After surviving and flourishing for nearly four centuries, Edmund was the last male member of the senior line of the Mortimers of Wigmore to bear the name ‘Mortimer’ (his inheritance passed to his nephew and direct male heir, Richard, duke of York). 2025 is the 600th anniversary of his death, thus an opportune time to consider Edmund’s contribution as well as the impact of the whole dynasty. This talk will provide an overview of his life and career, which was circumscribed by a childhood spent in royal confinement, and by repeated rebellions by others against the Crown with the aim to put Edmund on the throne.

Philip Hume is the author of The Welsh Marcher Lordships I: Central and North (Logaston Press, March 2021 & new edition March 2023; and editor of the Marcher Lordship series), On the Trail of the Mortimers’ (Logaston Press, 2016), On the Trail of the Mortimers in the Welsh Marches (Logaston Press, 2022), co-author of The Ludlow Castle Heraldic Roll (Logaston Press, 2019), co-editor of The Mortimers of Wigmore 1066 – 1486: Dynasty of Destiny (Logaston Press, 2023) and author of articles in various journals. Philip is the Chair of the Mortimer History Society, a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London, and is studying part-time at Swansea University for a PhD, researching the career of Roger Mortimer (d.1282).

This talk rejects the traditional narrative of great men making (Mortimer) history and looks at the part played by women. From the days of Norman rule in England to the lifetime of Edmund Mortimer (d.1425), 5th earl of March, the Mortimer women were critical to the power of the dynasty at Wigmore and its arrival at the forefront of national politics in the late thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. With a collection of women – Mortimers by birth and marriage – leading the charge, my talk will demonstrate that across the centuries they not only brought new lands and great connection to their husbands, but also (among other things) managed estates and households, garrisoned castles, worked to bring down Simon de Montfort and Llywelyn ap Gruffudd, endured prison and privation, and held great earldoms in their own right. Only when we explore the women’s contributions can we really understand the rise of an impressive border family which, in the fourteenth century, stood centre-stage.

Emma Cavell is a Senior Lecturer in Medieval History at Swansea University. She specialises in the study of aristocratic women and the Welsh borderlands, law and litigation in England and Wales, and Jewish women in medieval England – all between c. 1066 and 1300. Emma won the MHS Essay Prize in 2017, and her essay was published in the MHS Journal vol 2, 2018. She contributed a chapter on Mortimer women in The Mortimers of Wigmore 1066-1485: Dynasty of Destiny (Logaston Press, 2023), and an article on medieval marriage in Mortimer Matters.

If land equalled power in the Middle Ages, then the transnational Mortimer earls of March and Ulster had few equals. By the end of the fourteenth century the dynasty became claimants to the English throne. But marshalling the financial and personal resources that land conveyed required not simply physical and military but also intellectual control. This talk will introduce and explore the almost unparalleled wealth of manuscript and archival material produced by and for the Mortimers throughout the Middle Ages, whether that be narrative chronicles detailing the family’s glories and bolstering the claim to the throne, or mundane administrative documents detailing rights to land and property across England, Wales and Ireland.

Paul Dryburgh is President of the Mortimer History Society. An archivist and historian, he works at The National Archives, Kew, as a specialist in medieval collections. His PhD thesis was on Roger Mortimer, 1st earl of March.

The Mortimer dynasty achieved fame and wealth in England, Wales and Ireland in the later Middle Ages, but it originated in Normandy, and for 150 years was a major landowner in the duchy, as well as acquiring lands in Picardy, beyond the borders of Normandy. This paper will trace the history of the Norman family of Mortemer from its appearance in the eleventh century to its expulsion by King Philip Augustus of France in 1204. The dynasty had lost Mortemer-sur-Eaulne by the time of the Norman Conquest of England, but it continued to use the name of this fortress for centuries afterwards. The family’s main estates were in the Pays de Caux and Pays de Bray in northeast Normandy, but it also acquired lands in central Normandy near Lisieux. In Normandy, the Mortemers were never of more than regional significance, but they maintained their position until they were forced to choose between their Norman and their Insular estates when King John lost Normandy to the king of France. The paper will conclude with a brief consideration of another family called Mortemer, which was probably not related but which has sometimes been confused with the Mortimers of Wigmore, and which also acquired land in England in the twelfth century. This lesser Norman family came to prominence during the wars of Richard I and King John against Philip Augustus, and grew in importance in Normandy after 1204.

Daniel Power is Professor of Medieval History at Swansea University. He is an expert on France and the British Isles in the Central Middle Ages (c.1000 – c.1300), especially the Anglo-Norman, Plantagenet and Capetian realms. His publications mainly concern aristocratic power and culture.

The first part of the talk will explore the complexity of the March of Wales: its different regional and local characteristics; its varying manifestations at different stages of its evolution; the varying figures and families and their fluctuating fortunes in shaping the development of the March. This probing examination of the March will lead on to an assessment of the role of the Mortimer family over some three and a half centuries and in territories in Wales, the March, England and Ireland. We shall then be able to evaluate the totality of the achievement of the Mortimers.

David Stephenson gained his doctorate at Oxford with a thesis on thirteenth-century Gwynedd. His subsequent academic career saw him holding posts as senior Bowra Research Fellow at Wadham College Oxford and Kathleen Hughes Memorial Lecturer at Hughes Hall Cambridge producing books and articles on a wide range of topics from Medieval Essex history, Anglo-Jewish history and medieval Welsh history and modern British politics. For over twenty years he has been Honorary Research Fellow in Medieval Welsh History at Bangor University. His books have included Medieval Powys, published by Boydell and Brewer (2016), and several published by University of Wales Press, including Political Power in Medieval Gwynedd (2014), Medieval Wales (2019), Patronage and Power in the Medieval Welsh March (2021). His latest book, Heirs to the Princes will be published later this year.

The Mortimers are justly famous in the histories of medieval Wales and England. Less well known however is their important place in the history of medieval Ireland. From their arrival in the thirteenth century until the extinguishing of the senior Mortimer line in the early fifteenth century, the Mortimers were major landowners and players in the English colony in Ireland. Of the five Mortimer earls of March, four served as the royal lieutenant of Ireland, and the last three Mortimer earls died on the island. This lecture will provide a survey of the Mortimers in Ireland and their wider significance for Irish history.

Patrick McDonagh carried out his doctoral thesis at Trinity College Dublin on the transnational lordship of the Mortimer earls of March and Ulster across Wales, Ireland, and England during 1368-1398. Since being awarded his doctorate in 2023, he has worked in University College Dublin, the Virtual Record Treasury of Ireland, and is now currently employed by the National Library of Ireland. He has published in the Journal of the Mortimer History Society, a chapter in the society’s edited volume Dynasty of Destiny, and later this year Irish Historical Studies will publish his article on a popular urban revolt in Galway during the late fourteenth century. He is currently engaged in editing and expanding his thesis into a monograph which will encompass all three Mortimer earls of March and Ulster during the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries and provide the first major study of their mighty transnational lordship.