The Duchy of Aquitaine: England's Last Continental Possession

The Duchy of Aquitaine was the principal English possession in France at the outbreak of the Hundred Years’ War, and the disputes over its status and governance were among the immediate causes of the conflict. The duchy had been held by the Plantagenet kings of England since the marriage of Henry II to Eleanor of Aquitaine in 1152, and it remained the cornerstone of English continental policy for the next three centuries. The duchy was reconquered by the French, in stages, between 1370 and 1453, and its loss was the defining political event of the war’s closing phase.

The standard treatment is Malcolm Vale’s English Gascony 1199–1453 (2010), the most important single account in English. The older work of Yves Renouard, Études sur Angoulême and the relevant chapters of his work on the English in Aquitaine, remains valuable. The Aquitanian dimension of the war is treated in detail in Sumption’s The Hundred Years’ War in all five volumes.

The duchy before the Plantagenets

The duchy of Aquitaine emerged as a major political entity in the early Middle Ages. The dukes, descended from the counts of Poitiers, controlled a vast territory in southwestern France, including much of the region between the Loire and the Pyrenees. By the 11th century the duchy was one of the most powerful feudal principalities in France, and its dukes frequently played a decisive role in the politics of the kingdom.

The duchy was, however, a loose collection of territories rather than a unified state. The dukes of Aquitaine ruled over a patchwork of counties, viscounties, and lordships, each with its own customs and traditions. The duchy was held of the French crown, and the dukes were vassals of the French kings. The relationship between dukes and crown was often strained, and the duchy was a frequent source of friction in the politics of medieval France.

Eleanor and the Plantagenet marriage

The history of the duchy was transformed by the marriage of Eleanor of Aquitaine to Henry Plantagenet in 1152. Eleanor, who had previously been the wife of King Louis VII of France, brought the duchy of Aquitaine to her new husband as her dowry. The marriage, which took place only weeks after the annulment of Eleanor’s first marriage, was a remarkable political event: it united the duchy of Aquitaine with the duchy of Normandy and the county of Anjou, all of which were held by Henry.

When Henry became King of England in 1154, the Plantagenet kings of England became also the dukes of Aquitaine. The duchy, which had been an independent principality, was now joined to the English crown. The constitutional absurdity of the arrangement — the King of England was also a vassal of the King of France for lands the English regarded as sovereign — was the structural cause of the Hundred Years’ War.

The duchy under the Plantagenets

The Plantagenet kings of England were absentee dukes for most of the period from the 12th to the 14th centuries. The duchy was governed by a series of seneschals, appointed by the English kings and administering the duchy in their name. The seneschals ruled from Bordeaux, the principal city of the duchy, and they were responsible for the maintenance of order, the administration of justice, and the collection of revenues.

The relationship between the dukes and their vassals was not always smooth. The duchy was a complex patchwork of territories, and the centralising policies of the Plantagenet kings were often resented by the local nobility. The duchy was also a frequent target of French attack, and the dukes of Aquitaine were constantly forced to defend their territories against French encroachment. The duchy was treated, throughout the medieval period, as a “frontier” duchy: an English bridgehead on the continent, surrounded by French power and dependent on English naval and military support.

The Black Prince and the principality of Aquitaine

The duchy was at its most prosperous and most famous during the period when Edward of Woodstock, the Black Prince, served as Prince of Aquitaine (1362–1372). The Black Prince governed the duchy from Bordeaux and conducted his campaigns through the duchy, including the chevauchée of 1355 into Languedoc and the campaign of 1367 into Castile (the Battle of Najera, 3 April 1367).

The Black Prince’s regime, however, was marked by harsh fiscal policies. The fouage (a flat hearth tax) imposed in 1368 and the pays de taille policy that subjected much of the duchy to direct taxation provoked a revolt of the Aquitanian nobility in 1368–1369. The revolt was the pretext Charles V used to revoke the Treaty of Brétigny in November 1369 and to reopen the war.

The Black Prince returned to England in January 1371, ill with what was probably dysentery contracted in Spain. He died on 8 June 1376, a year before his father. The duchy, which had been the centrepiece of the Treaty of Brétigny, was effectively lost within a few years, as the French under Charles V and du Guesclin gradually recovered the territories ceded in 1360.

The duchy in the Lancastrian phase

The English position in Aquitaine was effectively reduced to a coastal strip around Bordeaux. The duchy, as an entity, survived only as a title: the Black Prince’s son, the future Richard II, was nominal Duke of Aquitaine, but the duchy was administered by the English through a seneschal and a small council. The duchy in this period was a relic rather than a principality.

The French reconquest of 1449–1453 ended the title as well. The reconquest of Normandy in 1449 was followed by the reconquest of most of Gascony in 1451, and the final English defeat at Castillon on 17 July 1453 marked the end of the duchy. Bordeaux, the ancient capital, surrendered to the French on 19 October 1453. The title “Duke of Aquitaine” was claimed by the English kings into the 19th century, but the substance of the duchy had been lost in 1453.

The legacy

The duchy of Aquitaine was the principal English possession in France for three centuries, and its loss was the defining political event of the war’s closing phase. The duchy was the source of constant friction between the English and French crowns, and the disputes over its status were among the immediate causes of the war. The duchy was also the principal theatre of the Edwardian phase and the early part of the Caroline phase.

The duchy also produced durable cultural legacies. The wine of Bordeaux, exported to England in vast quantities throughout the medieval period, was a major source of revenue for the duchy and a major source of friction between England and France. The pays de Gascogne — the southwestern Gascon homeland that was the heart of the duchy — retained a distinctive identity long after the loss of the principality. The Aquitanian dialect of Occitan, the troubadour tradition that had been the principal literary culture of medieval Europe in the 12th century, and the Romanesque architecture of the pilgrimage roads (Vézelay, Conques, Moissac) are all legacies of the duchy.

The duchy of Aquitaine is the territorial key to the Hundred Years’ War. The disputes over its governance, the chevauchées launched from it, the taxes imposed on it, the political allegiances of its inhabitants, and the long, slow process of its reconquest by the French crown are the central threads of the war’s political narrative.