The Hundred Years' War 1337–1453

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The Hundred Years' War (1337–1453): A Complete Historical Overview

The Hundred Years’ War was the defining Anglo-French conflict of the late Middle Ages. the war lasted 116 years, from 7 October 1337 — when Edward III renounced his homage to Philip VI — to the French victory at Castillon on 17 July 1453 and the surrender of Bordeaux on 19 October 1453. It was fought intermittently, in three main bursts separated by long truces, and it ended with England stripped of every continental possession except Calais (and even Calais fell in 1558).

The conventional division is:

  • Edwardian phase (1337–1360) — ended by the Treaty of Brétigny.
  • Caroline phase (1369–1389) — named for Charles V; ended by the truce of Leulinghem.
  • Lancastrian phase (1415–1453) — opened by Henry V’s invasion, closed by the Battle of Castillon.

The name “Hundred Years’ War” was coined by French historians in the 19th century, popularised in English by May McKisack’s The Fourteenth Century (1959) and fully embedded by Jonathan Sumption’s multi-volume The Hundred Years’ War (vol. I 1990 — vol. V forthcoming).

Background

The English kings had been continental lords since 1066, when William of Normandy became king of England. For the next 150 years the Plantagenet kings — Henry IIRichard I, JohnHenry IIIEdward IEdward II — ruled an Angevin Empire that stretched from the Cheviots to the Pyrenees. By the time of Edward III, that empire had been reduced to a single duchy, Aquitaine, held as a fief of the French crown. The arrangement was constitutionally combustible: the King of England was vassal of the King of France for lands the English regarded as sovereign.

Two further tensions accumulated over the same centuries. First, the English economy had become structurally dependent on the export of raw wool to the cloth towns of Flanders, which sat under French suzerainty. SecondFrance and Scotland had concluded the Auld Alliance in 1295, giving the French a permanent opening against England in the north.

The immediate trigger: 1328

The immediate trigger was the succession crisis that followed the death of Charles IV on 1 February 1328, the last direct Capetian king. The French magnates applied the Salic Law and chose Philip of Valois (Philip VI) over Edward III, whose mother Isabella was Charles IV’s sister. Edward did homage to Philip at Amiens on 6 June 1329 for the duchy of Aquitaine. The compromise was unstable from the start; when Edward overthrew the regency of Isabella and Roger Mortimer in October 1330 he had every motive to revive his dormant claim.

The drift to war between 1328 and 1337 ran through a series of discrete disputes: the succession to the county of Artois the status of English pirates in the ChannelFrench support for Scotland, and the question of whether Edward would do homage in person for Aquitaine. On 24 May 1337 Philip VI’s Parlement declared Aquitaine forfeit. Edward renounced homage on 7 October 1337. He did not, however, formally assume the title “King of France” until the Westminster Parliament of 26 January 1340, when he quartered the French arms with the English and ordered the title used in chancery documents.

The Edwardian phase, 1337–1360

The first two decades of fighting were the high-water mark of English arms. The decisive engagements:

  • Sluys, 24 June 1340 — a fleet action off the Flemish coast. The English ships, with their high castles and massed longbowmen, destroyed the French fleet and gave England control of the Channel for the rest of the war. Froissart’s figure of 18,000 French killed is rhetorical, not statistical, but the result was total.
  • Crécy, 26 August 1346 — Edward III, retreating northward from his chevauchée through Normandy, stood and fought a much larger French army near the village of Crécy-en-Ponthieu. The dismounted English men-at-arms, covered by longbowmen firing in disciplined volleys, broke the successive French attacks uphill. The Duke of Alençon, the Count of Flanders, the Count of Blois, and the blind King of Bohemia were among the dead.
  • Poitiers, 19 September 1356 — the Black Prince, returning from a chevauchée through southern France, was caught by King John II. Once again the longbow, combined with a carefully chosen defensive position, decided the day. King John himself was captured and held to ransom.

The Treaty of Brétigny (8 May 1360) settled the war on terms spectacularly favourable to England: full sovereignty over Aquitaine, Ponthieu, and Calais, in exchange for Edward’s renunciation of the French crown. Edward had not the institutions, the money, or the population to occupy so much territory. Within a decadeCharles V was recovering it.

The Caroline phase, 1369–1389

Charles V, advised by his constable Bertrand du Guesclin, deliberately refused the kind of pitched battle that had decided Crécy and Poitiers. The French strategy was one of attrition: avoid open battle, harass the English garrisons, cut off English Aquitaine from seaborne reinforcement (the Franco-Castilian fleet destroyed an English convoy at La Rochelle in 1372), and exhaust the enemy’s finances. By the truce of Leulinghem in 1389, only Calais and a coastal strip around Bordeaux remained in English hands.

The Lancastrian phase, 1415–1453

The third phase opened with the most concentrated English success of the entire war:

  • Agincourt, 25 October 1415 — Henry V, returning from the conquest of Harfleur, was cornered by a substantially larger French force in the narrow plain of Picardy. Mud, longbow fire, and the narrow front did the rest. Modern estimates put English losses at 400–600French at 1,500–4,000, of whom a substantial proportion were men-at-arms of the higher nobility (the Duke of Alençon, the Duke of Brabant, the Constable d’Albret). Shakespeare, working from Holinshed and Hall, fixed the image in English memory.
  • The conquest of Normandy, 1417–1419 — a methodical campaign of sieges (Caen 1417Rouen 1419) that left Henry in control of the duchy his ancestors had lost in 1204.
  • The Treaty of Troyes, 21 May 1420 — the most ambitious diplomatic instrument of the war. Charles VI, or rather Queen Isabeau acting for him, recognised Henry as regent and heir of France and contracted Henry to marry Catherine of Valois. The Dauphin, the future Charles VII, was disinherited.

