The Caroline Phase of the Hundred Years' War (1369

The Caroline phase of the Hundred Years’ War, named for the French king Charles V, was the second of the three great phases of the conflict. It opened in 1369 with Charles V’s revocation of the territorial concessions made to Edward III at the Treaty of Brétigny, and it ended with the truce of Leulinghem in 1389. The phase was marked by a methodical French reconquest of the territories ceded to England in 1360, conducted by du Guesclin, by the French-Castilian fleet, and by the patient exploitation of the English fiscal crisis. By the end of the phase, the English position in France had been reduced to a coastal strip around Bordeaux, the duchy of Calais, and a handful of Channel ports.

The standard treatments are Sumption’s The Hundred Years’ War, vol. II (1999), and the work of Philippe Contamine in La Guerre de Cent Ans (1968). Jean Favier’s La Guerre de Cent Ans (1980) is the most readable French synthesis.

The opening of the war

Charles V came to the throne in April 1364, succeeding his father John II, who had died in captivity in London. The new king was a serious, careful, austere man of thirty-six, well-educated (his library contained more than 1,000 volumes, the largest private collection in Europe), and determined to recover the territories his father had lost. The duchy of Aquitaine had been in revolt against the Black Prince’s principality since 1368, and Charles used the revolt as the pretext for reopening the war.

The immediate trigger was Charles V’s formal revocation, on 30 November 1369, of the territorial concessions of Brétigny. The English response was to treat the revocation as a French breach of the treaty and to resume the war in name as well as in fact. The Aquitanian nobles who had appealed to Charles for protection against the Black Prince’s fiscal regime were given the choice between submission to the French crown and the consequences of resistance.

The strategy of avoidance

The most distinctive feature of the Caroline War was the French refusal to give battle. The longbow, demonstrated to devastating effect at Crécy in 1346 and Poitiers in 1356, was a weapon that favoured defensive, prepared positions. Charles V and du Guesclin, the new Constable, decided that the only way to defeat the English was to avoid offering them the opportunity to use it.

The method, set out in the modern literature by Contamine and by Rogers, combined several elements. First, the French army would refuse pitched battle, even when challenged. Second, the French would use a chevauchée strategy of their own, designed to devastate the lands under English control and to force the English to disperse their garrisons. Third, the French would use siege warfare systematically, isolating a town, building a siege, and waiting for the garrison to surrender. Fourth, the French would exploit the new alliance with Castile to cut off English Aquitaine from sea-borne reinforcement.

The strategy worked because the English could not afford it. The English war effort of the Edwardian phase had been financed by the wool trade, by parliamentary taxation, and by the loans of the Bardi and Peruzzi banking houses, all of which collapsed in the 1340s and 1370s. The English government of the late 1360s and 1370s was effectively bankrupt, and the cost of the war, in men and money, was unmanageable.

The reconquest of Aquitaine

The principal theatre of the Caroline War was Aquitaine, the duchy that Edward III had been granted in full sovereignty at Brétigny. The duchy was a complex patchwork of territories, and its nobles had long resented the centralising fiscal policies of the Black Prince’s principality. The combination of internal revolt and French invasion was decisive.

The French reconquest was methodical. Du Guesclin took town after town, beginning with Limoges in 1370 and continuing through the decade. The Black Prince, who had returned to England in January 1371 suffering from a wasting illness (probably dysentery contracted in Spain), was unable to mount a counter-offensive. The death of the Black Prince on 8 June 1376 and the death of Edward III on 21 June 1377 left the English government in the hands of a child, the future Richard II, and the war effort collapsed.

The Franco-Castilian fleet destroyed an English convoy at the Battle of La Rochelle on 23 June 1372, cutting off English Aquitaine from sea-borne reinforcement. By 1375 the English position in Aquitaine had been reduced to a coastal strip. The duchy, the centrepiece of the Treaty of Brétigny, was effectively lost.

The English political crisis

The Caroline phase coincided with a deep political crisis in England. Edward III’s last years were marked by financial collapse (the failure of the Italian banking houses in 1343–1346 had been a warning; the final collapse came in the 1370s), by the political dominance of John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster, and by the king’s dependence on his mistress Alice Perrers. The Good Parliament of 1376, the first English parliament to impeach ministers of the crown, attempted to reform the government; the reforms were short-lived.

The death of Edward III in 1377 and the accession of the ten-year-old Richard II opened a long minority. The Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 was in part a response to the fiscal demands of the war, and the political turmoil of the 1380s made it impossible to mount effective military campaigns in France. The Appellants, the baronial faction that dominated English politics in the late 1380s, completed the political crisis.

The truce of Leulinghem

The Caroline phase was effectively ended by the truce signed at Leulinghem on 18 June 1389, to last 28 years with possible break clauses every four years. The truce was a major French diplomatic success. The English, by this point, had effectively lost control of all the territories that had been ceded at Brétigny, and the truce simply recognised the new situation on the ground.

The truce was not, however, the end of the conflict. French support for English rebels, disputes over the sovereignty of Brittany, and the long-running question of the English claim to the French throne all contributed to the eventual resumption of the war in 1415. The phase that followed, the Lancastrian phase, would be even more dramatic than the Edwardian or Caroline phases, and would end with the final English defeat in 1453.

The historiographical debate

The Caroline War is one of the best-evidenced wars of the Middle Ages, and the central historiographical question — whether the French recovery was the work of du Guesclin’s strategic genius or of Charles V’s political and administrative reforms — has been argued in the literature for more than a century. The standard reading, set out by Perroy in 1945 and developed by Favier, Contamine, and Sumption, is that the recovery was the joint product of both. The duchy of Aquitaine, the war-weariness of the English aristocracy, the fiscal exhaustion of the English crown, the demographic effect of the Black Death, and the Franco-Castilian alliance were the conditions of the recovery; du Guesclin’s strategy was the instrument. The recovery was, in other words, the work of a generation, not of a single commander.

The other historiographical question is whether the strategy of avoidance was a “real” innovation or the necessary response to a tactical problem the French could not solve. The standard reading, set out by Rogers, is that du Guesclin’s contribution was to make a coherent system out of an inherited instinct: the French instinct to refuse battle was turned into a deliberate, published, teachable strategy. The Caroline War is the first major medieval war in which the strategy of avoidance is theoretically articulated and politically sold.