De Mortus Mari; from Mortemer in the Pays de Caux, at the source of the river Eaulne; the Castle of Saint-Victor-en Caux was the caput baroniæ. The progenitor of this illustrious house was “Walter, Lord of St.Martin in Normandy, who about 920 married a niece of the Duchess Gunnora, the great-grandmother of the Conqueror. William de St. Martin, his son, was father of Roger, Lord of Mortimer, and of Ralph, Sire de Garenne, and of the Sire de St.Martin, from whom came the family of St.Martin in Normandy and England.” - The Norman People. This pedigree is furnished by William de Jumièges, but has, like most pedigrees, been disputed. Roger, Sire de Mortemer, commanded the Norman army sent in 1054 to oppose the French under Count Eudo, who had seized and pillaged his own town of Mortemer. They “devoted the night to revelry, searching out the wine and drinking their fill;” but before daybreak the Normans had surrounded and fired the town, and the revellers awoke from their drunken sleep to find themselves penned in between burning walls. The Normans guarded the barriers, letting no one pass, and the Frenchmen, though they fought desperately “from the rising of the sun till three in the afternoon,” were utterly discomfited and routed. “There was no varlet, be he ever so mean, but took some Frenchman prisoner, and seized two or three horses with their harness; nor was there a prison in all Normandy that was not full of Frenchmen.”—Wace. The Duke sent a messenger with the tidings to the King of France; and the man, finding the whole camp asleep, climbed a tree, and “all night cried aloud” — “Franceiz! Franceiz! levez! levez! Tenez vos veies, trop dormez! Alez vos amiz enterrer Ki sunt occis a Mortemer!”

Notwithstanding this signal victory, Roger de Mortemer was disgraced and banished for having sheltered in his castle one of the leaders of the French army, his own father-in-law the Count de Montdidier, but was pardoned before the Conquest, for he furnished sixty vessels to the invading fleet. He was himself too old to follow the Duke; but his son Ralph, according to Ordericus, held a command in the army.

Ralph de Mortemer, the founder of the splendid English lineage that conveyed to the House of York its title to the Crown, had inherited his father’s renown, and was one of “the most puissant captains” of the Conqueror. Wace (who calls him Hue de Mortemer Eyton says there is some evidence that old Roger had two other sons, Hugh and William; and they may probably have been in the battle. But Ralph was certainly the heir.) tells us how, with the Sires d’Auvilliers, Onebec, and St. Clair, he stormed one of the Saxon outposts at Senlac, and “overthrew many." He was afterwards selected to take the field against Edric Sylvaticus, the Saxon thane who had obtained the aid of Griffith King of Wales, and proved himself the King's ablest lieutenant in the West. After a toilsome campaign, and a protracted siege of tbe castle of Wigmore, he brought Edric captive to the King in 1074; and received all Edric’s lands in Shropshire and Herefordshire as his reward, as well as a large share of the forfeited estates of William Fitz Osbern, Earl of Hereford. Wigmore Castle, built by Fitz Osbern, was the head of his Herefordshire barony; and in Shropshire Cleobury (which had also been Fitz Osbern’s) became Cleobury Mortimer, and was held by him as Seneschal of Salop. In Domesday one hundred and thirty-one manors are recorded as his property. Dugdale tells us that he commanded Henry I.'s forces at Tinchebray, and captured Courteheuse; but Ordericus gives a different account, and the story apparently originated with the canons of Wigmore. This Priory was founded in 1179 by his son Hugh, who ended his days there in 1185; and on the anniversary of his death, Roger, who succeeded him, endowed it “with a fruitful and spacious pasture, lying near the Abbey, called The Treasure of Mortimer, "saying, “I have laid up my Treasure in that field, where Thieves cannot steal or dig, or moth corrupt."

