Hundred Years' War

• 1. Introduction

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  The Hundred Years' War lasted 116 years, from 1337 to 1453, which makes its tidy name a small lie. It was never one continuous fight. Truces stretched across years, and the Black Death broke the rhythm of campaigning in the middle of the 14th century. Across that long span, five generations of kings from two rival dynasties fought for the throne of France, then the wealthiest and most populous kingdom in Western Europe. It began as a feudal dispute over the Duchy of Aquitaine. Edward III of England claimed the French crown, and that claim turned a quarrel between vassal and lord into a war that drew in factions from across Western Europe. The conflict was a civil war inside France as much as a struggle between two nations. So how did a question about who could inherit through a mother explode into the longest military conflict in European history? Why did England, which won so many of the famous battles, end up losing nearly everything on the continent? And what did a teenage visionary, a freak Easter hailstorm, and the arrival of field artillery have to do with the answer? The war reshaped how Europe fought, how kingdoms taxed their people, and how two nations came to think of themselves as nations at all.

• 2. A Throne With No Heir

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  In 1328, Charles IV of France died without any sons or brothers, and the main male line of the House of Capet went extinct. The crisis had been building for over a decade. After the death of Louis X in 1316, France had already wrestled with whether a woman could inherit the throne. Louis left a young daughter, Joan, and a son, John I, who lived only five days. Joan's paternity was in doubt because her mother had been accused of adultery in the Tour de Nesle affair. The crown went instead to Louis's brother, who became Philip V and argued that women should be ineligible to succeed.

  Charles IV's closest male relative was his nephew, Edward III of England, whose mother Isabella was Charles's sister. Isabella claimed the throne for her son by the rule of proximity of blood. The French nobility rejected this, leaning on a 1317 decision that women do not succeed in the kingdom of France, and reasoning that Isabella could not pass on a right she did not herself hold. There was a darker objection too. Isabella and her lover Roger Mortimer were widely suspected of murdering the previous English king, Edward II, and the French barons recoiled at being ruled by an Englishman. The barons, prelates, and the University of Paris decided that anyone deriving a claim through his mother should be excluded. The crown passed to Charles's patrilineal cousin, Philip, Count of Valois, crowned Philip VI in 1328. In 1340, the Avignon papacy confirmed that under Salic law males could not inherit through their mothers. Edward III reluctantly recognized Philip and, in 1329, paid him homage for Aquitaine and Gascony.

• 3. The Problem Of Two Crowns

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  Since the Norman Conquest of 1066, every king of England had also been, awkwardly, a vassal of the king of France. William, Duke of Normandy, took the English throne while still owing homage for his French lands. His successors held titles and estates in France, which made them among the most powerful subjects of the French crown. They could draw on the wealth of England to defend their mainland interests. To the kings of France, this was an intolerable threat to royal authority, and they worked constantly to undermine English rule on the continent.

  King John of England lost most of the Angevin continental possessions by 1204, when Philip II of France exploited his weaknesses. After the Battle of Bouvines in 1214, the Saintonge War of 1242, and the War of Saint-Sardos in 1324, the English holdings shrank to provinces in Gascony around Bordeaux. The dispute over Guyenne mattered even more than the dynastic quarrel. Edward III held his French lands as a vassal, which meant a legal judgment in Guyenne could be appealed to the French royal court. The king of France could revoke any legal decision made by the king of England in Aquitaine. That was unacceptable to the English, and it kept the two monarchies in a latent state of conflict for generations. When the 17-year-old Edward paid homage in 1329, tradition demanded he approach unarmed and bareheaded. Edward protested by attending in his crown and with his sword.

• 4. The English Onslaught

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  On the 22nd of June 1340, Edward III sailed from England and met the French fleet at the Battle of Sluys, off the Zwin estuary. The English deceived the French into thinking they were retreating, then attacked with the wind and sun behind them when the wind turned in the late afternoon. The French fleet was almost destroyed. England would dominate the English Channel for the rest of the war, preventing French invasions. The English wool trade was at the heart of the alliance with Flanders, whose cities depended on English raw material. There were about 110,000 sheep in Sussex alone, and governments raised large sums by taxing the trade.

  In July 1346, Edward landed on Normandy's Cotentin Peninsula and captured Caen in a single day. He marched north, pillaging, crossing the Somme at a tidal ford at Blanchetaque that stranded Philip's army. At the Battle of Crécy in 1346, the French suffered a complete disaster, credited largely to the English longbowmen and to a French king who let his army attack before it was ready. Philip begged his Scottish allies for a diversion, but King David II of Scotland was defeated and captured at the Battle of Neville's Cross on the 17th of October 1346. Edward then besieged Calais and took it in 1347, a port that would stay English long after the war.

  In 1356, the Black Prince led a chevauchée from Gascony, pillaging towns such as Carcassonne and Narbonne. At the Battle of Poitiers on the 19th of September 1356, his army routed the French. The Gascon noble Jean de Grailly, captal de Buch, led a mounted unit hidden in a forest, then swung around in a flanking movement that cut off the French retreat and captured King John II and many of his nobles. With John a hostage, his son the Dauphin took up the powers of king as regent.

• 5. Plague, Hailstones, And A Fragile Peace

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  Between 1347 and 1351, the Black Death tore through Europe and reshaped the war as surely as any battle. In France, 6 to 12 million people died, 30 to 60 percent of the population, producing labour shortages, economic collapse, and social dislocation. England suffered too, but less, with roughly 2 to 3 million deaths. The plague and the war together brought poverty, unrest, and a weakening of royal authority in both kingdoms. England recovered from these crises earlier than France did.

