The Mortimer Regime, 1327–1330

The period between the coup which established Edward III on the throne and the young king's own coup which brought Mortimer down is a curious one, with no parallels in English history before this date, though it was to have several parallels in fifteenth-century Scottish history. Roger Mortimer was not a regent governing with the consent of the magnate interest, as had been William Marshal and Hubert de Burgh between 1216 and 1227. Nor was he much like Simon de Montfort, who saw himself as the leader of a reform movement which again depended on the community for its authority. Roger Mortimer had been associated with the Ordainers and a follower of Earl Thomas of Lancaster, and in the winter of 1325–6 as an exiled dissident from England he had gravitated to the court of the refugee Queen Isabel. What gave him authority was not ideology but his sexual liaison with the queen and control of her son, the young Edward. When Mortimer escorted the queen back to England and rode the wave of popular hatred of the Despensers to engineer the downfall of Edward II, he did so as Isabel's captain. Following the deposition of Edward II, it was still his personal closeness to the queen and her son, the new king, which gave him authority. For the queen saw no reason why she should not, like the great Blanche of Castile, her ancestor in mid thirteenth-century France, govern her son and the realm until Edward was of full age. Mortimer was given no office of state, but it was soon clear that he was always at her elbow and that his was the voice she listened to: the queen ruled, but Mortimer reigned, as a contemporary chronicler put it. The young king was a closely supervised and increasingly resentful cipher.

A second major change also affected all three peoples, though the Welsh less than the others. This was the absorption of eleventh-century Britain into the dominant European Francophone culture. Earlier Britain had not been by any means immune to the international Latin culture which also overlaid the peoples and institutions of Europe and united its intellectuals and clergy in the same thought world.

Ethnic Diversity

Britain in 1000 was an island of several distinct peoples, who were principally defined by language, not by any political unit. Language was regarded as the chief feature of ethnicity in the middle ages, when what we call a ‘people’ was often called a ‘tongue’. England was, of course, as it had been for a long time, the land of the English, but within the kingdom of Æthelred II were other ethnic identities: ‘Britons’ (that is, Welsh speakers) occupied corners of his realm in the north-west and Cornwall, and indeed still hung on at the western fringe of Herefordshire. More recent migrants also retained an identity. The Norse and Danes who had arrived in the ninth century maintained a distinct cultural and legal identity in the north and east of England, though they had by now integrated linguistically. But Scandinavian identity was in 1000 in the process of being massively reinforced by the reappearance of Danish armies and mercenaries in England in some numbers.

The same diversity applied to the kingdom of Alba. Here the Scots, the Gaelic speakers of the west and centre, had political dominance under their king Coinneach II mac Máel Coluim. English speakers were broadly predominant in Lothian and Fife, and a form of Gaelic was spoken in Galloway. Alba too had its Scandinavian element, which was concentrated in Caithness in the far north.

This book is intended as an introduction to half a millennium of British history for degree-level students, though its breadth of coverage would make it useful also as a senior school text. It is not intended as a reference book so much as a guide to broad social, political and cultural change in a very long period of history. Because of the complexity of the intertwining story of the three nations of Great Britain (the English, Scots and Welsh), the emphasis of the book is on themes rather than events. It is not a reign-by-reign account of the kingdoms of Britain. A thematic approach does make more clear what political histories often fail to, that the history and lives of those three peoples did have a powerful ‘British’ rather than national dimension. Indeed, looked at in this way the period can be seen to have experienced a major shift in the idea of what Britain was. As a result, the book is organised in two narrative sections: before and after what is called here ‘the great divorce’, the collapse of the ancient understanding of the British peoples as being united under the informal presidency of the English king. After 1306 Britain was partitioned between two mutually hostile, warring states: England and Scotland. There was no healing of the rift within the rest of the period of this book. The thematic sections, however, make plain that the unrelenting hostility was an overlay on societies and states which were otherwise responding to the same developments in culture, agriculture, economy, disease and social change, and that all three peoples were interacting with forces beyond the British Isles. Ireland (which is part of the British Isles, but not Great Britain) is not specifically addressed in this study, as that would have made the book unmanageable and indeed incoherent. Nonetheless, reference is made to developments concerning Ireland which have a British context.

