What Is the Difference Between the Edwardian and Lancastrian Phases?
The Edwardian and Lancastrian phases are the two great English centuries of the Hundred Years’ War. The Edwardian phase (1337–1360) opened the war and gave the English arms their highest reputation. The Lancastrian phase (1415–1453) reopened the war after a generation of truces and ended in English defeat. The two phases share the longbow, the chevauchée, the Aquitanian base, and the great English captains. They differ in the strategic objective, the personal style of the principal commanders, the character of the English occupation, and the political outcome. The standard treatment is Jonathan Sumption’s The Hundred Years’ War (vols. I and II cover the Edwardian phase, vol. III the early Lancastrian); Anne Curry’s Agincourt: A New History (2005) and The Battle of Agincourt: An Anatomy (2020) reset the most-studied single engagement.
The strategic objective
The two phases were fought for different reasons. The Edwardian phase was, at its opening, a war about the duchy of Aquitaine and the French succession; by 1360, with the Treaty of Brétigny, it was a war about sovereignty. The English kings had been vassals of the French for Aquitaine since 1152; the Edwardian settlement made them independent sovereigns of the duchy. The strategic objective of the Edwardian phase, in the long run, was the recovery of a position of parity with the Valois.
The Lancastrian phase was, in strategic terms, a different kind of war. Henry V reopened the conflict in 1415 not to recover Aquitaine — the duchy was already in English hands — but to conquer the French crown. The Treaty of Troyes of 21 May 1420 was the most ambitious diplomatic instrument of the war: the disinheritance of the Dauphin, the recognition of Henry V as regent and heir of France, the contract of marriage between Henry and Catherine of Valois. The strategic objective of the Lancastrian phase, in its most aggressive formulation, was the union of the two crowns in the person of the English king. The objective failed. The objective of the Edwardian phase, in its most aggressive formulation, had partially succeeded.
The principal commanders
The two phases had quite different military cultures. The Edwardian phase was dominated by the personal command of Edward III and his son Edward of Woodstock, the Black Prince. Edward III was a tactician and a campaigner in the older feudal style; the Black Prince was the most successful English field commander of the war, at the head of the Anglo-Gascon army. The principal subordinate commanders — John Chandos, Sir John Chandos, the Captal de Buch, Robert Knolles, Sir Robert Knolles — were the products of the same culture. The war was fought by a small military elite, supported by indent companies raised by contract in England.
The Lancastrian phase was dominated by Henry V and his brothers Thomas, Duke of Clarence, and John, Duke of Bedford. Henry was a more systematic and more administrative commander than Edward III. He planned the 1415 campaign in detail, conquered Normandy by a methodical sequence of sieges, and managed the political settlement of Troyes in person. The principal subordinate commanders — the Earl of Salisbury, the Earl of Warwick, Sir John Fastolf, John Talbot — were the products of a more professional military culture. The war was fought by a larger army, paid for out of the customs and the parliamentary grants, and increasingly by indent companies. The military culture of 1415 was substantially more bureaucratic than the military culture of 1346.
The character of the occupation
The English occupation of France looked different in the two phases. The Edwardian settlement of Brétigny in 1360 transferred a vast duchy to a foreign crown; the Black Prince’s government of Aquitaine in 1362–1372 was the first attempt to govern a French province as an English possession. The result was politically unsuccessful; the harsh fiscality of the Black Prince’s regime, in particular the hearth-tax (fouage) of 1368, helped to drive the duchy into the arms of Charles V. The Edwardian occupation was a fiscal occupation, designed to extract revenues from the duchy to pay for the war.
The Lancastrian occupation of Normandy in 1417–1419 was a different kind of project. Henry V, advised by Bedford, governed Normandy directly, with a Norman council at Rouen, English garrisons in the principal towns, and a substantial programme of political reconciliation with the local nobility. The Lancastrian occupation was a political occupation, designed to incorporate the duchy into a larger English-French state. The Normans of 1420, in the standard reading, were more reconciled to English rule than the Gascons of 1360. The difference, in the long run, did not save the Lancastrian phase. It did, however, give the English a stronger political position in 1430 than they had ever had in 1370.
The military technology
The two phases had different relationships to the technological changes of the late Middle Ages. The Edwardian phase was the high point of the longbow as a battlefield weapon. The English victories at Crécy (1346) and Poitiers (1356) were won by the longbow in conditions where it could be deployed effectively. The bow was, in 1346, a mature weapon; its tactical doctrine was fully developed.
The Lancastrian phase saw the longbow joined, slowly, by gunpowder artillery. Henry V used a substantial train of cannon at the siege of Harfleur in 1415. The French, in the second half of the phase, developed the most powerful artillery train in Europe, the Bureau brothers’ train. The last battle of the war, Castillon in 1453, was decided by French field artillery. The longbow did not become obsolete at Castillon. The two weapons were complementary until the end of the war. But the balance of the military technology had shifted, by 1450, decisively toward the gun.
The political outcome
The two phases had opposite outcomes. The Edwardian phase ended in a settlement that was spectacularly favourable to the English. The Treaty of Brétigny of 8 May 1360 ceded Aquitaine in full sovereignty, together with Ponthieu and Calais. The English crown had not held a position of comparable territorial independence in France for two centuries. The settlement was unenforceable; the English lost most of it in the Caroline phase. But for a brief moment, the English were the masters of a continental duchy larger than the French royal domain.
The Lancastrian phase ended in disaster. The last English army was destroyed at Castillon on 17 July 1453. Bordeaux surrendered on 19 October. The English crown held only Calais and the Channel Islands. The political outcome of the Lancastrian phase, in 1453, was the loss of every continental possession the English had held in 1415 — and the loss of the duchy of Aquitaine, which had been in English hands since 1152.
Why the phases differ
The contrast is partly a product of the structural changes of the late Middle Ages, partly a product of the personality of the principal commanders, and partly a product of contingent political decisions. The most useful single explanation, in the standard reading, is that the English had less time in the Lancastrian phase to consolidate their gains. Edward III in 1360 had the possibility of consolidating the duchy of Aquitaine for a generation. Henry V in 1420, with an infant heir, did not. The English position in 1422 was structurally weaker than the English position in 1360, even though the duchy of Normandy was more thoroughly conquered than the duchy of Aquitaine.
The English defeat in 1453 was the consequence of a series of political and military decisions taken in the generation after Henry V’s death. The French recovery, made possible by the work of Charles VII, by the training of the compagnies d’ordonnance, by the construction of the Bureau brothers’ artillery train, and by the long negotiation of the Congress of Arras in 1435, was the decisive factor. The two phases, in the end, are two different stories. The English won the first. The English lost the second.
Significance
The contrast between the two phases is the contrast that explains the long-term outcome of the war. The Edwardian phase showed what the English could do on a continental battlefield; the Lancastrian phase showed what the English could not do in continental governance. The political lessons of the two phases were absorbed by the generations that followed. The English, in the 16th century, never again attempted the kind of continental commitment that had destroyed the Lancastrian phase. The lesson was bought at the cost of a generation of war and a century of political disorder.