Wigmore was the chief residence of the Mortimers, who were styled Lords of Wigmore, and as Barons Marcher, guarded a long line of castles on the Welsh frontier. They lived the turbulent and quarrelsome life of Border chieftains on debateable ground, engaged in unrelenting warfare with the Welsh, in feuds with their neighbours, and sometimes in rebellion against the King, though they remained unalterably loyal during both the baronial wars. Ralph II., in the time of Henry III., made himself so obnoxious to Llewellyn of Wales, that the Prince bestowed upon him as a peace-offering the hand of his daughter Gladuse Duy, with a great dowry. She was the widow of Reginald de Braose, and their son Roger married the heiress of her step-son, Maud de Braose, who brought him a share in the vast English and Irish inheritance of the Earls Mareschal, and a third part of the Honour of Braose, - “proper fuel for the future ambition of the House of Mortimer." To this Roger belongs the credit of having planned and carried out Prince Edward’s escape from Hereford Castle. “Seeing his sovereign in such distress, he took no rest till he had contrived some way for their deliverance," and sent a swiff horse to the Prince, bidding him get leave to ride out for recreation in the direction of Widmarsh “and that upon sight of a person mounted on a White Horse, at the foot of Tulington Hill and waving his Bonnet (which was the Lord of Croft, as it was said) he should hast towards him with all possible speed." The Prince obtained Montfort’s permission “to try if the Horse were of use for the great Saddle," and having effectually wearied out the other horses, mounted a fresh one held in readiness by a boy bringing two swords sent to meet him by Mortimer, “and so turning himself to Robert de Ros, then his Keeper, and other by-standers, said, ‘I have been in your custody for a while, but now I bid you farewell;’ and so rode away” to Tulington. Roger met him with his banner displayed, and five hundred armed men at his back, turned back his pursuers, with great slaughter, to the very gates of Hereford; and brought him home to supper at Wigmore Castle. From thence was gathered together the army with which he fought and won the battle of Evesham, and replaced his father on the throne. After the victory of that day, on which Roger commanded the third division of the forces, “no privilege, reward, or honour was too great for him to ask, or the King to grant.” Amongst other gifts, he received the forfeited Honour and Earldom of Oxford; but Robert de Vere resumed them after the Dictum de Kenilworth, though the indignant Mortimer, with the other Barons Marcher, fiercely opposed and denounced the injustice of taking away “what for their pains and fidelity had been given to them by the King.” On the day that all his three sons were knighted by Edward I., he held a tournament at Kenilworth, “the like whereof was never before seen in England:” - a foretaste of the ostentatious splendour of his grandson the “King of Folly.” He “sumptuously entertained one hundred Knights, and as many Ladies, for three days; and there began the Round Table” (so called because the enclosure in which they practised their feats of arms was round). “And, upon the Fourth Day, the Golden Lion, in sign of triumph, being yielded to him, he carried it (with all that company) to Warwick. The fame whereof being spred into Foreign Countreys, occasioned the Queen of Navarre to send unto him certain Wooden Bottles, bound with Golden Bars and Wax, under the pretence of Wine; which (in truth) were all filled with Gold; and for many ages after, kept in the Abbey of Wigmore. Whereupon, for the love of that Queen, he added a Carbuncle to his Arms.” The “carbuncle” of Navarre, a cross and saltire of chains, affixed to an annulet in the fess point, was a canting coat; such a chain being called in Navarre una varra, and in the patois of the country, the “u” being dropped, na varra. His son Edmund, summoned to parliament in 1294, was the first baron by writ in the family; and married a Spanish kinswoman of the Queen’s. It was he who commanded the detachment that encountered and slew the heroic Llewellyn at Builth in 1282, and caused the unfortunate prince’s head to be cut off and sent to the King. The next in succession was the Roger de Mortimer who became notorious as the insolent paramour of Queen Isabel. “He seems,” says Eyton, “to have inherited and combined the worst qualities of the three races whose blood mingled in his veins, the Norman, the Castilian, and the Cambro-Briton;” and his career, “a mixture of violence and ambition, of pride and folly, of intrigue and treachery,” fills an ignoble page in our annals. It is too well known to need recounting here: nor will I attempt to reckon up the sum of the favours, honours, and grants that he coveted and obtained. The task would be heavy; for “the truth is,” says Dugdale, “this Mortimer bore such sway, that he got what he had a mind to;” and the grasp of his ambition seemed measureless. As the declared enemy of the Spencers, he had been sent to the Tower by Edward II., but con­trived to administer a sleeping potion at a banquet to Sir Stephen de Segrave, the Constable, “escaped with a Cord,” and joined the Queen in France. Sentence of banishment was pronounced against him; and ₤1,000 was offered to whoever would bring his body to the King, alive or dead. But when, not long after, he returned to England with the Queen, the Prince of Wales, and their triumphant party, the scene changed as by enchantment His three sons received knight­hood at the coronation of Edward III.; his youngest daughter Beatrix (the six others were already splendidly allied) was married to Edward Plantagenet, the eldest son of Thomas de Brotherton, Earl Marshal of England; and he himself became Justice of Wales, and Earl of March; a new title suggested by his great power on the Border. There, during a progress that the young King made in Wales, he entertained him magnificently in his castles of Ludlow and Wigmore, with hunting, tilting, and other pastimes. His arrogance and presumption grew with his advancement, and passed all bounds; “he waxed proud beyond measure,” and aped Royalty, “so that his own son Geoffrey called him the King of Folly. He kept the Round Table of Knights in Wales, for a pride in imitation of King Arthur.” At length his insolence became altogether unbear­able, and all men were unanimous in their determination to get rid of him. The nobles of the Council, to whom he was specially odious, warned the King of the impending mischief, urging him “to take into account his own dishonour and damage;” and Edward commanded Sir William de Montacute to seize him in the castle of Nottingham, where he was then staying with the Queen-Mother. Montacute took with him two of the Bohuns, Sir Ralph de Stafford, Sir John de Nevill, and others, and demanded admission in the King’s name of the Constable, Sir William Eland, who told them that the keys of the Castle gates were every night brought to Queen Isabel, who laid them under the pillow of her bed until the morning. But he showed them an underground passage through the rock (said to have been made by a Saxon king in the Danish times) that led by some stairs up to the Keep; and by this secret sallypost (since known as Mortimer’s Hole) the barons entered the castle “in the dead time of the night,” and surprised Mortimer in a room adjoining the Queen’s chamber. Some say that his capture was effected with little noise and no resistance; according to others, his attendants fought desperately, and two of them were slain. The Queen, roused from her sleep, cried piteously “Bel Fitz, Bel Fitz, ayes Pitie du Gentil Mortimer!” but the King reserved him for a public and more shameful death. He was brought to trial for complicity in Edward II.’s murder at Berkeley Castle and on five other counts, and sentence was passed upon him (as it had been on the Spencers) without his even being heard in defence. He was executed on the common gallows at Smithfield, when his body was suffered to hang for two days and two nights, stark naked, before it received burial. No end could have been more utterly ignominious; yet “his descendants and lineal representatives in the seventh degree were two sceptred Kings.”

