Late Middle Ages

The Hundred Years’ War: England, France, and the Longest War of the Middle Ages

The Hundred Years’ War was the longest and most important conflict of the Late Middle Ages. Fought between the kingdoms of England and France between 1337 and 1453, the war reshaped both countries, exhausted their treasuries, transformed their armies, and produced a wave of national feeling on both sides of the English Channel. It was the war in which the longbow, the gun, and the armoured knight came to terms with each other; the war in which Joan of Arc turned a peasant girl into a French national heroine; and the war in which the kingdom of France was, for a time, almost erased from the map.

The name “Hundred Years’ War” is a modern invention, first used by French historians in the nineteenth century. The war is conventionally divided into three main phases separated by long truces: the Edwardian War (1337–1360), the Caroline War (1369–1389), and the Lancastrian War (1415–1453). It is a slight misnomer: the war actually lasted 116 years, with significant gaps. Yet the name has stuck, and it captures the war’s defining characteristic — its extraordinary length, and the way it dominated the political, military, and economic life of both kingdoms for more than a century.

This guide is organised in four sections:

What was the war about?

At root, the war was a dynastic dispute that grew into a struggle for national identity. It began over the succession to the French throne: in 1328 the direct Capetian line died out, and the nearest male heir, Edward III of England, was passed over in favour of Philip VI of the house of Valois. Edward first formally assumed the title “King of France” in 1340. The dynastic dispute then merged with older conflicts — the commercial rivalry between the two kingdoms, the territorial dispute over the duchy of Aquitaine (held by the English kings since the marriage of Henry II to Eleanor of Aquitaine in 1152), the strategic competition for control of the Channel and the wool trade of Flanders, and the personal ambitions of kings and great lords on both sides.

By the 1370s, after the English had lost almost everything they had won, the war had begun to take on the character of a national struggle between “England” and “France” — categories that were still in formation. By the 1450s, after the final English defeat at Castillon (1453), it was clear that two nation-states, not two feudal aggregations, were now confronting each other across the Channel.

The three phases

The Edwardian War (1337–1360). Edward III took advantage of the disputed succession to launch a war that, for a time, put much of France under English control. The naval Battle of Sluys (1340) gave the English control of the Channel; the Battle of Crécy (1346) demonstrated the longbow’s effect on mounted French knights; the Battle of Poitiers (1356), in which King John II of France was taken prisoner, was perhaps the most catastrophic French defeat of the medieval period. The phase ended with the Treaty of Brétigny (1360), by which Edward renounced his claim to the French throne in exchange for the full sovereignty of his remaining French possessions.

The Caroline War (1369–1389). Charles V of France, advised by the Breton knight Bertrand du Guesclin, avoided the great set-piece battles that had been so disastrous at Crécy and Poitiers, and relied instead on a strategy of attrition — recapturing the English-held towns and castles, cutting off supplies, and refusing the English the decisive battle they wanted. The English continental empire was gradually reduced. The war ended inconclusively, with a series of truces in 1389.

The Lancastrian War (1415–1453). Henry V of England renewed the war in 1415, won the Battle of Agincourt (25 October 1415), and imposed the Treaty of Troyes (1420), which recognised him as regent of France and heir to the French throne. He married Catherine, daughter of Charles VI, and seemed to be on the verge of a dual monarchy. But Henry died in 1422, a few weeks before Charles VI, and his infant son Henry VI was left to inherit an impossible position. The Dauphin, disinherited by Troyes, continued to claim the throne. The appearance of Joan of Arc in 1429, the lifting of the Siege of Orléans (May 1429), the coronation of Charles VII at Reims (July 1429), and the final English defeat at Castillon (1453) ended the war with the English retaining only the Channel port of Calais.

The fiscal and political consequences

The war cost both sides far more than the battles themselves. The English Parliament, called upon repeatedly to grant taxation, acquired a more assertive role in the governance of the kingdom, and the king’s dependence on parliamentary support shaped the constitutional conflicts of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The repeated demands for war taxation in the reign of Henry VI contributed directly to the political tensions that produced the Wars of the Roses.

In France, Charles V and Charles VII developed the apparatus of a centralised state. The taille (a direct tax on the peasantry) and the aides (a sales tax on wine and other commodities) gave the French crown a permanent revenue; the compagnies d’ordonnance, created by Charles VII in 1445, are usually called the first permanent royal army in Western Europe; the parlement and the bailliage gave the crown a system of regional administration and a high court that doubled as an organ of government. The development of these institutions is, in the long view, a more enduring legacy of the war than the military victories and defeats.

National identity and cultural memory

The war produced, in both kingdoms, a sharper sense of what it meant to be English or French. English literature of the period — the works of Chaucer, John Gower, and John Lydgate — is full of references to the war and to the English self-image as a divinely chosen people. The French cult of Joan of Arc, suppressed in her own lifetime, became a central feature of French national identity after her rehabilitation in 1456; she was beatified in 1909 and canonised in 1920. Shakespeare’s history plays, written in the 1590s, are largely concerned with the events of the Hundred Years’ War and its aftermath, and they are still shaping the way the war is remembered in the English-speaking world.

A note on periodisation

The Hundred Years’ War overlaps with most of the other great crises of the late Middle Ages. The first wave of the Black Death arrived in western Europe in 1347–1348, mid-war, and the second (the Pestis Secunda) of 1361–1362 killed a generation of children who had not been exposed to the disease in infancy. The Avignon Papacy (1309–1377) made the papacy appear as a partisan of the French crown, which complicated the diplomacy of the war for the English kings. The Western Schism (1378–1417) split the church for the duration of the Caroline and most of the Lancastrian wars. The war also played an important role in the development of the national monarchies of the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and in the long process of the English Reformation. None of these can be understood in isolation from the war, and none of them can be reduced to it.

Further reading

Chapters in this guide