What Role Did Artillery Play in the Hundred Years' War?

Artillery played a decisive role in the closing years of the Hundred Years’ War. The French train of field artillery, built by Jean and Gaspard Bureau in the 1430s and 1440s, was the most powerful in Europe. It was the decisive weapon in the French reconquest of Normandy in 1449, in the reconquest of Gascony in 1451, and in the destruction of the last English army at the Battle of Castillon on 17 July 1453. The standard modern treatment is Philippe Contamine’s La Guerre de Cent Ans (1968); the contributions to Clifford Rogers’ The Oxford Encyclopedia of Medieval Warfare and Military Technology (2010) give the technical context.

The slow beginning

The first gunpowder weapons in Europe appeared in the early 14th century, in the form of powder charges attached to arrows and lances, and as small siege cannon. The first securely documented cannon in France is recorded in 1338, and the first major English use of cannon in the field was Henry V’s train at the siege of Harfleur in September 1415. The early cannon were slow, dangerous to their crews, and of limited military value; their principal use was psychological and against static fortifications.

The English were the first to use cannon systematically in the war. The train that Henry V brought to Harfleur in 1415 was substantial by the standards of the time, and the train that Henry used in the conquest of Normandy in 1417–1419 was larger still. The cannon were used to batter the walls of the principal Norman towns, including Rouen, which surrendered on 13 January 1419 after a long bombardment. The English use of cannon in Normandy was, in the standard reading, the first sustained use of artillery in a major campaign.

The Bureau brothers

The decisive development of gunpowder in the war was French. Jean Bureau (c. 1390–1463) and his brother Gaspard (c. 1395–1469), sons of a minor noble family from the Loire, took charge of the French royal artillery in the 1430s and built it into the most powerful in Europe. Jean, who was also Master of the Mint, brought the metallurgical, financial, and logistical skills; Gaspard, his field commander, brought the operational ones. The brothers standardised the calibres of the French cannon, professionalised the gun crews, developed the field-fortification techniques that turned artillery from a siege weapon into a battlefield weapon, and constructed the supply train that allowed the guns to be moved rapidly across the field. The Bureau brothers’ train was the model for European artillery for the next century.

The strategic context of the Bureau brothers’ work was the political consolidation of Charles VII’s government after the Congress of Arras in 1435. The Anglo-Burgundian alliance, on which the English position in France had rested, ended with the Treaty of Arras. Charles VII had a political opportunity for the reconquest. The Bureau brothers gave him the military means.

Castillon, 17 July 1453

The conventional test case is Castillon, fought on 17 July 1453 on the banks of the Dordogne east of Bordeaux. The French army, under the constable Arthur de Richemont and with Gaspard Bureau commanding the artillery, had constructed a fortified camp on a rise south of the town, defended by a palisade and a substantial train of field guns. John Talbot, Earl of Shrewsbury, in his late sixties, attacked the camp head-on with perhaps 4,000 men, without scouting, in the conviction that the English longbow and the knight’s charge would prevail as they had at Agincourt thirty-eight years earlier. The French cannon destroyed him. Talbot and his son John Talbot, Viscount Lisle, were both killed. Bordeaux surrendered on 19 October 1453. The war was over.

The Castillon engagement is conventionally treated as the moment when the gun definitively replaced the longbow as the dominant battlefield arm. The argument is not that the longbow became obsolete in 1453 — it did not — but that the tactical centre of gravity had shifted. A commander in 1453 who relied on the longbow alone was working with a 14th-century weapon in a 15th-century war.

The longbow, the gun, and the chronology

The longbow did not become obsolete in 1453. The English and French both continued to use it, in combination with the new field artillery, for the rest of the 15th century. The point at which the gun definitively overtook the bow is a matter of historical argument; the standard reading is the second quarter of the 15th century, when the Bureau brothers’ train and the parallel development of the hand-gun made the gun the principal battlefield weapon. The bow remained useful for its original purpose, the rapid delivery of massed missiles at short range, but it was now a secondary weapon.

The popular formulation — that the longbow was “replaced by the crossbow and the harquebus” — is wrong on several counts. The crossbow had been in use in European warfare since the 12th century and was, by the 15th, a secondary weapon. The harquebus (the early hand-gun) was a 15th-century development, useful in the 1470s and 1480s, but it did not replace the longbow. The longbow was displaced by the cannon, the field piece, and the tactical doctrine of combined arms that the Bureau brothers’ train made possible.

The fortified camp

The development of the fortified field camp, in which the guns were deployed in a prepared position, was as important as the development of the guns themselves. The Castillon camp, with its palisade and its field works, was the model. The doctrine of using field artillery from a prepared position became, in the 16th century, the foundation of European siege warfare. The Italian engineers of the trace italienne, in particular, took the Bureau brothers’ Castillon as a model and developed it into the bastion fort of the early modern period.

Significance

The role of artillery in the war is one of the canonical examples of a “military revolution” in late medieval warfare. Clifford Rogers’ War Cruel and Sharp (2014) treats the development of English strategy under Edward III, and the contributions to his Oxford Encyclopedia treat the broader technical development. The Bureau brothers’ train, the engagement at Castillon, and the reconquest of Normandy and Gascony are the milestones. The longbow did not disappear in 1453. The political and tactical framework in which it had been the dominant weapon — the chevauchée, the deep raid, the encounter battle — did.