How Long Was the Hundred Years' War? | The Hundred Years' War

The Hundred Years’ War lasted 116 years, from 7 October 1337, when Edward III renounced his homage to Philip VI at Westminster, to 19 October 1453, when Bordeaux surrendered to the French. The conventional division is into three phases, separated by long truces: the Edwardian phase (1337–1360), the Caroline phase (1369–1389), and the Lancastrian phase (1415–1453). The label “Hundred Years’ War” was coined in the 19th century by French historians; the name stuck, but it is a label of convenience rather than a description.

Where the dates come from

The conventional opening date is 7 October 1337. On that day Edward III, in a ceremony at Westminster, formally renounced the homage he had done to Philip VI at Amiens on 6 June 1329 for the duchy of Aquitaine. The renunciation was the culmination of a year of escalating disputes — the case of Robert d’Artois, the confiscation of Aquitaine by the Parlement of Paris on 24 May 1337, the issue of the liege homage — and it marked the moment at which the political dispute became a war. Edward did not, however, assume the title “King of France” until the Westminster Parliament of 26 January 1340, when the French royal arms were first quartered with the English.

The conventional closing date is 19 October 1453, the day on which Bordeaux surrendered to the French. The military decision had been made at the Battle of Castillon on 17 July 1453, when John Talbot, Earl of Shrewsbury, was killed and the English army destroyed. The surrender of Bordeaux was the political consequence. The end of the war is sometimes given as 17 July 1453, sometimes as 19 October 1453, and sometimes as 1453 in general; the historiographical argument for the 19 October date is the stronger, since the Bordeaux garrison had been negotiating since Castillon and the surrender was the last formal act.

Why “Hundred Years’ War” is a useful label

The name is convenient. The war was fought in three distinct bursts, separated by two long truces, and the political objectives of the three phases were not the same. The 19th-century French historians who coined the term did so precisely because the label, while false as arithmetic, was true as description: there was a single, continuous Anglo-French conflict that lasted from the reign of Philip VI to the reign of Charles VII. The standard English reference, May McKisack’s The Fourteenth Century (1959), popularised the term; Jonathan Sumption’s The Hundred Years’ War (vol. I 1990 — vol. V forthcoming) made it definitive.

The term has its critics. Some English historians have preferred to speak of the “Hundred Years’ War” only in quotation marks, or to divide the conflict into “the Edwardian War,” “the Caroline War,” and “the Lancastrian War.” The criticism is fair as far as it goes. The war was not a single sustained campaign, and the strategic aims of 1337, 1369, and 1415 were different. But the continuity of the conflict — the same royal houses, the same disputed succession, the same Aquitanian claim, the same Flemish-Scottish diplomacy — is real.

The three phases

The Edwardian phase opened on 7 October 1337 and closed with the Treaty of Brétigny on 8 May 1360. The phase saw the great English victories: Sluys on 24 June 1340, Crécy on 26 August 1346, and Poitiers on 19 September 1356. The Treaty of Brétigny, which ceded Aquitaine, Ponthieu, and Calais to England in full sovereignty, was the high-water mark of English arms. The phase ended in the early 1360s when the English government, bankrupted by the cost of the war, proved unable to consolidate the gains.

The Caroline phase opened in 1369 with Charles V’s reopening of the war and closed with the truce of Leulinghem on 18 June 1389. The phase was one of slow French recovery. Charles V and Bertrand du Guesclin refused pitched battle, harried the English garrisons, and used a strategy of avoidance to recover most of the Brétigny gains. The truce of Leulinghem was meant to last 28 years, with break-clauses every four years; it held, with regular renewals, until 1415.

The Lancastrian phase opened with Henry V’s invasion of August 1415 and closed with Castillon in 1453. The phase opened with Agincourt on 25 October 1415, the systematic conquest of Normandy in 1417–1419, and the Treaty of Troyes on 21 May 1420. It closed with the French reconquest of Normandy in 1449, of Gascony in 1451, and the destruction of Talbot’s army at Castillon. The phase was the longest of the three, and the one in which the long-term outcome was decided.

The truces

The war was held together, and held apart, by the truce system. The truces of 1389, 1396, 1403, 1414, 1415, 1420, 1427, 1435, 1444, and 1451 are the major ones; the truces of 1444, signed at Tours and extended at various intervals, gave the longest single period of Anglo-French peace in the war, broken only by the renewal of hostilities in 1449. The truces were not always strictly observed. Local raids, the policing of the Channel, and the small wars of the March of Calais continued throughout. The diplomatic culture of the truce — the safe-conducts, the negotiations, the ransom-brokers — was one of the most distinctive features of the war.

Years of active fighting

If the question is “how many years of actual campaigning were there,” the answer is something like 40 to 45 years out of 116. The Edwardian phase had perhaps 10 years of major campaigning; the Caroline phase had perhaps 8; the Lancastrian phase had perhaps 25, including the long reconquest of 1449–1453. The remainder was spent in truces, in the negotiation of extensions, in the slow grind of garrison warfare, and in the political processes of the two kingdoms. The truces were not peace. They were an armistice in a war that everyone expected to resume.

Significance

The 116 years of the war are best understood as a single political process, punctuated by military campaigns, rather than as three wars joined at the seams. The English claim to the French throne, asserted in 1340, was not formally renounced until the reign of George III. The Aquitanian duchy, lost in 1453, was not recovered. The war settled a series of constitutional questions — the French succession, the relationship of the English king to the French crown, the status of the duchy of Aquitaine — that had been open since 1066. The settlement of 1453 was, in this sense, the most consequential diplomatic event of the late Middle Ages.