The Earldom was never restored to his son; but it was held by his grandson and the three following generations, and with it were given back nearly all the forfeited estates, which had been granted to Montacute, the new Earl of Salisbury.

Edmund, third Earl of March, through whose famous match with a grand­daughter of Edward III., the House of the White Rose, as “next in blood and parentage,” inherited its undoubted right to the throne, was the great grandson of Roger. He must have been, as Dugdale represents him, a youth “of singular knowledge and parts;" for at the age of eighteen he was employed to negotiate a peace with France, and succeeded so well, that he was sent to Scotland on a similar occasion. Before he was of age, he had achieved the highest fortune of his day, and become the husband of Philippa Plantagenet, the only child of Lionel of Antwerp, Duke of Clarence, by his wife Elizabeth de Burgh, the heiress of Ulster, whose own mother had inherited a third part of the Earldom of Gloucester as one of the last daughters of the famous house of De Clare. In her right he bore the titles of Earl of Ulster, and Lord of Clare and Connaught; and he was also Marshal of England. Richard II. appointed him in 1378 his Lieutenant in Ireland, and he “so tamed the Barbarousness of that rude people by destroying ten or eleven of their petty Kings, within the space of half a year,” that he regained the whole of her lost territory of Ulster, and even enlarged it He ruled Ireland for three years, and well-nigh solved the impossible problem of “reducing that Realme to quiet,” not solely by the cogent argument of the sword, but by kindness, prudence, and affability. Unfortunately, he caught a chill while crossing a river, and died at Cork in 1381, when he was only twenty-nine years old. His will, enumerating his legacies, is a curious record of some of his possessions; the “Saltseller in the form of a Dogg,” bequeathed to his daughter Elizabeth; his “Cup of a Tortois;" another little cup.”made like the Body of a Hart with the head of an Eagle,” given to his son-in-law Hotspur; and “his Sword adorned with Gold, which was the good King Edward’s,” with “the great Horn of Gold,” left, “together with God’s Blessing and his own,” to his eldest son Roger. He had two other sons and two daughters by Philippa Plantagenet; Sir Edmund, married to Owen Glendower's daughter; Sir John, executed by Henry VI.; Elizabeth, Lady Percy, and afterwards Lady Camoys; and Philippa, who was successively Countess of Pembroke, Countess of Arundel, and Lady St.John.

