Aftermath and Long-Term Consequences of the Hundred Years’ War
The war that began in 1337 and effectively ended on 17 July 1453 at Castillon did not so much conclude as bleed forward into the rest of the fifteenth century, and the consequences of the Hundred Years’ War shaped both kingdoms for the next four hundred years. This section traces that aftermath through three articles: the formal diplomatic settlement from the Treaty of Picquigny (1475) to the loss of Calais in 1558, the forging of an English national identity out of the war’s humiliations, and the parallel and very different rise of French national feeling centred on the figure of Joan of Arc. Together they ask a question that has divided historians since the nineteenth century: was the war a catastrophe, or a forge?
The Settlement of 1453–1475
The French victory at Castillon in 1453, where Talbot’s army was shattered by Jean Bureau’s field artillery, was followed not by a single grand peace treaty but by a long, ungainly settlement. Henry VI, by then sliding into the mental collapse that would cost him his throne within seven years, struggled to keep open even the Channel port of Calais. The English claim to the French crown, which Edward III had first formally assumed in 1340, was at last laid down by Henry VII at Picquigny on 29 August 1475, in exchange for an immediate payment of 75,000 crowns and a yearly pension of 50,000. The renunciation was a calculated humiliation dressed up as pragmatism. Edward IV’s invasion of 1475 had collapsed almost without fighting, and the cash was the price of going home. The English claim to the French throne was not finally extinguished until 1558, when the loss of Calais under Mary I removed the last physical trace of English France, but it had been a fiction for almost a century by then.
The settlement was a disappointment to almost everyone. The English taxpayer had funded a century of war for a pension and a fiction; the French crown had won the duchy and the counties but at a fiscal cost that, as the historian Jean Favier has emphasised, permanently restructured the French state. The detailed diplomacy, the ransom negotiations, and the long question of what to do about the residual English garrison at Calais are traced in the article on the Treaty of Picquigny and the end of English France.
Two Nations Forged in War
The war’s deepest consequences were cultural rather than diplomatic. Jonathan Sumption, whose multi-volume narrative is now the standard English-language account, has argued that the Hundred Years’ War was the moment when the kingdoms of England and France stopped being loose aggregations of lordships and became nations. The argument is not uncontested — Michael Vale and others have warned against reading fifteenth-century patriotism through the lens of later nationalism — but the evidence is hard to dismiss. The English Parliament grew more assertive under the pressure of war taxation from 1340 onwards; the French crown built, between roughly 1360 and 1450, the apparatus of direct taxation (the taille and the aides), a standing army (the compagnies d’ordonnance of 1445), and a regional administration that would outlast the Valois dynasty.
On the English side, the war produced a literature of grievance and a new self-image, articulated in Chaucer, Gower, and Lydgate, and later hardened in the Tudor myth of an island race delivered from continental entanglements. On the French side, the rehabilitation of Joan of Arc in 1456 and the rapid growth of her cult gave the kingdom a heroine whose trial transcripts — preserved in the Procès de Condamnation and the Procès en Nullité — were already being read as national scripture. These two parallel stories are examined in how the war shaped English national identity and in the rise of French national feeling.
The Long Shadow on the Two Kingdoms
The political settlement and the cultural transformation fed directly into the crises of the later fifteenth century. The financial exhaustion of Henry VI’s government, and the breakdown of royal authority between 1450 and 1453, are the immediate backdrop to the Wars of the Roses; the trauma of defeat in France is, in part, what the two houses of Lancaster and York were fighting over. The fiscal machinery developed in France by Charles V and Charles VII — Colbert’s ancestors, in a sense — is the deeper legacy, and the framework within which the Renaissance monarchy of Francis I and the absolutism of Louis XIV would later be built. The English and French stories of the aftermath cannot be separated from each other, and they are examined in their European context in the rise of national monarchies and in the Wars of the Roses.
Articles in this section
- The Treaty of Picquigny and the end of English France
- How the war shaped English national identity
- The rise of French national feeling