Late Middle Ages

How the war shaped English national identity

The Hundred Years’ War reshaped what it meant to be English. From the chevauchées of the 1340s to the Lancastrian conquest of Normandy in 1417–1419, generations of Englishmen and Welsh archers, London merchants, and East Anglian peasants crossed the Channel in the king’s service, and the experience left a permanent mark on the kingdom’s self-image. The victories of Crécy (1346), Poitiers (1356), and Agincourt (1415) supplied a stock of stories on which English chroniclers, parliamentarian speakers, and Tudor mythographers would draw for centuries. The war, as the historian Adrian Bell has put it, “created an English audience for English news.”

A war of ink and arrows

The war was fought in documents as well as on the battlefield. Edward III’s chancery rolled out a new vocabulary of English kingship, the Quo Warranto proceedings of the 1330s asserted royal supremacy in a unified English tongue, and the parliamentary petitions of the 1370s and 1380s increasingly used the “Commons” as a collective voice distinct from the magnates. The Statute of Pleading (1362) ordered that pleas in the royal courts be conducted in English “for that the French tongue is much unknown in the realm,” an acknowledgment that a century of conflict had produced a self-consciously English political community.

Equally important were the visual codes of identity. From 1340 Edward III quartered the fleurs-de-lis with the leopards of England, and from the 1370s the Black Prince and his Cheshire archers appeared in the Wilton Diptych in the same combined arms. The English saint, the English king, the English language: these were now the building blocks of a national rhetoric, and they have been read as such by historians from G. G. Coulton to recent scholars of late-medieval political culture.

The literature of victory

The great English writers of the age were not spectators to the war but participants. Geoffrey Chaucer (c. 1343–1400) served in the English garrison at Calais in 1369 and again in 1370–1371, was paid for bringing three men-at-arms in the company of Sir John Bagot, and was captured in France in 1359–1360, ransomed by the king for £16. The Knight’s Tale of the Canterbury Tales is set in Athens, but its chivalric furniture is the chivalry of Edward III’s reign: tourneys at Thebes, lists at Athens, a parliament of young knights arguing love-cases in the English fashion. The Knight himself, “worthy in armes,” has fought at Alexandria and Prussia and “at the sege of Alisaundre he was whan it was wonne”; he is, in short, an Edwardian veteran, and Chaucer is making a quiet point about who now counts as a national hero.

John Gower (c. 1330–1408), Chaucer’s friend and a Kentish landowner, served the king in diplomacy and wrote the Vox Clamantis in Latin and the Confessio Amantis in English. The Confessio, dedicated to Richard II, is a long poem of counsel, but it is also a meditation on the costs of war: on mercenaries, on chevauchées, on the ruin of the common people. Gower is closer to the mémoire of the war’s critics than to its celebrants, and his complaints anticipate the Complaint of the Commons of 1376.

John Lydgate (c. 1370–c. 1450), monk of Bury St Edmunds, was the most prolific English poet of the fifteenth century, and his Troy Book and Fall of Princes were commissioned by Henry V and his brothers. Lydgate’s Troy is not merely classical: it is a Lancastrian Troy, in which Henry V is figured as a second Hector and the English army as the legitimate heir of the antique. The transformation of antique story into English self-flattery is one of the most distinctive achievements of late-medieval English letters, and it is a direct byproduct of the war.

The language question

The Hundred Years’ War is often credited with the rise of English as a literary and administrative language, but the credit is misleading. The shift was already well advanced by 1300; what the war did was accelerate and politicize it. The first English kings of the new line wrote to one another in Anglo-Norman until the reign of Edward I; by the reign of Henry V they were writing in a Chancery English that any clerk could read. The use of English in parliamentary petition, in urban records, and in the proliferating town chronicles of the late Middle Ages has been mapped by M. T. Clanchy, who shows that by 1400 the “literate” English community was substantially larger than the French-speaking one.

The war reinforced this in two ways. First, the need to communicate with a broader constituency of taxpayers and soldier-recruits made a vernacular official register attractive: the Indenture of War and the Retinue rolls of the late fourteenth century preserve English as well as French formulae, and the army contracts drafted in 1415 for Henry V’s campaign are routinely in English. Second, the confrontation with a French-speaking enemy made the English language a badge of identity. The chronicler of the Brut, working in the 1430s, thought of “Engleishe tunge” as something to be defended, and the printers of Caxton’s Westminster in the 1470s would shortly translate the Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye from the French because the French text was insufficiently “English” in register.

