Nobody caught up in the chaos and bloodshed in France between the years 1337 and 1453 ever referred to what was happening around them as The Hundred Years War. Neither did future generations, until the early nineteenth century, when the name was coined by French historians (technically as La guerre de Cent Ans), from where it spread across Europe and the world. Since the concept of The Hundred Years War is entirely a historiographical construct, it was only a matter of time before people began to question whether it made sense. After all, the kings of England and France had fought numerous wars before the Hundred Years War and would continue to do so after, so what made the Hundred Years War a coherent conflict? Buckle up kids, because this might take a while.
Defining the Hundred Years War
Before we get into the historiographical weeds, it would be worthwhile to lay some groundwork, especially if you, the reader, are not already intimately familiar with medieval European history.
The conflict we call The Hundred Years War began in 1337 when Edward III, the King of England, declared that he was the true King of France and that the then French king, Philip VI, was a usurper. Even that, though, is a bit like starting in the middle. To understand why Edward III did this requires reaching even further back into Anglo-French history. One could in theory reach back as far as 1066 (and we’ll get there) but for these purposes it is enough to go back as far as the reign of Philip IV of France, who was king from 1284 until his death in 1314.
Philip IV is a pretty wild guy, infamous for dissolving the Knight’s Templar and helping to create the Avignon Papacy, but it is his children that we are really interested in here. If we leave aside the ones who died in childhood, Philip had four children: Louis, Philip, Charles, and Isabella. Isabella married Edward II, King of England from 1314 to 1327, and will be important later, but first let’s deal with the sons.
Louis became King Louis X on the death of his father but died only two years later in 1316. He left behind a pregnant wife and a daughter, Joan, from a previous marriage. His wife gave birth to a son who was declared King Jean, but he died aged only four days. This left the inheritance in dispute, as Louis’ only other heir was his daughter. In stepped his brother, Philip, and it was agreed post-facto that no woman could inherit the throne of France, so Philip became Philip V of France. Philip’s reign proved similarly short, and he died in 1322 after only six years on the throne. He left behind only daughters, who were quickly passed over thanks to the precedent that their father had helped to establish. Charles IV stepped in to take over for his brother, but in a familiar refrain he died in 1328 after six years on the throne and, you guessed it, left behind only daughters.
Now, this left France with a bit of a quandary. All the legitimate sons of Philip IV had died, and none had left a male heir (something that had literally not happened in centuries). There was, however, still Isabella. While it had been agreed that a woman could not inherit the throne, nothing was settled on whether she could pass a claim to the throne on to her descendants, and Isabella had a son (the future Edward III of England). However, Isabella was also an adulteress who the year previously had joined with her lover to depose (and murder) her husband and put her son on the throne of England as a puppet boy-king. That, along with a general desire to not unite the thrones of England and France, pushed the nobility of France towards considering yet another redefinition of how inheritance worked for the French throne.
The nobility of France elected to move further afield in the family and, using another post-facto justification to declare that women couldn’t pass on the royal claim, picked Philip of Valois, the son of Philip IV’s younger brother and so cousin to the previous three kings of France. Philip, of course, happily took them up on their offer and was crowned Philip VI.
For the time being the matter seemed settled but in 1330 Edward III led a coup against his mother and her lover. He executed the latter and established himself as the sole ruler of England at the young age of 17. I’ll leave aside the many, often inexplicable, events of the following seven years but let’s just say that by 1337 Edward had secured his rule in England and was considering the merits of reevaluating the decision back in 1328 to pass him over for the throne of France.
So, that’s how it began. In brief, here’s how it went:
The early years were kind of a mess as Edward pursued an expensive and ineffective strategy of securing alliances with Philip’s various foreign enemies. It looked like things might end before they really got started until Edward pivoted to a strategy of aggressive (and much cheaper) raiding in France which ultimately culminated in battle at Crécy in 1346 where Edward secured a famous victory over Philip (which was also incredibly lucrative for the English). The Black Death put a halt to fighting for most of the next decade, but a subsequent victory at Poitiers in 1356 saw Edward’s son, the Black Prince (a nickname he never would have used), capture the now deceased Philip’s son, King Jean II.