Within this book there are some major changes which have a significance for vocabulary. One is the change in understanding of the Gaelic kingdom of the north, which under David I (1124–1153) moved into the mainstream of European monarchies. So, before his reign, it is called by its ancient name of Alba, and after by the name it was increasingly given within and outside its borders, Scotland (Scotia).

A medieval kingdom already possessed some of the elements of the state and occasionally a lot of them. England by 1000 was an infant Leviathan. It was a well-articulated kingdom with an energising and exploitative government at its heart which demanded the compliance and allegiance of its king's subjects. It had recognised borders, a single imperial ruler, a standardised vernacular language and its own idea of law. It even had a national administrative and financial structure which could generate the wealth by which navies could be launched and armies could be fielded. The same could be said to a lesser degree about the stable Gaelic kingdom of Alba to its north, which also had a military and judicial organisation to give it reality and expression. But if the volatile and shifting Welsh kingdoms in the west of Britain could be called ‘states’ then they were at a very basic level of development: their kings’ sole aim was to extract a surplus from their tributary districts so as to finance the military household which guaranteed their local hegemony and defended them from their predatory kinsfolk.

In 1000 Britain was a much troubled place. The dominant kingdom of England was disturbed by internal dissensions and a dysfunctional court under a king who was failing to deal with aggressive Danish incursions into his realm. Æthelred II had become king while a boy in 979 following the murder of his elder half-brother and a period of civil unrest. Danish raids on the coasts of England began soon after his accession. In part this may have had to do with the kingdom's internal problems, but it was also related to the fact that Britain belonged more to the northern world, for which the North Sea was a highway. Commerce, people and information freely circulated across the shallow seas of the North Atlantic coastal shelf, so Æthelred's problems were well known in the Norse world. England's relations with France and Germany were by contrast culturally distant.

The part of France closest to the coasts of England would hardly challenge its cultural isolation. ‘Normandy’ was still perceived as a Norse colony, its leaders characterised by other Frenchmen as ‘pirate dukes’, even though it was by 1000 a land whose former Viking aristocracy was entirely French in customs and lifestyle.

An Island of Minsters

Eleventh-century Britain was an ancient Christian land, with a rich heritage of saints and spirituality. The English owed their very name as a people and nation to a seventh-century decision at Rome that the Germanic people it was dealing with in Britain were the Angles (Englysc), not the more dominant Saxons. In 1000, some of what was characteristic of the Church in later medieval England was already established. The two archbishoprics of Canterbury and York divided their authority at the river Trent, though they had not yet decided their tussle for supremacy, and their claims over the British Isles beyond the kingdom of England remained as yet undefined. As England was defined by its shires, so the English Church was defined by its territorial dioceses, most of whose boundaries were coterminous with those of shires. Great Benedictine monasteries were already then important in the South and Midlands, though none was yet to be found in the North.

Visions of Society

The medieval peoples of Britain had a view of society as a thing to which they belonged and in which they each had a place, though not an equal one. In the view of one twelfth-century poet: ‘Everything that the rich achieve – king, count and magnate – is paid for by the poor: the rich of this world squabble but it's the poor who foot the bill.’ It was not by any means beyond medieval capacities to visualise a nation or the human race as a social entity and to go on to analyse it. It was all the easier since medieval people knew that they were all one under God, and both the Old Testament and the Gospels said that there were seventy-two nations, one for each of the disciples Jesus sent out (Luke 10). The English, the Welsh and the Scots were known to be three of these, and each had centuries of history behind them, in the case of the Welsh allegedly going back to Trojan times. Medieval intellectuals most frequently used theology to explain how society worked and interacted. By the tenth century English thinkers, including King Alfred the Great, had absorbed a Frankish idea of society as tripartite: divided between those who fought (and ruled), those who prayed and those who laboured.

