Deviation Actions
Description
This year is significant for two reasons; first, the murder of King Godwine I while touring a ship factory in Liverpool; second, the Anglo-Norse wars turned from skirmishes on the North Sea to a vicious invasion of Norway, the first time that the full panoply of English power is asserted outside the British Isles.
The conquest of Scotland, completed in 1095, should've heralded the creation of the Scottish earldoms, akin to the conquest of Wales and Ireland; instead, Godwine I chose to take much of Scotland under personal suzerainty, against the advice of his consol and many of the English Earls (some of whom were trying to secure earldoms for their own kin). Increasingly unpopular decisions during his reign, including the forced removal of scottish tribes to create vast hunting lands and royal estates, lead to his assasination in April 1104, while touring a new drydock facility in Liverpool, Mercia. The assasin was caught by a mob and lynched, and was found to be a member of one of the scottish tribes dispossessed for one of Godwine's hunting estates.
When the news reached Winchester, Godwine's brother Edmund was crowned in a rushed ceremony and hailed as Edmund III. Edmund treatised with the scottish families, and carved out new English earldoms from the royal estates.
At the same time, the long-running war with Norway finally resulted in an English invasion; using ships initially built for the trans-Atlantic journey, thousands of English soldiers, some created from new Welsh, Irish and Scottish brigades, were sent to Norway and Iceland, conquering the country in it's entirety in just two years, with the use of advanced muskets and cannon.
Questions and comments always welcome.
interesting idea for a storyline here, the author Harry Turtledove pulled a fast one in his Alt Hist "The Guns of the South" where a bunch of time travellers turn up in the deep south during the Civil War and start handing out lots of free AK-47's to Robert E. Lee and the Army of Northern Virginia.
However you might have had a hell of a lot more trouble in Ireland, Irish princes and kings were elected by a senate of elders, there was no concept of a crown prince who would be king just because of chance of birth. This meant that the office passed from grown man to grown man there were no troublesome examples of a snotty baby being declared king with a bunch of lords killing each other to become regent as happened in Scotland. This also meant the canniest or most capable might become king.
Also Irish kings could be much more merciless than their English counterparts, in the part I'm from we had a king called Dermot MacMurrough King of Leinster who recorded as being "damned when dead and putrid while living" apparently his body started to rot in his old age(leprosy?) he had the child of one prince skinned alive and jointed like a calf for the butcher and sent the lot back to the father in a sack. In another example he's recorded as using the heads of his enemies as footballs after a battle. There was also the prince Abertach from the north he's meant to have ruled after St. Patrick came and Abertach supposedly drank the blood of his enemies after his people rebelled against him, he's buried in a hill tomb south of Londonderry .