What Was the Hundred Years War? A Dynastic Claim That Lasted 116 Years

The immediate cause was a succession. The direct Capetian line failed in 1328, and the closest male relative by blood was Edward III of England, whose mother was a French princess; the French nobility instead chose Philip of Valois, invoking a principle that inheritance could not pass through the female line. Edward accepted this initially and revived the claim in 1337 after Philip confiscated the duchy of Aquitaine. That confiscation points at the deeper cause: English kings held extensive territory in France as vassals of the French king, which was an unstable arrangement because it made one sovereign the subordinate of another, and both crowns had been trying to resolve it for a century. Additional grievances included French support for Scotland, English control of the Flemish wool trade on which both economies depended, and competing claims in Brittany.

The conflict divides into distinct periods with long gaps:

• •The Edwardian phase from 1337, including the English naval victory at Sluys and the crushing land victories at Crecy in 1346 and Poitiers in 1356, where the French king was captured, ending in a treaty in 1360 that gave England enormous territory in exchange for dropping the claim to the throne
• •The Caroline phase from 1369, in which Charles V and his commander Bertrand du Guesclin avoided battle entirely and reconquered most of the lost territory by siege and attrition, demonstrating that the English advantage existed only in pitched battle
• •A long truce from 1389, during which France descended into civil war between Burgundian and Armagnac factions while its king suffered episodes of insanity
• •The Lancastrian phase from 1415, opening with Agincourt and culminating in a treaty that made Henry V heir to the French throne and married him to the French king's daughter, an outcome undone when he died of dysentery in 1422, two months before the French king he was to succeed
• •The final phase from 1429, when the siege of Orleans was relieved following the arrival of Joan of Arc, after which French fortunes reversed decisively, ending with the recapture of Bordeaux in 1453

The tactical story is the longbow and the strategic story is everything else. English armies at Crecy, Poitiers and Agincourt were smaller, frequently exhausted and in retreat, and won by defensive deployment on chosen ground, with dismounted men-at-arms flanked by archers behind stakes, against French armies that attacked uphill or across mud into massed arrow fire. The longbow required a lifetime of training, which England supported through legislation and practice requirements and France never matched. What it could not do was take fortified towns or hold territory, and the wars of the later phases were overwhelmingly sieges and raids rather than battles. France had roughly four times England's population and a far larger tax base, and once its kings declined battle and reformed their finances and army, with a standing force and a professional artillery train, the outcome followed. The French recapture of Normandy in 1450 was achieved substantially by cannon, which had made the castles that structured the earlier war obsolete within a generation.

The episode that dominates popular memory is short and genuinely consequential. A peasant girl from Lorraine, reporting visions instructing her to expel the English, persuaded the disinherited dauphin to give her a role in the relief of Orleans in 1429, after which the siege was lifted in nine days. She accompanied the army through a campaign that led to the dauphin's coronation at Reims, which mattered enormously because coronation at Reims with the sacred oil was what made a French king legitimate in the eyes of his subjects. She was captured by Burgundians in 1430, sold to the English, tried by a church court on charges including heresy and wearing men's clothing, and burned at Rouen in 1431 at about nineteen. The trial record survives in detail and is remarkable for her answers under interrogation. A retrial in 1456 annulled the verdict, and she was canonised in 1920. Historians debate her military importance and generally agree on the effect on morale and legitimacy, which is what the war turned on at that point.

The territorial outcome was that England lost everything in France except Calais, held until 1558, ending three centuries in which the English crown had been a major continental landholder and redirecting it toward the sea and toward Scotland and Ireland. The internal consequences were larger. Both monarchies emerged with permanent taxation and standing armies, which is the origin of the fiscal-military state, and both had strengthened at the expense of their nobilities, with the French crown emerging considerably more centralised. English became the language of government and of the courts, displacing the French that had been used since 1066, and Chaucer wrote within this period. Both populations developed a national identity defined substantially against the other. And England's returning armies and defeated nobility went directly into the Wars of the Roses, which began two years after the French war ended and is not a coincidence.

The conflict ran 116 years in separated phases, caused by a disputed succession in 1328 and by the unstable arrangement in which English kings held French territory as vassals. English armies won the famous battles through defensive deployment and massed longbow fire and could not hold territory, and France's larger population, reformed finances, standing army and artillery decided the outcome. Joan of Arc's contribution turned on legitimacy and morale at a critical moment, and the war left both states more centralised with permanent taxation.