The settlement depended on the survival of the two principals. Henry V died of dysentery at the Château de Vincennes on 31 August 1422. Charles VI, the articles in this site conventionally date his death to 21 October 1422, outlived him by seven weeks. The infant Henry VI was proclaimed King of France and England, but the Dauphin refused the disinheritance and held the centre and south.

The turning point came in 1429. A peasant girl from DomrémyJoan of Arc, persuaded the Dauphin to let her lead a small army to the relief of Orléans. The siege was lifted on 8 May 1429, the Loire was cleared at Jargeau, Meung-sur-Loire, Beaugency, and Patay (18 June, in which John Talbot was defeated but not captured), and Charles VII was crowned at Reims on 17 July 1429. Joan was captured at Compiègne on 23 May 1430, sold to the English, tried for heresy by a French ecclesiastical court under English supervision, and burned at the stake in Rouen on 30 May 1431. The rehabilitation process opened in 1450 under Nicholas V, the verdict was annulled in 1456, and Joan was beatified in 1909 and canonised by Benedict XV on 16 May 1920.

The war dragged on for another 22 years. The English lost Normandy in 1449Gascony in 1451, and finally the army of John TalbotEarl of Shrewsbury, was destroyed by French artillery under Jean Bureau at Castillon on 17 July 1453. Bordeaux surrendered on 19 October 1453. Apart from Calais the English territorial presence in France was finished.

The international context

The Hundred Years’ War cannot be read in isolation. Three long-running conflicts fed into and out of it:

  • The Auld Alliance (1295) bound France to Scotland; French money and French troops kept Scotland in the war against England for the entire duration.
  • The Anglo-Castilian campaigns of the 1360s and 1380s — Najera (1367), the expedition of John of Gaunt, the Castilian support for France — drew English resources into Iberia.
  • The Western Schism (1378–1417) split the loyalties of Christendom and shaped the diplomacy of the treaty of Troyes; the resolution of the Schism at the Council of Constance in 1414–1418 removed a piece of leverage Henry V had been using.

The Italian banking houses, the Bardi and the Peruzzi, financed much of Edward III’s early war effort and went bankrupt in 1343–1346 after the failure of the wool tax. The collapse of English credit is one of the underappreciated reasons the Edwardian phase ended where it did.

Military revolution

The Hundred Years’ War is one of the canonical examples of a “military revolution” in medieval warfare. Three structural shifts are visible in the war’s record:

  1. The decline of the mounted charge. The longbow at Crécy, Poitiers, and Agincourt demonstrated that massed infantry missile fire, fired from a prepared position, could break the most expensive armoured cavalry in Europe. The mounted knight did not disappear, but the independent mounted charge was tactically suicidal.
  2. The rise of paid professional armies. The feudal levy — limited service, limited duration, limited training — could not produce the long, deep campaigns of the late phase. Both crowns increasingly relied on contract captains (indents) and on the French compagnies d’ordonnance established by Charles VII in 1445.
  3. The integration of gunpowder artillery. Cannon appeared in European warfare in the early 14th century; the French Bureau brothers turned the French train of field artillery into a decisive weapon, and Castillon is conventionally cited as the moment when the gun replaced the longbow as the dominant battlefield arm.

Consequences

The political, social, and cultural consequences of the war were, in their own way, larger than the military outcome.

  • In France the war produced a centralised fiscal-military state. The permanent taille (1445), the compagnies d’ordonnance (1445), and the standing artillery train were the bones of the absolute monarchy that Louis XIV would inherit.
  • In England the loss of the continental possessions cut a thread of identity that had run from the Norman Conquest to Henry V. The political crisis of the 1450s — the incapacity of Henry VI, the loss of Normandy and Gascony, the breakdown of royal finance — fed directly into the Wars of the Roses (1455–1485).
  • In language, law, and culture the war marked the moment when English ceased to be a court language in England (French had been used in chancery until the 15th century) and when French was decisively replaced by vernacular English in English law reporting.

The strategic geography

The war was fought almost entirely on French soil. Three macro-regions mattered most:

  • Aquitaine and Gascony — the wine country of the southwest, the principal English possession, and the scene of the Edwardian and Caroline phases.
  • Normandy and the Île-de-France — the Channel coast, the second English foothold after 1417, and the most heavily fought-over theatre of the Lancastrian phase.
  • The Loire valley — the boundary between the English-held north and the French-held south after 1429 and the principal theatre of Joan’s campaign.

Why the war is still argued about

The Hundred Years’ War is unusually well-documented for a medieval conflict. The French sources — the Chronique du Religieux de Saint-DenisEnguerrand de MonstreletJean Froissart (writing from an English-friendly Burgundian standpoint), the anonymous Chronique de Normandie — and the English sources — the Chronicon Henrici KnightonAdam of UskThomas Walsingham, the Gesta Henrici Quinti — allow modern scholars to triangulate the major events with unusual precision. The standard modern narrative in English is Jonathan Sumption’s The Hundred Years’ War, in progress since 1990; Anne Curry’s Agincourt: A New History (2005) and The Battle of Agincourt: An Anatomy (2020) reset the most-studied single engagement; Philippe Contamine’s La Guerre de Cent Ans (1968) remains the most-cited French synthesis. The historiography continues to evolve: the structural, fiscal, and demographic arguments pioneered by M. M. PostanRobert Boutruche, and Georges Duby have been deepened in the work of Christopher AllmandClifford Rogers, and Andrew Villalon.

A useful starting point

The simplest way into the war is the timeline of the Hundred Years’ War. The three phase articles — Edwardian, Caroline, and Lancastrian — cover the conventional divisions in detail. The causes, battles, key figures, and legacy pillars give the longer view.