The Hundred Years' War 1337–1453

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The Legacy of the Hundred Years' War

The war ended in 1453 with the French victory at Castillon, but its consequences are still being measured. The standard modern assessment, in line with the work of Jean FavierPhilippe Contamine, and Jonathan Sumption, is that the war was one of the formative events of the European state system. The English Plantagenet Empire was finished. The French Valois monarchy emerged as the dominant power in Western Europe. The English parliament became a permanent part of the English constitution. The mounted knight ceased to be the dominant arm of European armies. And the social, fiscal, and demographic effects of 116 years of intermittent war fed directly into the political crises of the 15th century.

The end of the Plantagenet Empire

The most immediate consequence was the loss of every English possession on the Continent. By 1453 England retained only Calais, which fell in 1558. For three centuries the kings of England had been continental lords; after 1453 they were kings of an island kingdom. The Plantagenet dynasty had defined itself by its French possessions; the dynasty lost its identity when it lost them, and the discontent that followed fed directly into the Wars of the Roses and the end of the Plantagenet line at Bosworth in 1485.

In the longer view, however, the loss was a liberation. The English kings had spent the entire 14th and 15th centuries trying to defend a continental footprint that was, by the 15th century, militarily indefensible. The end of the war allowed the English kings to focus on the governance of their own island, and the political and administrative capacity built up for the war effort was redirected into the consolidation of the English state. The Scottish-English union of 1603 (Stuarts) and 1707 (Acts of Union) is unimaginable without the end of the war.

The rise of the French state

The war was, in France, the catalyst for the centralised fiscal-military state. Charles VII’s government, between 1439 and 1453, built the three institutional pillars of the modern French monarchy:

  • The permanent taille (a direct tax on the peasantry, granted by the Estates-General of Orléans in 1439).
  • The compagnies d’ordonnance (1445), the first permanent professional field army in Western Europe, organised in 15 companies of 100 lances each.
  • The standing artillery train under the Bureau brothers, the most powerful in Europe by 1450.

These institutions outlived Charles VII. The Valois kings of the 16th century, and eventually Louis XIV, inherited the centralised state the war had produced. The taille remained a principal source of French royal revenue until 1789; the artillery train became the model for European artillery in the Renaissance.

The decline of feudalism

The Hundred Years’ War accelerated a process that was already underway in the 12th and 13th centuries: the decline of feudal military service as the basis of European armies. The English response was the development of the indent system — contract captains raising paid companies from a labour market in archers and men-at-arms — which had emerged by the 1370s and was the dominant English form by the 1420s. The French response was the centralised royal tax (the taille) and the companies of ordonnance.

The decline of feudalism in this period is more than a metaphor. The legal incidents of feudal tenure, the obligations of vassalage, the fief-rentes and the commendatio, lost much of their military relevance during the war. 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 decline of feudalism cluster article gives the standard longer reading.

The military revolution

The conventional list of military changes produced by the war:

  • The decline of the mounted charge as a decisive battlefield tactic, after Crécy, Poitiers, and Agincourt demonstrated that massed longbowmen firing from a prepared position could break the most expensive cavalry in Europe.
  • The rise of professional infantry and contract armies, financed by parliamentary taxation in England and royal taxation in France.
  • The integration of gunpowder artillery into the field army, culminating in the Bureau brothers’ French train and the decisive use of artillery at Castillon.
  • 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 most useful single treatment of the military revolution in this period is Clifford Rogers’ War Cruel and Sharp: English Strategy under Edward III, 1327–1360 (2014) and his The Oxford Encyclopedia of Medieval Warfare and Military Technology (2010). The site covers the longbow, artillery, plate armour, the chevauchée, and military innovations in dedicated articles.

National identity

The war is one of the formative moments of European national identity. The French and English identities that emerged in the 14th and 15th centuries were shaped by the war in ways that are still legible.

  • The French national identity was forged in the disasters of the 1340s and 1350s, the recovery under Charles V, and the Joan of Arc–era coronation at Reims. The association of the monarchy with a particular, narrowly FrenchCatholic identity is a 15th-century development that the war made possible.
  • The English national identity had been gestating since the Norman Conquest; the war, by giving the English kings a continental enemy to fight and a parliament to pay for it, gave the identity political content. The English language, which had been a court language alongside French and Latin, became the principal language of English governance and law in the same period.

The national identity cluster article treats the theme at length.

Language, law, and culture

A handful of specific cultural legacies are worth naming.

  • The English language. French had been used in English chancery since the Norman Conquest; by the late 15th century, the use of French in legal pleadings and in the courts had been decisively replaced by English. The Pleading in English statute (1362) and the Tresilian reforms of the 1380s are the conventional markers.
  • English parliamentary taxation. The English parliament’s power to grant and oversee taxation was built up over the course of the war. The grant of 1340, the wool customs of the 1340s, and the parliamentary impeachment of ministers in the Good Parliament of 1376 are the milestones.
  • English literature. The war produced the first sustained English-language historiography, the Brut chronicles, and (in the 16th century) Shakespeare’s Henry V and Henry VI plays. Froissart’s Chroniques and the Chronique du Religieux de Saint-Denis are the French equivalents.
  • The Black Prince’s tomb in Canterbury Cathedral, the Talbot monument at the old St. Paul’s, and the surviving longbowmen’s memorials are the principal physical artefacts.

The wars of the roses

The English loss in France is the most direct single cause of the Wars of the Roses. The loss of Normandy in 1449, of Gascony in 1451, and of the war in 1453 destroyed the reputation of the government of Henry VI. The king’s subsequent mental breakdown, the political crisis of the regency, the dynastic challenge of the Duke of York, and the financial exhaustion of the crown fed directly into the civil war of 1455–1485. The long-running historiographical debate about how direct the causation was — Sumption, Curry, and the contributors to the Oxford Handbook of the Wars of the Roses (2015, ed. Doran) lean toward structural rather than immediate causation — is treated in the origins of the Wars of the Roses article.

The international balance

By 1453, the political map of Europe had been redrawn. England was no longer a continental power; France was the dominant kingdom in Western Europe; the duchy of Burgundy was at its maximum extent; the Iberian kingdoms were consolidating; the Italian city-states were entering the period of the Italian Wars. The Anglo-French rivalry that had been at the heart of European politics since the Norman Conquest would continue, in different forms, until the Napoleonic era.

The war in memory

The English memory of the war has been shaped by the great English victories — Crécy, PoitiersAgincourt — and by Shakespeare’s Henry V, which has done more than any other single work to fix the popular image. The French memory has been shaped by the trial and martyrdom of Joan of Arc, by the long Armagnac-Burgundian trauma, and by the patient work of reconquest from 1429 to 1453. Both memories are essential to the war’s meaning.

The war has also been the subject of a modern scholarly literature of unusual quality. The standard English-language account is Jonathan Sumption’s multi-volume The Hundred Years’ War (vol. I 1990, vol. V forthcoming). The standard French accounts are Édouard Perroy’s La Guerre de Cent Ans (1945)Jean Favier’s La Guerre de Cent Ans (1980), and Philippe Contamine’s La Guerre de Cent Ans (1968). Anne Curry’s Agincourt: A New History (2005) and The Battle of Agincourt: An Anatomy (2020) are the most useful single-engagement treatments; Clifford Rogers’ War Cruel and Sharp (2014) is the most useful single-campaign treatment. Christopher Allmand’s The Hundred Years’ War (1988) is the most useful single-volume English introduction; the Oxford Encyclopedia of Medieval Warfare and Military Technology (2010) is the most useful reference work.