What Happened to the English Lands in France?

By 19 October 1453, the date of the surrender of Bordeaux, the English crown had lost every continental possession it had held in 1337. The duchy of Aquitaine — the Bordelais, the Saintonge, the Périgord, the Limousin, the Agenais, and the rest — was gone. Normandy, conquered by Henry V in 1417–1419, was gone. Ponthieu, the small county on the north French coast that had been in English hands since 1279, was gone. Calais, the last foothold, was held for another 105 years and was lost in 1558. The Channel Islands, the only surviving part of the medieval Plantagenet inheritance in France, are the only territorial fragment still in the British Crown’s possession. The standard modern treatment is M. G. A. Vale’s English Gascony 1399–1453 (1970); Jonathan Sumption’s The Hundred Years’ War covers the long political history.

What the English held in 1337

The English continental inheritance of 1337 was, in 1152, the most impressive in Europe. Henry II’s marriage to Eleanor of Aquitaine had brought the Plantagenet kings the duchy of Aquitaine and the county of Poitou, the duchy of Gascony, and a long list of dependent lordships in the south. Three centuries of attrition had reduced this inheritance to a single duchy — Aquitaine — held as a fief of the French crown.

The English also held a scatter of smaller possessions. The county of Ponthieu, on the north French coast, had come to the English crown in 1279. The Channel Islands, in particular Jersey and Guernsey, had been part of the duchy of Normandy and had been retained by the English crown after the loss of Normandy in 1204. The Channel Islands remain a possession of the British Crown to this day. Calais was not yet in English hands; the town was captured in 1347 after an eleven-month siege, the only major English territorial acquisition of the Edwardian phase.

The Edwardian phase: expansion and contract

The English position expanded dramatically between 1337 and 1360. The Treaty of Brétigny of 8 May 1360, ratified at Calais in October 1360, ceded to England in full sovereignty the duchy of Aquitaine, the county of Ponthieu, and the town and county of Calais. The English crown had never held anything comparable in territorial extent; the duchy of Aquitaine in 1360 included most of modern south-western France, from the Loire to the Pyrenees.

The settlement was unenforceable. The duchy was too large to occupy with the available English resources, the Aquitanian nobility resented English rule, and the Black Prince’s fiscal regime of 1362–1372 was a model of how to alienate a subject population. Charles V, advised by Bertrand du Guesclin, reopened the war in 1369. By the truce of Leulinghem in 1389, only Calais, Bordeaux and a thin coastal strip, and the Channel Islands remained.

The Lancastrian phase: the great project and the great failure

The Lancastrian phase was the most ambitious English project of the war. Henry V invaded France in August 1415; he took Harfleur in September; he won Agincourt on 25 October 1415. The systematic conquest of Normandy, the second great English territorial project of the war, was carried out in the campaigns of 1417–1419. The Treaty of Troyes of 21 May 1420 made Henry regent and heir of France, recognised his heirs as kings of France, and disinherited the Dauphin Charles. Henry died at Vincennes on 31 August 1422, Charles VI on 21 October 1422, and the infant Henry VI became, on paper, king of both kingdoms.

The English held the whole of Normandy, the whole of the Île-de-France north of the Loire, the greater part of the Maine, the Boulonnais, Picardy, and Calais. It was, for a brief moment in 1420–1422, the largest English territorial empire in France since the Angevin inheritance of Henry II.

The collapse began in 1429. Joan of Arc appeared at the Dauphin’s court in early 1429; she relieved Orléans on 8 May; the Loire campaign and the coronation at Reims on 17 July 1429 transformed the political situation. The Congress of Arras in September 1435 ended the war between France and Burgundy, and the Anglo-Burgundian settlement on which the dual monarchy had rested collapsed. The French reconquest of Normandy, completed in 1449, was a methodical, garrison-by-garrison operation; the reconquest of Gascony, completed in 1451, was similarly systematic. The last English possession, the town of Bordeaux, was recovered by the French in 1451, retaken briefly by the English in 1452, and surrendered for the last time on 19 October 1453.

Castillon, 17 July 1453

The last battle of the war was the Battle of Castillon, fought on 17 July 1453 on the banks of the Dordogne east of Bordeaux. John Talbot, Earl of Shrewsbury, in his late sixties, attempted to relieve the French siege of the town. The French, under the constable Arthur de Richemont and the artillery master Jean Bureau, had constructed a fortified camp on a rise south of the town, defended by a palisade and a substantial train of field guns. Talbot attacked without scouting. The French cannon destroyed his army. Talbot and his son, John Talbot, Viscount Lisle, were both killed.

The battle was, in military terms, the final act. The political consequence — the surrender of Bordeaux on 19 October — followed three months later. Apart from Calais, the English territorial presence in France was over.

The Channel Islands

The Channel Islands are the only part of the medieval English inheritance in France that has remained in the British Crown’s possession. The islands, which had been part of the duchy of Normandy, were retained by the English crown after the loss of Normandy in 1204. The islands have remained loyal through the entire period since, including the long years of the Hundred Years’ War when the duchy of Normandy itself was English territory. The bailiwicks of Jersey and Guernsey are still possessions of the British Crown, with their own legislatures and legal systems. The position is anomalous in international law and is the result of the historical accident that the islands were never reconquered by the French.

Significance

The loss of the English lands in France was the most consequential single territorial change of the late Middle Ages. The Plantagenet dynasty had defined itself by its French possessions; the loss of those possessions stripped the dynasty of the basis of its identity. The political crisis of the 1450s, in which the incapacity of Henry VI, the loss of Normandy and Gascony, the dynastic challenge of the Duke of York, and the financial exhaustion of the crown fed directly into the Wars of the Roses, was the direct consequence. The English, in the standard reading of Sumption and Curry, were too exhausted by the war to manage the constitutional crisis it had produced. The loss of France was the structural cause of the civil war that followed.