Roger, fourth Earl, though then but eleven years of age, was appointed Lieutenant of Ireland shortly after his father’s death; and in 1385 declared “heir presumptive to the Crown of this Realm.” He, again, spent the better half of his life in his Irish government, and most often sword in hand, “till at last, too much relying on his own valour, he adventured himself before his Army in an Irish habit, and was unhappily slain at Kenlis,” in 1398. He was in the very flower of his age—a year younger than his father had been at the time of his death; and left another child-heir, not more than six years old. He had married Alianor Holland, daughter of Thomas, second Earl of Kent, and sister of Thomas Duke of Surrey and of Edmund, the last Earl, whose co-heir she became; and was the father of four children; Edmund; Roger, who died early, s. p.; Anne; and Alianor.

The eldest son, Edmund, the fifth and last Earl of his name, was in ward to Henry Prince of Wales, and as “the rightful heir, by just descent, to the Crown of England,” was so jealously watched and guarded, that all his early years were spent in captivity. According to Dugdale, Lady Le Despencer (his kinswoman through the De Clares) made a successful attempt to rescue him from the Prince’s custody: but he was soon brought back to his prison-house. We are next told that he headed the Herefordshire men against Owen Glendower, and being defeated, “became his prisoner; soon after which, by allurement or terror he contracted marriage with the Daughter of Owen; and being thus in the hands of that great Rebell, was with him at the battle of Shrewsbury, where the King obtained a happy victory, and this Earl was then released. But upon St.Valen­tine’s Day, 7 Hen. IV., by means of a false Key, he and his brother were both taken out of Windsor Castle and carried again to Owen, but yet shortly after recovered again.” Dugdale here follows Holinshed, as both Shakespeare and Hume have done; but it seems likely that he has confounded the two Edmund Mortimers, and that it was the uncle who led the men of Hereford against Glendower, and not the young heir of the realm, then barely ten years old, and a State prisoner. Even if he was present at the battle, no child of that age could have confronted the formidable Glendower in the single combat described in “King Henry IV.”:— “When on the gentle Severn’s sedgy bank, In single opposition, hand to hand, He did confound the best part of an hour In changing hardiment with great Glendower.”

The young Earl’s wife was Anne, daughter of the Earl of Stafford, and it was, beyond all doubt, Sir Edmund Mortimer (Hotspur’s brother-in-law) who married Glendower’s daughter. Shakespeare’s Lady Mortimer, of whom her husband says, “This is the deadly spite that angers me— My wife can speak no English—I no Welsh."

They are said to have settled in Scotland, and to have left descendants. The escape from Windsor can, however, only refer to the former.

He was released from durance on the accession of Henry V.; went with the King to the French wars, where he served under the renowned Earl of Salisbury, and was Lieutenant of Normandy in 1418. Henry VI., as soon as he came to the throne, appointed him Lieutenant of Ireland, as his father and grandfather had been; and he died in 1424, when he was about twenty- four—the youngest of all his short-lived race. Yet Shakespeare, in his pathetic death-scene, represents him as an aged captive: “Even like a man new haléd from the rack, So fare my limbs with long imprisonment; And these grey locks, the pursuivants of death, Nestor-like aged, in an age of care Argue the end of Edmund Mortimer.”

