Key Battles and Military Leaders of the Hundred Years’ War
The Hundred Years’ War is, more than any other late medieval conflict, a war remembered by its battles. Sluys (1340), Crécy (1346), Poitiers (1356), Agincourt (1415), and Castillon (1453) form a sequence of set-piece encounters so dramatic that they have shaped the English and French imaginations ever since — not least through Shakespeare’s Henry V, written in 1599, which still does much of the work of fixing Agincourt in the popular memory. This section takes the reader through the three of those battles treated at length in the site: the Battle of Crécy (1346), the Battle of Agincourt (1415), and the lifting of the Siege of Orléans by Joan of Arc in May 1429. Each is a hinge of the war; together they chart the rise and fall of English military advantage between the Edwardian and the Lancastrian phases.
Four Battles that Defined the War
Crécy, Agincourt, and Orléans are not the only great engagements of the war, but they are the three that best illustrate how the balance of military power shifted. At Crécy, on 26 August 1346, Edward III’s roughly 9,000 English and Welsh troops, deployed behind a natural defensive position on a ridge in Picardy, cut the French army — perhaps three times their number — to pieces with massed longbow fire, and in the process killed blind King John of Bohemia and a generation of French magnates. Poitiers, ten years later, was Crécy repeated: the Black Prince, with a much smaller force, captured King John II of France himself, the most prestigious single prisoner of the entire Middle Ages. Agincourt, on St Crispin’s Day 1415, was the third great longbow victory: Henry V with about 6,000 men broke a French army often estimated at 20,000 in heavy ground after a night of rain. Each of the three was a tactical disaster for the French heavy-cavalry charge, and each is examined in detail in the linked articles.
Orléans is a different kind of battle. The siege had been running since October 1428, and the English position looked unbreakable: Sir John Talbot, Sir John Fastolf, and the Earl of Salisbury’s veterans held a ring of bastilles around the city on the north bank of the Loire. Joan of Arc’s arrival in April 1429, the capture of the Saint-Loup bastille on 4 May, and the English decision on 8 May to withdraw rather than fight a pitched battle ended the campaign in a week. The political consequences — the march to Reims, the coronation of Charles VII on 17 July 1429, the re-legitimisation of the Valois line — were larger than the military ones. The full narrative is in Joan of Arc and the lifting of the Siege of Orléans.
The Commanders who Shaped the Campaigns
Battles do not fight themselves. The three set-piece articles examine the leaders whose decisions produced the outcomes: Edward III at Crécy, an experienced soldier in his mid-forties and the architect of the longbow-heavy English tactical system; Henry V at Agincourt, who had spent the years 1414 and early 1415 preparing the invasion with a care that bordered on the obsessive; and Joan, the illiterate seventeen-year-old from Domrémy whose voice, by her own account, told her to go to the Dauphin and raise the siege. The French side is no less consequential. Bertrand du Guesclin (c. 1320–1380), the Breton constable under Charles V, lost the great battles but won the war in the 1370s by avoiding them, recapturing town by town through a deliberate strategy of attrition. The English careers of John Talbot, Earl of Shrewsbury — the “English Achilles” of French propaganda, killed at Castillon at the age of seventy — and of Sir John Chandos, the Black Prince’s lieutenant at Poitiers, are treated in Key battles and military leaders and in the parent overview.
How Memory and Scholarship Treat these Battles
The battles of the Hundred Years’ War have been the subject of fierce scholarly argument since the nineteenth century, and the three articles in this section engage with that literature rather than repeating it. Anne Curry’s careful reconstruction of the Agincourt campaign has revised earlier numbers downwards and questioned the older English celebratory tradition. Kelly DeVries has done the same for Crécy, arguing that the longbow’s role, while decisive, has been over-emphasised at the expense of the English defensive position and the muddled French command. Clifford Rogers has placed the battles in the larger framework of a “real” medieval military revolution driven by infantry and missile weapons, in opposition to the older artillery-centred account of Geoffrey Parker. Contamine, in the standard French narrative, treats Orléans as the symbolic turning point of the war. The historiographical argument is not an ornament to the military narrative; in this section it is part of the narrative itself.
Articles in this section
- The Battle of Crécy (1346)
- The Battle of Agincourt (1415)
- Joan of Arc and the lifting of the Siege of Orléans