What Was the Impact of the Hundred Years' War on English Identity?
The Hundred Years’ War transformed English national identity. The war gave the English a continental enemy to fight, a parliament to pay for the fighting, and a vernacular language in which to record the experience; the war also stripped the English crown of the continental possessions that had defined it since 1066, and forced the political class to imagine the kingdom as an island polity rather than a cross-Channel realm. The English identity that survived the war — Protestant, parliamentary, maritime — was, in large part, the identity that the war had made.
The argument can be put sharper. England in 1337 was, in the cultural sense, a French-speaking kingdom: the king, the higher nobility, the courts, and the higher offices of the church used Anglo-Norman French; the chancery used Latin; English was a spoken vernacular, not an official one. By 1453 English was the language of the courts, the chancery, the parliament, and the literature that the war had produced. The war did not cause this transformation, but it concentrated and accelerated it.
The England of Edward III
England in 1337 was, in the political sense, a substantial kingdom with a sophisticated fiscal system and a strong central administration, but it was not, in the modern sense, a nation. The Norman Conquest of 1066 had created a single state, but it had not created a single people. The English-speaking commonalty and the French-speaking aristocracy had been held together by the crown and by the law; the long centuries of Plantagenet rule on the continent had given the aristocracy a French identity that the English language had not yet displaced.
The war changed the political weight of the two communities. The English commonalty, which provided the longbowmen and the parliamentary taxes, gained in political weight; the higher aristocracy, which had held its principal estates in France, lost them. The wool trade with Flanders, which was the financial pre-condition of every Edwardian campaign, gave the English merchant class a stake in the war effort. The long gentry families of the Welsh marches, of the West Country, and of the home counties, which had previously been provincial, became the backbone of the English army.
The longbow, Crécy, and the English military identity
The weapon that came to symbolise this new English military identity was the longbow. The longbow was not invented for the war — it was an ancient Welsh and English weapon — but the war made it a national weapon. The English parliament, from the 1360s on, required the practice of archery as a condition of citizenship; the muster rolls of the late Edwardian phase show archers in proportions of three or four to one against men-at-arms.
The three great English land victories of the war — Crécy (1346), Poitiers (1356), Agincourt (1415) — were all won by the longbow in the hands of massed infantry, and they were all remembered as longbow victories. The English memory of the war, fed by Froissart (writing in French) and by the English chronicles of Thomas Walsingham and Adam of Usk, fixed the longbow in the national mythology in a way that it had not been fixed before. The image of the English archer, with his yew bow and his sheaf of cloth-yard shafts, is the iconic image of the war.
The English language and English literature
The war accelerated the use of English in official contexts. The Pleading in English Act of 1362 required that court proceedings be conducted in English, “because the French language is much unknown.” The use of French in the chancery was already declining; the 15th century saw the displacement of Anglo-Norman French by English in nearly every official context.
The literary consequences were substantial. The first sustained English-language historiography was the Brut chronicle, in its English verse and prose versions. The alliterative Alliterative Morte Arthure and the Awntyrs off Arthur were products of the same generation that had fought at Crécy. John Gower’s Confessio Amantis (1390) was written in English as well as in French and Latin. Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (c. 1387–1400) was composed in the vernacular that the war had elevated. The English of the late 14th century was already a literary language; the war gave it political weight.
The Order of the Garter and English chivalry
The Order of the Garter, founded by Edward III in 1348, is the institutional expression of this new English chivalric identity. The order was conceived, in the founding legend, as a recreation of the Round Table; its 26 founding members were the heroes of Crécy and Sluys; its chapel at Windsor, rebuilt by Henry V and Henry VI, is the architectural monument of the English high Middle Ages. The motto Honi soit qui mal y pense — Shame on him who thinks evil of it — and the blue ribbon of the order remain the personal emblem of the British sovereign.
The Garter is important as an institution, not just as a decoration. It was the first secular order of chivalry in England, and it was the political centre of the English aristocracy throughout the war. The membership lists, kept in the Statuta of the order, are a register of the English war effort.
The loss of France and the English self-image
The political consequences of the loss of France in 1453 were the most profound. The English crown had been a continental monarchy for three centuries. The loss of Bordeaux, the last English possession of any consequence on the continent, deprived the English crown of its political identity. Henry VI, already incapacitated by the mental breakdown of 1453, was the symbol of a dynasty that had lost its meaning.
The 19th-century historian Édouard Perroy, in La Guerre de Cent Ans (1945), argued that the loss of France was the necessary precondition of the modern English state: an island kingdom, looking outwards to the sea, with a parliament as the political centre. The argument has been broadly accepted. The union of the English and Scottish crowns under the Stuarts in 1603, and the Acts of Union of 1707, are unimaginable without the end of the war. The English identity that entered the early modern period was the identity the war had made.
The Tudor synthesis
The English national identity that emerged from the war was, in the shorthand, the Tudor synthesis: a Protestant, parliamentary, English-speaking kingdom, looking outwards to the sea. The Tudors, who came to power in 1485, drew on the legacy of the war to construct a new sense of English nationhood, founded on the English church, the English language, and the English parliament. The English identity of 1603 was the identity that the war had made possible.
The standard modern treatment is Christopher Allmand, The Hundred Years’ War: England and France at War c. 1300–c. 1450 (1988), and the Oxford Encyclopedia of Medieval Warfare and Military Technology (2010, ed. Clifford Rogers). The national-identity question is treated in the national identity cluster article.