This is dramatised from the following passage in Hall: "The last Earl of March of that name was long time restrained of his liberty, and finally waxed lame;” which obviously refers to his imprisonment in childhood. It had probably affected his health - when he went to France for the first time with Henry V. he had to return home invalided - and may have tended to shorten his life; but he certainly did not “in prison spend his pilgrimage.”

His brother was already dead, and no children had been born of his marriage; thus the representation of the house of Mortimer passed to his two sisters. Alianor, who had married a Courtenay, was childless; and the entire inheritance —a vast aggregate of manors and castles in England, Ireland, and Wales— reverted to Anne, who, as the eldest born, became, in succession, to her brother, the heiress of the throne. She was the wife of Richard Plantagenet, Earl of Cambridge (a younger son of Edmund Duke of York), or rather, at that time, his widow, as he had been beheaded at Southampton in 1415 for conspiring against Henry V. Within thirty years of his death, their son Richard (who had succeeded his uncle as Duke of York) in open parliament claimed the crown, and commenced the long contention that was to cost so many lives, and all but exterminate the nobility of England.

No less than five other branches of the family attained baronial rank. Robert (son or brother of the first Hugh of Wigmore) obtained the great Honour of Richard’s Castle through his wife Margery de Say, and held twenty-three knight’s fees in Herefordshire and six in Worcestershire. His great grandson Hugh was summoned to parliament as Baron Mortimer of Richard’s Castle in 1229, but left no male heir; and Joan, his eldest daughter, carried Richard’s Castle to Sir Richard Talbot, whose posterity held it for two generations. A younger brother of this Lord Mortimer, named William, became Lord Zouche of Mortimer (see Souche).

The Barons of Attilbergh in Norfolk descended from Robert de Mortimer, whose Lincolnshire estates were forfeited for rebellion against King John, and bestowed upon his kinsman of Richard’s Castle. The first summoned to parliament was William, 25 Ed. I., who was taken prisoner in the French wars, and died at Paris. Constantine his son had license to castellate his house at Sculton, and also received a writ of summons; but it was not repeated to any of the descendants. The last spoken of by Dugdale is another Constan­tine, living in the reign of Henry IV.

The Mortimers of Chirke acquired their barony by a flagrant breach of faith. Griffith ap Madoc, who had taken part with Henry III. and Edward I. against his own countrymen, left his children under age at his death. Edward I. gave the wardship of Madoc, the eldest son, to John Earl Warren; and of Llewellyn, the younger, “to whose part the Lordships of Chirke and Nanheydwy fell, to Roger Mortimer, a younger Son to Roger Lord of Wigmore. Which Guardians forgetting the Service done by Griffith ap Madoc, so guarded these their Wards, that they never returned to their Possessions; and shortly after obtained these Lands to themselves by Charter.” Thus ignobly enriched, Roger became a man of note and importance in his generation. He built a castle at Chirke; fought with Edward I. in Scotland and Gascony, and was a baron by writ in 1299. Edward II. loaded him with favours. He was made first Justice of North Wales; then Justice of all Wales; most of the Welsh castles were committed to his charge; and two of them—Blaynleveny and Dinas—were granted to him as a free gift in 1311. But ruin overtook him at last He was one of the lords who passed sentence of banishment on the Spencers, and was sent to the Tower, where he remained till his death. His grandson John sold Chirke to the Earl of Arundel Dugdale tells us very little of the Barons of Chelmarsh. The first, Hugh, was a younger son of Ralph Lord Mortimer and the Welsh princess Gladuse Duy; and the husband of his father’s ward, Agatha de Ferrers, who at length became one of the co-heirs of Walter Mareschal, Earl of Pembroke. “This line ended in the fourth generation in Females.”

Mortimer is among the many great names that are now merged in the Royal family of England; but it still clings to some of the ancient manors of the family. Besides Cleobury Mortimer, we find Streatfield Mortimer in Berkshire, Worthy Mortimer in Hampshire, Woodham Mortimer in Essex, and Luton Mor­timer in Bedfordshire.

A Norman name: From the Domesday Book, de Mortemer; a local name