"England and Scotland were poles apart... In England population, trade, wealth had constantly increased. New industries had grown up and found new markets in a richer, more sophisticated lay society at home. The economic growth of England had been extraordinary and had created, however unequally, a new comfort and a new culture. But in Scotland there had been no such growth. There was little trade, little industry, no increase of population. Always poor and backward, it now seemed, by contrast, poorer and more backward still. That contrast is vividly illustrated by the comments of those who crossed the Tweed, in either direction. We read the accounts of English travellers in Scotland. Their inns, cries Sir William Brereton, are worse than a jakes; and he breaks into a sustained cry of incredulous disgust at that dismal, dirty, waste, and treeless land. Then we turn to the Scottish travellers in England. "Their inns", exclaims Robert Baillie, "are like palaces"; and Sir Alexander Brodie of Brodie, goggling at all the wicked fancies and earthly delights of London, reminds us of a bedouin of the desert blinking in the bazaar of Cairo or Damascus."
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Historians from EnglandUniversity of Oxford facultyUniversity of Oxford alumniConservative Party (UK) politiciansFellows of the British Academy
Original Language: English
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'Scotland and the Puritan Revolution', in H. E. Bell and R. L. Ollard (eds.), Historical Essays, 1600–1750, Presented to David Ogg (1963), p. 81
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Hugh_Trevor-Roper
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Hugh Trevor-Roper
Hugh Redwald Trevor-Roper, Baron Dacre of Glanton (15 January 1914 – 26 January 2003) was an English historian. He was Regius Professor of Modern History at the University of Oxford. Trevor-Roper was a polemicist and essayist on a range of historical topics, but particularly England in the 16th and 17th centuries and Nazi Germany.
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