Parliament, taxation, and the new political nation

The political consequences of the war were no less durable. The king’s need for unprecedented sums of money — to ransom David II of Scotland, to pay for the chevauchée of 1346, to put garrisons in Aquitaine after Brétigny, to garrison Calais, to ransom Charles d’Orléans after Agincourt — forced the Crown into repeated and increasingly hard bargaining with the Commons. The wool subsidy of 1340, the triennial grant of 1371, the poll taxes of 1377, 1379, and 1381: each of these produced a new round of political claim-making, and the Good Parliament of 1376 produced the first Speaker of the Commons to be impeached and the first peacetime impeachments of ministers.

The growth of Parliament, as G. L. Harriss and, more recently, Chris Given-Wilson have argued, was not simply a matter of grievances. The Commons claimed a national role: the right to know the king’s accounts, the right to scrutinise the conduct of the war, the right to appoint reforming councillors. The Modus Tenendi Parliamentum, written in the 1320s and widely circulated in the fifteenth century, presented Parliament as a high court of the realm with its own constitutional dignity; in 1399 the deposition of Richard II, and in 1461 the title of Edward IV, would be justified in parliamentary form. The institutional self-confidence of the English political class, which would eventually feed into the Reformation Parliaments of the 1530s, has deep roots in the assemblies that financed and questioned Edward III’s wars.

Henry V and the myth of Agincourt

No single figure did more to fix an English national memory of the war than Henry V (1386–1422). The victor of Harfleur and Agincourt, the imposer of the Treaty of Troyes (1420), the unquestioned heir to the French throne, Henry was commemorated by an industry of court poets — Lydgate, the anonymous author of the Gesta Henrici Quinti, the chaplain who compiled the Annales Henrici Quinti — and his legend was polished until it became the Tudor myth of the heroic king.

The reality was more complex. The first English campaign in France, that of 1415, did indeed culminate in a stunning victory on 25 October 1415, but Henry had taken the army into Picardy on the assumption that the dauphin would negotiate; he was forced to give battle by the closing of his line of retreat, and the cost in dead French noblemen, perhaps 4,000 to 6,000 of them, was bought with the near-annihilation of the English army by disease. Henry’s subsequent campaigns of 1417–1419 were longer, more deliberate, and more expensive: the conquest of Normandy was a serious act of state, not a chevauchée. And yet the legend, sustained by the Gesta Henrici Quinti and by the Tudor chroniclers who read it, was that Henry had renewed the glories of Crécy and Poitiers with even greater éclat.

That legend was, in turn, central to the political self-image of the early Tudors. Henry VII’s invocations of his Lancastrian inheritance, Henry VIII’s dream of recovering the French throne in 1512–1514, and Elizabeth I’s cult of the virgin warrior all draw on the iconography of the Hundred Years’ War as the Tudors received it. A national identity, in the late medieval sense, is precisely this: a usable past.

The long afterlife

By the time the Hundred Years’ War ended, in 1453 with the defeat at Castillon, the English self-image was firmly bounded in two ways. It was insular: the realm of England and the duchies of Ireland, Wales, and the Channel Islands, with Calais as the last continental toe-hold. And it was constitutional: a kingdom of king, lords, and Commons, in which the language of public affairs was the English tongue, the idiom of grievance was the parliamentary petition, and the great ancestral story was the long war.

That story was not yet finished. The loss of Bordeaux in 1453, the loss of Calais in 1558, the play of Shakespeare in 1599 that fixed the story for later centuries — these are continuations. The Hundred Years’ War, as Jonathan Sumption has written in the fifth volume of his history, was “a war of identity as well as territory.” The English identity it produced has proved remarkably durable. It survived the Reformation, the Civil War, the loss of the French title by act of Parliament in 1801, and the long dominance of the British Empire. When the English, in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, asked themselves who they were, the answers often led back to Crécy and to Agincourt, to the longbow and to the king. The Hundred Years’ War had made a people who knew what to remember.

References and further reading

  • Jonathan Sumption, The Hundred Years’ War, 5 vols. (London: Faber & Faber, 1990–2021), especially vol. IV: Cursed Kings and vol. V: Triumph and Illusion.
  • M. T. Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record: England 1066–1307, 3rd ed. (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013), and England and its Rulers 1066–1307, 4th ed. (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2014).
  • Chris Given-Wilson, The English Nobility in the Late Middle Ages (London: Routledge, 1996).
  • G. L. Harriss, King, Parliament, and Public Finance in Medieval England to 1369 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975).
  • A. J. Pollard, Late Medieval England 1399–1509 (Harlow: Longman, 2000).