The Edwardian Phase of the Hundred Years' War (1337–1360)
The Edwardian phase of the Hundred Years’ War, named for the English king Edward III, was the first of the three great phases of the conflict. It opened in 1337 with Edward’s renunciation of his homage to Philip VI and ended in 1360 with the Treaty of Brétigny. The phase was the high-water mark of English power in the war, marked by the personal command of Edward III and his son the Black Prince, by the development of the longbow as the dominant infantry weapon of the age, and by three great English victories — Sluys, Crécy, and Poitiers — that established the English as the dominant military force in Western Europe for a generation.
The standard treatment is Sumption’s The Hundred Years’ War, vol. I (1990) and vol. II (1999). The most useful single-volume French account is Contamine’s La Guerre de Cent Ans (1968). Clifford Rogers’ War Cruel and Sharp: English Strategy under Edward III, 1327–1360 (2014) is the most rigorous tactical treatment.
The opening of the war
The Edwardian phase opened with the long-running dispute over the succession to the French throne and the question of whether Edward III had a legitimate claim to it. Edward had renounced his claim in 1329, in exchange for French recognition of his possession of the duchy of Aquitaine, but the arrangement was unstable from the start. The French confiscation of Aquitaine by the Parlement of Paris on 24 May 1337, in response to a number of grievances, was the immediate trigger for the war. Edward renounced his homage to Philip VI on 7 October 1337, and on 26 January 1340 he formally assumed the title “King of France” at the Westminster Parliament.
The first three years of the war were largely inconclusive. Edward assembled a large army at Antwerp in 1338 and campaigned in the Low Countries, hoping to link up with German allies. The plan failed, and Edward was forced to fall back on his Flemish allies, who were increasingly reluctant to continue the fight. The English, however, found a powerful new weapon in the privateer war, the licensing of English ships to attack French commerce and the seizure of French merchant vessels.
Sluys, 24 June 1340
The campaign was effectively decided at sea. On 24 June 1340 Edward met the French fleet at the Battle of Sluys, off the Flemish coast (Sluys is now part of Vlissingen, in the Netherlands). The English navy, organised around a core of large vessels with high castles from which archers could fire, destroyed the French fleet in a battle that was as much a slaughter as a naval engagement. Froissart’s figure of 18,000 French killed is rhetorical; the more sober modern estimates put French losses in the low thousands. The result, however, was total: French control of the Channel was broken, and the prospect of a French invasion of England was ended for the rest of the war.
The Crécy campaign, 1346
The most important campaign of the Edwardian phase opened in July 1346, when Edward III landed in Normandy with an army of perhaps 12,000–15,000 men. The campaign was a chevauchée of the mature type: not a raid for plunder but a deliberate devastation designed to force Philip VI to fight and to demonstrate the inability of the Valois monarchy to defend its subjects. Edward marched through the duchy, sacked Caen on 26 July (the sack lasted five days and did enormous material damage), and turned north toward the English-held territory of Ponthieu.
The French king caught up with Edward near the village of Crécy on the evening of 25 August. The two armies fought on the afternoon of 26 August. The English, deployed on a ridge, used the longbow to devastating effect, and the French army, attacking uphill into a hail of arrows, was shattered. The young Black Prince, sixteen years old, won his spurs in the battle by leading the English right wing. The Duke of Alençon, the Count of Flanders, the Count of Blois, the Duke of Lorraine, and the blind King of Bohemia were among the dead.
The English followed up the victory at Crécy with the siege of Calais, which surrendered in August 1347 after an eleven-month siege. Calais, the last great continental conquest of the Edwardian phase, would remain in English hands until 1558. The possession of Calais allowed the English to maintain a permanent garrison on French soil and to dominate the Channel.
The Black Death
The Edwardian phase of the war was interrupted by the arrival of the Black Death in 1347. The pandemic, caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis and transmitted by fleas on rats, killed perhaps a third of the population of Europe between 1347 and 1351. The demographic and economic effects were profound: labour shortages caused by the plague led to a sharp rise in wages, which in turn undermined the old feudal economy.
The English kings were forced to seek parliamentary consent for new taxes to pay for the war, and the practice of parliamentary taxation, established during the Edwardian phase, would have important constitutional consequences in the following century. The English parliament, which had been a relatively minor institution in the early 14th century, was transformed by the war into a much more important body. The Good Parliament of 1376 and the parliamentary impeachments of the Lancastrian period are unimaginable without the fiscal-military infrastructure built up during the Edwardian phase.
Poitiers, 19 September 1356
The third great English victory of the phase was the Battle of Poitiers, fought on 19 September 1356 near the village of Maupertuis, a few miles southeast of the city of Poitiers. The Black Prince, returning from a chevauchée through southern France, was caught by King John II with a French army perhaps three to four times his own. The English deployed behind a hedge and a sunken road; the French attacked in successive waves and were broken. King John himself was captured and held to ransom in England until 1360. The ransom, fixed by the Treaty of London in 1359, was the basis of the Treaty of Brétigny in 1360.
The capture of the French king was an enormous strategic coup, and the political chaos that followed — the meeting of the Estates-General in October 1356, the Jacquerie of 1358, the revolt of the Navarrese faction in Paris — produced a French government in 1358 that was, in effect, incapable of conducting the war. The English, with the king of France in captivity, were in the strongest position they would ever be in.
The Treaty of Brétigny, 8 May 1360
The Treaty of Brétigny, signed on 8 May 1360, settled the war on terms spectacularly favourable to England. Edward renounced his claim to the French throne in exchange for full sovereignty over the duchy of Aquitaine, the county of Ponthieu, and the city of Calais. The ransom of King John was reduced, and the hostages released.
The treaty, however, was unenforceable. The English did not have the institutions, the money, or the population to occupy so much territory. The Black Prince, appointed Prince of Aquitaine in 1362, attempted to govern the duchy from Bordeaux, but his harsh fiscal policies provoked a revolt of the Aquitanian nobility in 1368–1369, and the French revocation of the treaty in November 1369 reopened the war. By the time of the treaty of Leulinghem in 1389, the English had been reduced to a coastal strip around Bordeaux and the duchy of Calais.
The significance
The Edwardian phase was the high point of English power in the war. Edward III’s personal command, combined with the longbow and a brilliant generation of commanders — Chandos, the Captal de Buch, the Black Prince — had produced victories that astonished Europe. The Battle of Castillon (1453) and the Battle of Agincourt (1415) would later match or exceed these English triumphs, but Crécy and Poitiers were the first, and their impact on the medieval imagination was enormous.
The phase also produced, in the long run, three of the most important institutions of the English state: the parliamentary tax system, the professional indent army, and the centralised royal administration capable of mobilising both. The English parliament’s power to grant and oversee taxation, the English military’s reliance on contracted professional soldiers, and the English state’s capacity to organise long continental campaigns are all Edwardian legacies.