The Hundred Years’ War

The Hundred Years’ War is the name historians give to a series of wars between England and France that began in 1337 and ended in 1453. It was not one continuous war: there were several phases of fighting separated by truces and peace treaties, some lasting many years.

At its heart were two questions. First, who should rule the lands in south-western France that the English kings held as vassals of the French crown? Second, who was the rightful king of France itself? English kings from Edward III onward claimed the French throne through descent from a French princess, and at one point, under Henry V and his son Henry VI, it looked as though they might win it.

The war ended with a French victory. By 1453 the English had lost Normandy and Gascony, keeping only Calais. The war left deep marks on both kingdoms: on their taxes, armies, languages, heroes and stories about themselves.

Since the Norman Conquest of 1066, English kings had also been great lords in France. By the early fourteenth century most of these lands had been lost, but they still held the duchy of Aquitaine, often called Gascony, around Bordeaux. For this duchy the English king had to do homage to the French king, as a vassal to his lord. French kings used their courts to interfere in Gascony, and English kings resented it.

In 1328 King Charles IV of France died without a son. His nearest male relative through his sister was her son, the young Edward III of England. French lawyers and nobles preferred Philip of Valois, a cousin descended through the male line, who became Philip VI. Later French jurists justified this by appealing to the so-called Salic law, which excluded inheritance through women; this argument was developed more fully after the fact.

Other tensions added fuel. The rich cloth towns of Flanders depended on English wool, so they leaned toward England while their count was loyal to France. France supported Scotland against England in the “Auld Alliance”. In May 1337 Philip VI declared Gascony confiscated, and Edward III answered with war; in 1340 he formally took the title King of France.

England had a smaller population than France but a well-organised system for raising paid armies through contracts. Its armies combined dismounted men-at-arms with large numbers of archers using the longbow, which could shoot many arrows quickly. France had more knights and more wealth, and later developed permanent paid companies and powerful artillery.

Much of the fighting was not in great battles but in the chevauchée: a mounted raid through enemy territory designed to burn villages, destroy crops, seize loot and show that the enemy king could not protect his people. Sieges of towns and castles were also common.

Both kings relied on allies and local lords. Some French nobles, especially in Brittany and later Burgundy, sided with England; the Gascons largely stayed loyal to the English king, their distant lord. Mercenary companies of many nationalities fought for pay and, in peacetime, often kept looting on their own account.

The English won control of the Channel at the naval battle of Sluys in 1340. In 1346 Edward III landed in Normandy, marched toward Paris and then north, and on 26 August defeated a much larger French army at Crécy. He then besieged Calais for about a year until it surrendered in 1347; it would remain English for more than two centuries.

In 1348 the Black Death reached France and England, killing perhaps a third or more of the population in many areas and interrupting the war. Fighting resumed in the 1350s. In 1356 Edward’s eldest son, Edward of Woodstock, later called the Black Prince, defeated the French at Poitiers and captured King John II himself.

With its king a prisoner, France fell into crisis: a reform movement in Paris led by Étienne Marcel and a violent peasant revolt, the Jacquerie, both broke out in 1358. The Treaty of Brétigny (1360) gave Edward a greatly enlarged Aquitaine in full sovereignty and a huge ransom for John, in return for Edward dropping his claim to the French crown. The renunciations, however, were never fully carried out.

King Charles V of France reopened the war in 1369. Advised by his constable Bertrand du Guesclin, he avoided large pitched battles and took back towns and castles one by one. By the 1380s the English held little more than Calais and a coastal strip of Gascony. Both kingdoms were exhausted: England faced the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, and truces followed from 1389.

The war also spread beyond France. England and France backed rival claimants in the Castilian civil war in the 1360s; the Black Prince won the Battle of Nájera in 1367, but the French-backed Henry of Trastámara eventually took the throne, and Castile’s galleys then helped France raid the English coast. In Scotland, France’s alliance kept England fighting on two fronts, and in the Low Countries the loyalties of Flemish towns shifted with the wool trade. For this reason some historians describe the conflict as a western European war rather than a purely Anglo-French one.

In France, King Charles VI suffered from episodes of mental illness from 1392. His relatives competed for power, and after the murder of the Duke of Orléans in 1407 a civil war broke out between the Armagnac and Burgundian factions. Henry V of England exploited this division. He invaded in 1415, took Harfleur, and on 25 October defeated a larger French army at Agincourt. From 1417 he conquered Normandy.

In 1419 the Duke of Burgundy, John the Fearless, was murdered during a meeting with the French heir, the Dauphin Charles. Burgundy then allied with England. The Treaty of Troyes (1420) made Henry V heir to the French throne and disinherited the Dauphin. Both Henry V and Charles VI died in 1422, leaving the infant Henry VI as claimant to both crowns, while the Dauphin ruled south of the Loire from Bourges.

In 1428 English forces besieged Orléans, the key to the Loire. Joan, a peasant girl from Domrémy in eastern France who said she was guided by the voices of saints, persuaded the Dauphin to let her join a relief army. The siege was lifted in May 1429, the English were beaten at Patay, and on 17 July 1429 Charles VII was crowned at Reims, the traditional place of French coronations.

Joan was captured by Burgundian troops at Compiègne in 1430 and handed over to the English. A church court at Rouen tried her for heresy, and she was burned on 30 May 1431, aged about nineteen. A later inquiry, completed in 1456, overturned the verdict. The Catholic Church canonised her in 1920.