Between 1066 and 1217 there were only ten years when the king of England did not also directly rule over parts of France: those were between 1087 and 1091 when William Rufus was in England attempting to secure a lordship of his own in Normandy and between 1100 and 1106 when King Henry was gathering himself to emulate his brother's achievements. Even when King Stephen was ousted from Normandy in 1144, he still ruled over the county of Boulogne until his death. Before 1141 the English king tended to spend considerably more time in northern France than in England. After 1154, the centre of gravity of the Angevin royal house shifted the king's usual haunts even further south, to a heartland between the Loire valley and Rouen. The young king of Scots himself went on tour in France in 1166, to some acclaim. After the 1130s the Scots royal family consistently married female aristocrats from northern France or scions of the Angevin royal house. We can see the cultural and linguistic meshing that followed on from this in some striking cross-fertilisation between peoples and cultures quite early on. A fine example is that of Osbert of Arden, an aristocrat impeccably English in lineage and a retained knight of King David of Scotland. He expected to make regular tours of northern French tourneying grounds in the 1120s.

The new Britain created by the acrimonious divorce between the English and Scottish political communities makes any integrated study of both kingdoms after the accession of Robert Bruce difficult, though they interacted often enough, if as unhappily as any other separated partners. Both in fact entered a state of intermittent warfare and prolonged hostility which was not to find any resolution within the period of this volume. One irritant was a factor that had already acted on relations between the English and the other insular peoples since the wars of 1173–1174 when the dominant Welsh prince, Owain ap Gruffudd of Gwynedd, had opened a diplomatic relationship with Louis VII of France against England, and King William the Lion of Scotland had invaded England as a second front against Henry II. When the king of England was at war with his French enemies and his back was towards Britain, there was always the opportunity for the French to ally with the king's British rivals. When King John Balliol of Scotland came into conflict with Edward I it was an inescapable strategy for him to negotiate an alliance with Philip IV of France in which he arranged a marriage with Philip's niece. When after 1337 the king of England embarked on a long-term war of succession with his French cousins this factor would continually involve the Scots in warfare as a way of gaining an advantage in their dysfunctional relationship with their southern neighbour.

INTRODUCTION

The author and V. C. Serghides have performed statistical analyses to produce combat aircraft reliability and maintainability prediction methods [61]. These are applicable for use at the conceptual design stage, because they only require the use of readily available parameters such as wing span, engine thrust, mass, etc. These methods predict whole-aircraft values of confirmed defects per 1000 flying hours and defect maintenance hours per 100 flying hours. Predictions are also made for individual systems and allowances may be made for technology improvements, relative to the empirical database used in the method derivation. These may be used as targets for reliability performance of individual systems during the preliminary design stage.

Earlier work by the author produced a similar method for the prediction of commercial aircraft dispatch reliability [62]. The whole-aircraft equations produced are reproduced in Section C2, below.

COMMERCIAL AIRCRAFT DISPATCH RELIABILITY PREDICTION

The work reported in reference 62 showed that some systems exhibited different traits according to the type of airline operation. For example long-haul aircraft tended to have higher delay rates because they may be away from their home base for more than a week, and defects might accumulate, whereas short-haul aircraft tended to return to their home bases more often. Other considerations were also affected by the operational type, in such things as ATA Chapter 28, fuel systems, where long-haul aircraft had more complicated systems that were more delay-prone than those of short-haul aircraft. To cater for these effects, separate models were made for the relevant systems.

All the aircraft in the sample had turbo-fan engines of some sort. Some were early types with bypass ratios of less than unity and some were of the more modern ‘big-fan’ type with bypass ratios on the order of five. These two types of engines, again, exhibited different traits, so separate curves were drawn for them. After the graphs were plotted, it was decided that, for most systems, a linear regression analysis would give the fairest result. This process was carried out by the use of a least-squares fit program.