The Succession Crisis of 1328: The Trigger for the Hundred Years' War

The Succession Crisis of 1328 was the immediate trigger for the Hundred Years’ War. The crisis began with the death of Charles IV of France on 1 February 1328, the last of the direct Capetian kings, and ended with the coronation of Philip, Count of Valois, as Philip VI of France on 29 May 1328. The decision of the French magnates to set aside the claim of the young Edward III of England in favour of Philip set the stage for more than a century of war. The legal pretext was the so-called Salic Law, an obscure Frankish legal tradition that excluded women from inheriting the throne and, by extension, prevented the claim from passing through them. The decision was made by an assembly of French magnates and was announced on 2 April 1328.

The standard treatments are the relevant chapters of Sumption’s The Hundred Years’ War, vol. I (1990), and the work of Jean Favier in La Guerre de Cent Ans (1980). The legal question is treated at length in the standard work on the Salic Law, and the political dimension in the relevant chapters of Malcolm Vale’s The Origins of the Hundred Years War (1992) and in the older work of Edouard Perroy, La Guerre de Cent Ans (1945).

The end of the direct Capetian line

The Capetian dynasty had ruled France since 987, when Hugh Capet, Count of Paris, had been elected king. The Capetians had been remarkably successful in maintaining their dynasty in the male line, but by the early 14th century the direct line was running out. Charles IV, the last of the direct Capetians, had been king since 1322, and his marriage to three different queens had produced only daughters. When he died on 1 February 1328, the question of who should succeed him was the most important political question in Europe.

The two principal claimants were Edward III of England, then fifteen years old, whose mother Isabella of France was Charles IV’s sister; and Philip, Count of Valois, a cousin of the late king, whose father Charles of Valois was the brother of King Philip IV. Philip was 35 years old, was already established as a major French nobleman, and had the support of much of the French aristocracy. A third claimant was Charles II of Navarre, known as Charles the Bad, whose mother was a daughter of King Louis X. Charles had a stronger claim by primogeniture than Philip, but he was widely disliked and politically unreliable.

The Salic Law and the rejection of Edward’s claim

The French solution to the succession was to apply the Salic Law, an obscure Frankish legal tradition that excluded women from inheriting the throne and, by extension, prevented the claim from passing through them. The Salic Law had been used in earlier disputes over the French succession — most notably in the dispute over the succession to the county of Artois — but it had not been used to settle a regnal succession in this way, and its application in 1328 was controversial.

The argument was that since the original claimants were all descendants of Philip IV through the female line, none of them had a clear claim, and the throne should pass to the senior male heir of the Capetian dynasty, who was Philip of Valois. The argument was politically convenient: it excluded Edward III, it excluded Charles of Navarre, and it allowed the throne to pass to a mature, established French nobleman with the support of the French aristocracy.

The application of the Salic Law effectively excluded Edward III from the French throne. The decision was made by an assembly of French magnates, including the Duke of Burgundy, the Duke of Bourbon, the Count of Flanders, and the Chancellor of France. The decision was announced on 2 April 1328, and Philip was crowned at Reims on 29 May 1328.

Edward’s homage and its consequences

Edward III, then only fifteen, accepted the French decision. On 6 June 1329, he travelled to Amiens to do homage to Philip for the duchy of Aquitaine, an act that acknowledged the new king’s sovereignty over Edward’s remaining continental possessions. The homage was meant to settle the dispute, but it was compromised from the start by the political context in which it was made.

Edward was not, in 1328–1329, in a position to assert his claim. His father, Edward II, had been deposed and probably murdered in 1327, and the new regime of Isabella of France and her lover Roger Mortimer was dependent on French goodwill. The young king was persuaded to renounce his claim in exchange for French recognition of his possession of Aquitaine. The arrangement was unstable, however, and within a few years, when Edward came of age in October 1330 and assumed personal rule, the compromise began to unravel.

The Aquitaine disputes

The settlement of 1328–1329 was further complicated by the long-running disputes over the duchy of Aquitaine. The duchy had been held by the Plantagenets since the marriage of Henry II of England to Eleanor of Aquitaine in 1152, and it had been enlarged by the addition of Poitou and other territories in the 13th century. The duchy was held of the French crown, and the dukes of Aquitaine, who were also the kings of England, were vassals of the kings of France.

The relationship between the duchy and the French crown had been a source of friction for generations. The dukes of Aquitaine frequently refused to acknowledge their French overlord, and the French kings, in turn, summoned them to parliament to answer charges of misgovernment. By the time of Edward III, the duchy was the source of constant disputes, and the question of whether Edward should do homage in person, and under what conditions, would soon become the immediate pretext for the war.

The drift toward war

The years between 1328 and 1337 saw a steady escalation of tensions. Edward III attempted to assert control over his continental possessions, while Philip VI sought to assert French sovereignty over the same lands. Minor incidents, including the dispute over the succession of the county of Artois, accumulated into major confrontations, and by 1337 the relationship between the two monarchs had broken down entirely.

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 III renounced his homage to Philip VI 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 succession crisis of 1328, which had seemed to be settled ten years earlier, had finally produced the conflict that would last for more than a century.

The 1328 settlement in historical perspective

The decision of the French magnates in 1328 was, in the short term, a sensible one. Philip VI was an established nobleman, a Capetian on the male line, and the support of the French aristocracy gave his new regime a strong foundation. The exclusion of Edward III was legally defensible, and the choice of Philip avoided the chaos that might have followed a succession by a foreign king.

In the longer term, however, the 1328 decision was disastrous. The English were not prepared to accept the exclusion of their king from the French throne, and the disputes over Aquitaine provided a steady source of friction. The decision to apply the Salic Law in this way was a particular source of grievance, since the English regarded it as a transparent manoeuvre to keep a foreign king off the French throne. The crisis of 1328, then, did not so much cause the Hundred Years’ War as provide the legal and political pretext for a conflict that was, in any case, becoming increasingly likely.

The most useful single reading, set out by Vale and developed in the modern literature, is that the 1328 decision was a contingent political settlement that produced an unintended consequence. The French magnates who made the decision were not, in 1328, choosing war; they were choosing what they took to be the most stable available succession. The war was the consequence of a series of subsequent decisions, on both sides of the Channel, that turned the settlement of 1328 into an instrument of conflict.