The Battle of Castillon (1453): The End of the Hundred Years' War
The Battle of Castillon, fought on 17 July 1453 on the banks of the Dordogne below the town of Castillon-sur-Dordogne, was the last battle of the Hundred Years’ War. An English army under John Talbot, 1st Earl of Shrewsbury, attempting to relieve a French siege of the town, was destroyed by French field artillery under Jean Bureau, and Talbot and his son John Talbot, Viscount Lisle, were both killed. Bordeaux, the last English-held city in Gascony, surrendered to the French on 19 October 1453. Apart from Calais, which held out until 1558, the English territorial presence in France was finished.
Castillon is conventionally cited as the engagement that ended the war, and as the moment when the gunpowder cannon definitively replaced the longbow as the dominant battlefield weapon. Jonathan Sumption’s treatment in The Hundred Years’ War, vol. IV (2015), is the standard modern account in English; Philippe Contamine’s La Guerre de Cent Ans (1968) and the work of the Bureau brothers’ biographer, René de Maulde La Clavière, are the French references.
The strategic position in 1453
By the spring of 1453 the English position in France had been reduced to a coastal strip in the Bordelais, centred on Bordeaux and a few dependent towns. The French reconquest of Normandy in 1449 and of most of Gascony in 1451 had been completed with extraordinary speed, and the remaining English garrisons were politically isolated. The counter-stroke of 1452, when Talbot was sent to Bordeaux at the head of a small force and was greeted as a liberator by the Bordelais, briefly recovered the situation, but the French court at the end of 1452 and the beginning of 1453 was determined to finish the war.
Charles VII’s government had by this point built three institutional pillars of the modern French state: the permanent taille (the direct tax granted by the Estates of Orléans in 1439), the compagnies d’ordonnance (the standing field army created in 1445), and the standing artillery train under Jean Bureau. Castillon was the moment when all three came together in a single field engagement.
The French position at Castillon
Jean Bureau had been conducting the siege of Castillon since the early summer. The town, on the left bank of the Dordogne, was held by an English garrison; the French had established their siege-lines on the right bank and had constructed a fortified camp in the tradition of the late medieval siege: a ditch, a palisade, and, in the centre, a battery of field guns anchored on a captured château. Bureau had perhaps 300 cannon and bombards of various sizes, ranging from the heavy veuglaires to lighter pieces, deployed in prepared positions covering the approaches to the camp.
Talbot marched from Bordeaux on 16 July with an army variously estimated at perhaps 5,000–8,000, including a substantial number of longbowmen. He was seventy years old, vigorous, and (in the chronicle accounts) impatient: the version in the Anciennes Chroniques d’Angleterre has him ridden on a horse because his legs were too weak to stand, a detail that may be propaganda.
The English attack
The English reached the neighbourhood of Castillon on the morning of 17 July. Talbot’s first decision was a reasonable one: to make contact with the garrison and to coordinate the relief. His second decision was the catastrophic one: to attack the French camp directly, without reconnaissance, with his army in marching order rather than in battle order.
The French guns opened fire at long range, before the English could close. Talbot persisted through several hours of fruitless attacks, sending forward first his longbowmen, then his men-at-arms, then his son with the reserve. None of them reached the French lines. By the late afternoon the English army was broken and in flight; the elder Talbot, refusing to leave the field, was killed in the rout, as was his son. The chronicler Jean Chartier records that the French lost very few men; modern estimates put French losses in the low hundreds and English losses in the low thousands.
The role of artillery
Castillon is one of the canonical moments in the history of European artillery, and the Bureau brothers are its architects. Jean Bureau (c. 1390–1463) and his brother Gaspard (c. 1395–1469) had been the principal designers of the French train since the 1430s; Jean was also Master of the Mint, and his combined work on metallurgy, gunpowder composition, and field-tactics had produced a train that was, by 1450, the most powerful in Europe.
The standard reading, set out by Contamine and developed by the contributors to Clifford Rogers’ Oxford Encyclopedia of Medieval Warfare and Military Technology (2010), is that Castillon was the first major field battle in which the gunpowder cannon was the decisive arm. The English longbow was not, strictly speaking, displaced by the cannon on that day; the English army was simply unable to close with the French position. But the strategic implication was clear. The mounted knight, the longbow, and the high medieval castle had all reached the end of their operational life within a single century, and the gun had taken their place.
The end of the war
The collapse of English Gascony after Castillon was rapid. Bordeaux, besieged by a French army, surrendered on 19 October 1453. Bayonne held out into 1454. The Plantagenet dream of a continental monarchy was over. The English crown, weakened by the loss of the war, by the financial exhaustion of Henry VI’s government, and by the king’s first major bout of mental illness in 1453, was in no position to reopen the conflict.
The war’s formal end was unmarked. There was no second treaty of the scale of Troyes or Brétigny; the residual English claim to the French throne was not formally abandoned, and the situation was settled by a series of local truces and by the slow English recognition of the new facts on the ground. Calais held out under English rule until 1558.
Aftermath and legacy
The political consequences of Castillon in England were enormous. The Plantagenet dynasty had defined itself by its French possessions; with the loss of those possessions the dynasty lost its identity, and the discontent of the next generation fed directly into the Wars of the Roses (1455–1485). The last English possession in France, Calais, was lost in 1558 under Mary I; the first English attempt to recover it, in 1558 under the Earl of Essex, was beaten off by the Duke of Guise, the great-grandson of one of Talbot’s contemporaries.
In France, Castillon marked the consolidation of the centralised Valois monarchy. Charles VII’s epithet in French historiography, le roi bien servi (the well-served king), refers to his ability to choose and keep his servants: Bureau, Richemont, Dunois, Jacques Coeur. The institutions built in his reign — the permanent taille, the compagnies d’ordonnance, the artillery train — survived to be the bones of the absolute monarchy that Louis XIV would inherit. Castillon is the moment that medieval France, in any meaningful sense, became the early modern French state.