Hundred Years’ War

Its roots lay in the status of Gascony, held by the kings of England as vassals of the French crown, and in the succession crisis of 1328: when the senior line of the Capetians died out, the French barons, prelates and the University of Paris excluded Edward III, the late king’s nephew through his mother, and chose Philip of Valois. Edward did homage to Philip in 1329, but after Philip declared Aquitaine confiscated in May 1337 he revived his claim and in 1340 took the title of King of France. In the first, “Edwardian” phase the English almost destroyed the French fleet at Sluys (1340), routed Philip VI’s army at Crécy on 26 August 1346 — a disaster for the French, credited largely to the English longbowmen and to the French king’s decision to attack before his army was ready — and took Calais in 1347; at Poitiers on 19 September 1356 Edward’s son, the Black Prince, captured King John II. By the Treaty of Brétigny (1360) Edward renounced the French crown in return for an enlarged Aquitaine and a ransom of 3 million crowns for the king.

War resumed in 1369. Charles V and his commander Bertrand du Guesclin avoided pitched battles and won back most of the lost lands, so that by Charles’s death in 1380 the English held little more than Calais and a few other ports. The cost of the war weighed on both kingdoms — in England the war taxes were one of the causes of the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 — and on 18 June 1389 the Truce of Leulinghem opened a long pause. Fighting flared up again in 1415 under Henry V, whose victory at Agincourt and alliance with Burgundy led to the Treaty of Troyes (1420); then Joan of Arc and Charles VII turned the tide, and the war effectively ended with the French victory at Castillon on 17 July 1453 and the surrender of Bordeaux on 19 October, although it was formally closed only by the Treaty of Picquigny (1475).

The name “Hundred Years’ War” was coined by later historians for what was an intermittent conflict, broken by truces and by the Black Death. It brought new tactics that blunted the charge of armoured knights, the spread of artillery and of standing armies, and strengthened national identities in both kingdoms.