  In 1360, a freak hailstorm struck Edward's encamped army near Chartres, killing over 1,000 English soldiers in what became known as Black Monday at Easter. He had besieged Reims for five weeks hoping to be crowned there, but the citizens reinforced the city's defences and there was no coronation. The disaster of Black Monday forced him to negotiate. The Treaty of Brétigny, signed on the 8th of May 1360, gave Edward enlarged lands in Aquitaine in return for renouncing Normandy, Touraine, Anjou, and Maine. He also abandoned his claim to the French crown and reduced King John's ransom by a million crowns.

  King John II remained captive in England for four years, his ransom set at 3 million crowns, with hostages held in his place. The hostages included two of his sons and citizens from each of the nineteen principal towns of France. When his son Louis of Anjou escaped captivity in 1362, John felt honour-bound to return to England, where he died in 1364. After Poitiers, a contemporary report described a kingdom undone, with thieves and robbers rising up everywhere and nobles who despoiled the peasants rather than defending the land from its enemies.

• 6. The French Reconquest

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  By 1378, under Charles V the Wise and the soldier Bertrand du Guesclin, the French had taken back most of the lands ceded at Brétigny, leaving the English with few cities. Du Guesclin was a Breton who rose from humble beginnings to become one of France's leading war captains. The renewed fighting grew out of a quarrel over a hearth tax. After the Black Prince campaigned in Castile and restored Peter to power at the Battle of Nájera, the Castilians failed to pay him. To cover his debts, the Black Prince imposed a hearth tax in Aquitaine. Arnaud-Amanieu VIII, Lord of Albret, refused to allow it in his fief and led Gascon lords to appeal to Charles V. Summoned to Paris, the Black Prince replied that he would come with sixty thousand men behind him. War broke out again, and Charles V declared all English possessions in France forfeit.

  In August 1373, John of Gaunt led 9,000 men from Calais on a chevauchée that became a grim lesson in attrition. Under orders from Charles V, the French refused a set battle and instead fell on detached foraging parties. The English found themselves trapped against the River Allier and crossed the bridge at Moulins, losing their baggage and loot. By December they reached Bordeaux starving, having lost over half of the 30,000 horses they began with. The march was a remarkable feat and a military failure.

  The English leadership then faded. The Black Prince died on the 8th of June 1376, and Edward III died on the 21st of June 1377, succeeded by the 10-year-old Richard II. When Charles V died in 1380, the English held only Calais and a few other ports. France soon lost its own momentum, as Charles VI succeeded to the throne at the age of 11, under a regency led by his uncles.

• 7. Henry V And The Treaty Of Troyes

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  In August 1415, Henry V sailed from England with about 10,500 men and besieged Harfleur, which held out until the 22nd of September and cost him most of the campaign season. Rather than march on Paris, he set out on a raid toward Calais and found himself cornered by a far larger French army at the Battle of Agincourt, north of the Somme. His victory was near total, and about 40 percent of the French nobility was killed. The French civil war between Armagnacs and Burgundians, combined with the madness of Charles VI, had handed Henry his opening. He retook much of Normandy, including Rouen on the 19th of January 1419, turning Normandy English for the first time in two centuries.

  In 1420, Henry signed the Treaty of Troyes with Charles VI. He married Charles's daughter Catherine of Valois, his heirs were to inherit the French throne, and the Dauphin, Charles VII, was declared illegitimate. A formal alliance with Burgundy underpinned the deal. Then everything unravelled at once. At the Battle of Baugé on the 22nd of March 1421, Henry's brother and heir Thomas, Duke of Clarence, charged into a Franco-Scottish force with no more than 1,500 men and was unhorsed and slain. Henry himself died on the 31st of August 1422, possibly of dysentery, and the insane Charles VI died on the 21st of October. Henry left a nine-month-old son, the future Henry VI. The Duke of Bedford took charge of English France and won an emphatic victory at the Battle of Verneuil on the 17th of August 1424. At Verneuil the English archers fought to devastating effect, virtually destroying the Dauphin's field army and eliminating the Scots as a military force for the rest of the war.

• 8. Joan, Cannon, And The Final Collapse

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  In April 1429, Joan of Arc persuaded the Dauphin to send her to Orléans, where the English siege had dragged on for months and the city neared surrender. She entered on the 29th of April, saying she had received visions from God telling her to drive out the English. Within days the tide turned, the French stormed the English redoubts, and the siege was lifted. Near the village of Patay, French cavalry broke through a unit of English longbowmen and swept through the retreating army, killing 2,200 men and capturing the commander, John Talbot. The victory opened the road for the Dauphin's coronation as Charles VII at Reims on the 16th of July 1429.

  Joan of Arc was captured by the Burgundians at Compiègne on the 23rd of May 1430 and handed to the English. A trial headed by Pierre Cauchon, Bishop of Beauvais, convicted her, and she was burned at the stake on the 30th of May 1431. She was rehabilitated 25 years later by Pope Callixtus III. In the summer of 1435, at the congress of Arras, the English demands proved unrealistic. Within days Philip the Good, Duke of Burgundy, deserted to Charles VII and signed the Treaty of Arras, which returned Paris to the French king.

  The long truces gave Charles VII time to centralise the state and build a professional army. A castle that once required a prolonged siege now fell in days under cannon fire, and French artillery earned a reputation as the best in the world. By 1449 the French had retaken Rouen, and at the Battle of Formigny in 1450 Richemont's force struck an English army from the flank and rear. After Bordeaux surrendered in 1451 and was briefly retaken by John Talbot in 1452, the war ended at the Battle of Castillon on the 17th of July 1453. Charles VII's gunner Jean Bureau had laid out a fortified camp, and when the French cannon opened fire the English took severe casualties, losing both Talbot and his son. England kept only the Pale of Calais, until the French took it in 1558. The bitterness of English landowners over their lost continental estates is often counted a major cause of the Wars of the Roses, which began in 1455.