The Hundred Years' War 1337–1453

Warfare & Legacy 6 min read

The Decline of Feudalism and the Hundred Years' War

The Hundred Years’ War was the most important single accelerator of the long decline of feudalism as a system of social and military organisation in Western Europe. The war did not, by itself, destroy feudal tenure: the legal incidents of fief-holding, the obligations of vassalage, the commendatio, the aide, the relief, survived well into the early modern period. But the war made the military, fiscal, and political underpinnings of the feudal order impossible to maintain. By 1453 the feudal levy had been replaced, on both sides, by paid professional armies; the mounted knight had been displaced as the dominant battlefield arm; the centralised fiscal-military state, capable of sustaining long campaigns by direct taxation, had been built. Christopher Allmand’s The Hundred Years’ War: England and France at War c. 1300–c. 1450 (1988) is the most useful single treatment of the social dimension; the more theoretical work of Georges Duby in Les Trois Ordres ou l’imaginaire du féodalisme (1978) is the most important long-range account.

The feudal system on the eve of the war

The feudal order of the early 14th century was already in slow decay. The system that had organised European society since the 11th century — the king at the top, holding from God; the great nobles below, holding from the king; the knights below them, holding from the great nobles; the peasantry at the bottom — was under demographic, economic, and political pressure that predated the war.

The military underpinning of the order was the feudal levy: the obligation of each tenant-in-chief to provide a fixed number of knights for a fixed period of service, conventionally 40 days a year. The system had worked in the early Middle Ages, when wars were short, the number of knights required was small, and the same tenants did not have to serve far from their lands. By the late 13th century the system was no longer adequate. The wars of Philip IV of France and Edward I of England, the long Scottish campaigns of the late 13th and early 14th centuries, and the early phases of the Anglo-French conflict had all shown that the feudal levy could not produce the long, deep campaigns the new warfare required.

What the war changed

The Hundred Years’ War accelerated and consolidated the change. The principal shifts are conventionally identified as follows.

The first was the decline of the feudal levy and the rise of paid professional armies. The English response, developed by Edward III and his successors, was the indent system: the king contracted with experienced captains to raise companies of paid soldiers, principally archers and men-at-arms, for the duration of a campaign. By the 1370s the indents were the principal form of English military recruitment; by the 1420s they were dominant. The French response, slower, was the compagnies d’ordonnance of Charles VII (1445), the first permanent professional field army in Western Europe.

The second was the decline of the mounted knight as the dominant battlefield arm. The longbow, demonstrated to devastating effect at Crécy (1346), Poitiers (1356), and Agincourt (1415), made the independent mounted charge — the charge without covering fire, the charge as a decisive battlefield act — tactically suicidal. The mounted knight did not disappear, but the role of cavalry in pitched battle was steadily reduced. The French response, developed in the late 14th century, was to fight on foot, in coordinated formations, with the crossbow (and later the gun) for missile support. The gunpowder cannon, demonstrated decisively at Castillon (1453), completed the displacement of the mounted knight by the early 16th century.

The third was the centralisation of royal authority in both kingdoms. The English kings had long struggled to assert their authority over the great nobles, and the war forced them to rely on parliamentary taxation to pay for the war effort. The practice of parliamentary taxation, established during the Edwardian phase, gave the English parliament a new importance in the English political system. The French kings, for their part, were forced to develop a centralised system of royal taxation, the taille, that bypassed the old feudal obligations and gave the crown a much greater control over the French state. The Estates-General of Orléans in 1439, which granted the taille as a permanent direct tax, was the decisive moment.

The fourth was the decline of the high medieval castle and the development, in the following century, of the low, thick-walled bastion fort of Italian origin. The English conquests in Normandy and Aquitaine had been defended, in the 14th century, by high stone towers on hilltops; by the 15th century the French Bureau brothers were reducing them with concentrated artillery fire. The castles of the late Middle Ages were the last expression of the feudal military order; the bastion forts of the 16th century were the first expression of the centralised state.

The Black Death

The Black Death of 1347–1351, which killed perhaps a third of the population of Europe, accelerated every one of these changes. The labour shortages caused by the plague produced a sharp rise in wages and a corresponding crisis in the seigneurial economy. The English Statute of Labourers of 1351, attempting to freeze wages at pre-plague levels, was unenforceable. The French ordonnances of the 1350s and 1360s attempted the same with no greater success.

The fiscal consequence for the war was direct. The war of the 1340s and 1350s had been financed, in part, by the wool trade and by the loans of the Italian banking houses; the demographic and economic shock of the plague reduced both, and forced both crowns to develop new fiscal instruments. The parliamentary taxation of the English crown, the taille of the French crown, and the standing professional armies of the 1440s are all in this sense children of the plague as well as of the war.

The long-term consequences

The decline of feudalism was a long-term process, and the war was only one of its causes. The rise of towns, the development of a money economy, the growth of the royal fisc, the demographic effects of the plague, and the slow transformation of intellectual and religious life were all in play. But the war gave the process urgency, and the war determined its pace. The feudal levy, the mounted knight, and the high medieval castle all reached the end of their operational life in the same century, and they were all replaced, on both sides of the Channel, by institutions — parliamentary taxation, the centralised state, the professional army, the bastion fort — that were recognisably modern.

The political consequences, in the long run, were enormous. The centralised English parliament, the centralised French monarchy, and the professionalised standing armies of the two kingdoms were the bones of the early modern state. The English Civil War of the 1640s, the French Revolution of 1789, and the slow political transformation of the European state system are unimaginable without the medieval work of the Hundred Years’ War.