The decisive turn came in 1435, when Burgundy made peace with Charles VII at the Congress of Arras. Paris returned to Charles in 1436. After a truce, the French, now with permanent paid companies and effective artillery, reconquered Normandy, winning at Formigny in 1450, and then Gascony. An English attempt to retake Bordeaux ended in defeat at Castillon on 17 July 1453. No peace treaty formally ended the war, but England kept only Calais.

For most people in France, the war meant not glorious battles but fear. Chevauchées deliberately burned villages and crops. In the long truces, discharged soldiers formed “free companies” and later bands known as écorcheurs (“flayers”) that robbed, kidnapped and extorted the countryside. Many rural communities fortified churches or fled to walled towns.

It is impossible to give a reliable death toll. The war overlapped with the Black Death and later plague outbreaks, famine and economic depression, and records rarely separate these causes. Historians agree that parts of northern and western France lost a large share of their population between the mid-fourteenth and mid-fifteenth centuries, but how much of this was due to war itself is debated.

England was spared invasion on land, apart from French and Castilian raids on its southern coasts, but its people paid through heavy taxation. The unpopular poll taxes of the late 1370s and 1381 were one cause of the Peasants’ Revolt. Soldiers, many of them ordinary archers, also came home with loot, ransoms and stories.

In France, the need to pay for war helped the crown establish regular taxes, such as the taille, without constant consent from assemblies, and in the 1440s Charles VII created permanent companies of paid soldiers — an early standing army. The French monarchy came out of the war stronger and more centralised.

In England, the need for money gave Parliament, especially the House of Commons, more importance in approving taxes. Defeat discredited the Lancastrian government of Henry VI and was one background cause of the civil wars later called the Wars of the Roses, which began in 1455. English kings kept using the title “King of France” until 1801.

The war also helped sharpen national identities. English increasingly replaced French as the language of the English court, law and government during the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. In France, loyalty to the crown and hostility to the English became part of how people described themselves. Militarily, the war showed the power of well-organised infantry and, at the end, of gunpowder artillery, though historians debate how revolutionary these changes were.

A third winner was Burgundy. The Valois dukes of Burgundy, who also ruled much of the Low Countries, used the war and the French civil conflict to build a rich, semi-independent state with a brilliant court culture. Their changes of side decided several turning points of the war. After the last duke, Charles the Bold, died in 1477, his lands were divided between the French crown and the Habsburgs — a legacy that shaped European politics for centuries.

In England, the war is remembered above all through victories — Crécy, Poitiers and especially Agincourt — often seen through Shakespeare’s history plays. His Henry V (about 1599) turned Agincourt into a story of a small “band of brothers” defeating a proud enemy. Laurence Olivier’s 1944 film version was made to raise morale during the Second World War. The eventual defeat is less often remembered.

In France, the war became a story of suffering and recovery, with Joan of Arc at its centre. From the nineteenth century she was claimed by many different groups: Catholics saw her as a saint, republicans as a daughter of the common people, nationalists as a symbol of resistance to foreign invaders. Some of these uses have been politically divisive, and historians try to separate the fifteenth-century Joan from her later images.

The very name “Hundred Years’ War” came into use only in the nineteenth century, when historians looked back and grouped these conflicts into one national drama. Modern scholars often point out that people at the time did not experience a single war between two nations, but a set of dynastic, feudal and civil conflicts in which loyalties were complicated.

The most famous narrative source is the Chronicles of Jean Froissart, written in French from the later fourteenth century and revised several times. Froissart drew on the earlier chronicle of Jean le Bel and on interviews with knights and heralds. His vivid, chivalric storytelling has shaped the popular image of the war, but he is often unreliable on numbers and sometimes changed his account to suit patrons on different sides. The Online Froissart project makes several manuscript versions available.

Other narratives include Enguerrand de Monstrelet’s chronicle for the early fifteenth century, the anonymous Journal of a Bourgeois of Paris, which records life in the capital under Burgundian and English rule, and English texts such as the Gesta Henrici Quinti. The records of Joan of Arc’s condemnation trial (1431) and of the nullification inquiry (1455–1456) contain her own recorded answers and many witness testimonies, although they were produced by courts with their own agendas.

Administrative documents are just as important: English exchequer accounts, muster rolls listing soldiers, treaties, tax records and letters. These allow historians to check chroniclers’ claims about army size, pay and logistics.

One debate is about the nature of the war. Was it a national war between England and France, a feudal dispute about Gascony, a dynastic quarrel over succession, or a French civil war in which the English king was one of several great princes? Most historians now see it as all of these at different moments, and treat the national framing as partly a later creation.

Another debate concerns battles and numbers. Chroniclers often reported huge French armies defeated by tiny English forces. Anne Curry’s work on English and French administrative records, especially for Agincourt, argued that the difference in size may have been smaller than the traditional story says; others, relying more on chronicles, still defend a large French superiority. Military historians such as Clifford J. Rogers have discussed whether the war saw an “infantry revolution” in European warfare.

Jonathan Sumption’s multi-volume narrative, completed in 2023, and Christopher Allmand’s shorter synthesis are standard modern accounts in English, while French scholarship, going back to Édouard Perroy’s mid-twentieth-century study, has emphasised the war’s effects on the French state and society. Historians also continue to study Joan of Arc’s trial records to understand religion, gender and politics in the fifteenth century.