The Hundred Years' War

The story

Who should be King of France?

In 1328 King Charles IV of France died, without male children. The crown passed to a cousin of his, Philip of Valois, who became Philip VI. But the King of England, Edward III, was Charles IV's nephew through his mother Isabella, and claimed to have more right than Philip. The French replied that a woman could not pass on the throne, and so neither could her son.

The real reason for the quarrel, however, was another. The kings of England had long held part of France, Gascony, around Bordeaux, but for this they had to pay homage to the French king, as vassals. This was hard for a king to accept. Besides, the two kingdoms were disputing Flanders, the rich region of wool cloth, which bought English wool but depended politically on France.

In 1337 Philip VI confiscated Gascony and in 1340 Edward proclaimed himself King of France. A war began that, with truces and renewed fighting, lasted 116 years, until 1453. The name “Hundred Years' War” was invented by historians much later.

Arrows against knights

In the first great battles the English won against all expectations. At Crécy, in 1346, a much larger French army, with many knights in armour, was defeated by English and Welsh archers armed with the longbow: a weapon almost as tall as a man, able to shoot an arrow every few seconds, which at a distance could pierce armour. In 1356 at Poitiers the King of France himself, John II, was captured, and an enormous ransom was paid to free him.

On 25 October 1415, in the battle of Agincourt, Henry V of England, with a much smaller army, worn out and sick, again defeated the French cavalry on a field turned muddy by rain. After the victory Henry V managed to have himself recognised by the French as heir to the throne in the Treaty of Troyes of 1420.

The English archers were peasants and small landowners, but they trained from boyhood: by law young Englishmen had to practise with the bow on feast days, and to be able to draw a longbow took years of training, which even deformed the bones of the shoulders and back. The skeletons found in the wreck of the ship Mary Rose show this even today.

A teenager changes the course of the war

France seemed lost: Paris was in the hands of the English and their allies, the Burgundians, and the heir to the throne, the Dauphin Charles, was shut up south of the Loire. Then, in 1429, Joan of Arc arrived, a peasant girl of seventeen who said she had heard the voices of saints, and who led the army to free Orléans. The Dauphin was crowned king at Reims as Charles VII.

After Joan's death, burned at the stake at Rouen in 1431, the war went on. The French learned to use cannon and reorganised the army with a core of permanently paid soldiers. In 1453, at Castillon, in Gascony, French artillery destroyed the English army. Bordeaux surrendered in October. The English lost everything in France, except the town of Calais, which they held until 1558.

A war with many pauses

It was not a continuous war. For long periods there was truce or peace, and the fighting was mostly raiding: bands of soldiers who burned villages, stole cattle and destroyed crops. In the middle of it all there had also been the Black Death, which killed many people on both sides. The peasants, taxed and plundered, rebelled several times, as in the Jacquerie revolt of 1358.