that is, in its careful and deliberate treatment of the two centuries before the Armorial de Gelre of 1370: in fact, about half the book is concerned with this period. From there McAndrew moves forward through to the seventeenth century, when the early volumes of the official Lyon Register appeared.
The first half of the book is organized in a broadly chronological manner, opening with a chapter explaining the origin, rules and language of heraldry. This is a very useful review of some of the specialized heraldic jargon that is encountered throughout, and there is also a very useful glossary of heraldic terms to which this reviewer, at any rate, found himself frequently returning. Chapter two tackles early Scottish heraldry, and from there the next five chapters progress chronologically through earldoms and territorial lordships, the Great Cause of 1291-2, the Ragman Roll, early rolls of arms, and the Declaration of Arbroath. Much of this part of the book is, of necessity, dedicated to the royal house and the most important magnates of the realm. There is a good deal of discussion of sigillographic evidence, something that this reviewer found to be both useful and a major contribution of the book.
Building upon this foundation, McAndrew moves through the fourteenth to seventeenth centuries in the second half of the book, where there is a wider range of source material available. The study also becomes more thematic in this section, with chapters that consider, for example, how sons differentiated their coats-of-arms from those of their fathers, and the various armorial charges encountered in Scottish heraldry. The last quarter of the book is organized regionally, and shifts from an emphasis upon the royal house and the great magnates to explore the Scottish laird within the heraldic framework. This regional coverage is both thorough and very even, and although the lowlands predominate (as is to be expected, since this was the nucleus of heraldic practice in Scotland from which it disseminated outwards), the coverage of the highlands is fair and significant. The plates are mostly in colour and are crisp and clear, and there are some less-well-known illustrations here in addition to the standard and familiar illustrations of, for example, the Declaration of Arbroath. The tables and genealogical charts are also clear and the arms are often reproduced in colour. The overall appearance of the book is certainly pleasing.
The title of the book, Scotland's Historic Heraldry, captures another, perhaps the most significant, aspect of the work: the fact that Scottish heraldry is not considered in isolation but rather holistically within the framework of Scottish history. In fact, this is less a book about Scottish heraldry than about the nature of the society within which it functioned, and an equally apt title would have been "Scotland's Heraldic History." Thus, key themes within Scottish history are examined as they relate to heraldry and heraldic practice; the nature of both nobility and monarchy are thoroughly explored; and, above all McAndrew shows how what was essentially a "foreign" European practice was adopted and adapted by a society on the northern margins of Europe and developed into something that in many cases became unique. As is to be expected, genealogy plays a significant role in the study--heraldry is really only comprehensible as it relates to families, after all--so that while some of the genealogical information presented is rather dense and difficult to wade through, the accompanying charts both facilitate assimilation of the information and provide wonderful colour illustrations of the arms of virtually every family of note in Scotland between the thirteenth and seventeenth centuries.
One might, of course, quibble with various aspects of the historical component of the work--to take but one example, the recurring use of "feudalism" and "feudal" to describe medieval society is quickly becoming a thing of the past. All in all this is a book that is, perhaps, more likely to be sampled for particular, specific pieces of information rather than to be read through systematically in a sustained fashion--but this is not to say that it will not prove useful to historians and genealogists as well as to all those interested in heraldry in general.