A literal king’s ransom via the Treaty of Bretigny in 1360 saw Edward surrender his claim to the French throne in exchange for a massive inheritance of French lands in Aquitaine that the English kings had once ruled but lost slowly over the years. These lands were meant to be held independent of the French King, effectively removing them from France entirely. However, the treaty agreement was a bit of a mess, with the final version never quite being fully signed by both parties, which left a crack through which the next French king, Charles V, would rip it asunder.
The 1370s-1400s saw a slow decline in English power in France as Charles V and, briefly, his son Charles VI reclaimed significant French holdings from the English. England under Richard II, Edward’s grandson, experienced significant turmoil and he was eventually deposed by his cousin Henry, crowned Henry IV, in 1399. Meanwhile Charles VI developed a form of severe mental illness which plunged France into civil discord and eventually war.
It was in this climate of discord that Henry’s son, also named Henry, inserted himself. Henry V famously won victory at Agincourt in 1415, but it was his campaign of sieges from 1417-22 that won him significant lands in France. However, these campaigns also brought about his early death. In 1420 he had married Charles VI’s daughter and their son, also Henry, would inherit another strong claim to the French throne. Even after his death Henry’s brothers managed to oversee further expansion of English control in northern France, but it was a losing battle. English finances could not afford to conquer all of France, and they relied upon the ongoing civil war to bolster the borders of their newly conquered lands.
Charles VI’s son, the Dauphin Charles (the fifth of his sons to hold that title), managed to rebuild his power outside of English held lands (primarily in Bourges and Poitiers) and, to make a very long story much shorter, reconciled with his Burgundian cousins in 1435 to end the civil war, restructured the French military to be the most sophisticated in Europe in the 1440s, and drove the English king from France from 1449-53 – leaving only a small region around the city of Calais still in English hands.
So, that’s an incredibly oversimplified account of nearly two hundred years Anglo-French history. As you can imagine there are a lot of different ways this could be split up by historians.
There are, essentially, three main schools of thought in how to deal with this period of Anglo-French history. There is, of course, the label of the Hundred Years War but I think it makes the most sense to come to that one last. First let’s consider the two main alternatives, which are essentially people who think that the Hundred Years War is way too long of a period, and it should be split up, and those who think that the Hundred Years War is far too short of a period and it should be stretched out.
A hundred years? That’s way too many!
One argument, which I have a lot of sympathy for, is that 116 years is an unwieldy amount of time to have to deal with. In general, histories of the war we break it up into phases, and this argument pushes forward the idea that we should go even further and split those phases into distinct topics unto themselves. This generally involves a minimum of two distinct wars, the phase under Edward III and his grandson Richard II vs the “Lancastrian phase” under the three Henries (IV-VI). However, one can get even more granular if they want! For example, one could split Edward III’s reign into multiple phases, such as the early failed alliance-based strategy, the early chevauchee era, the post-Black Death era, and finally the period of decline at the end of his life. How much you want to slice it depends a lot on the individual historian and their perspective.
Unfortunately, nobody can really agree on exactly where to break up the Hundred Years War. Even besides the many possibilities I named, all the examples I gave above are extremely Anglo-centric. If one takes the view of the French, the break points don’t align nearly so neatly with the reigns of English kings. This creates even more places where we can argue over how to split it.
No single theory of how to re-divide the Hundred Years War has fully caught on, which means that this practice is generally reserved for more focused studies on just one subject that is best examined in detail without having to deal with the wider implications of the century. While I am partial to the idea of splitting the Hundred Year War approximately down the middle, I think the deposing of Richard II in 1399 is a good break point, I’m also not sufficiently convinced that it is significantly better than the traditional definition. It’s great for detailed academic studies, but as we’ll get to later, I think the old definition’s merits have yet to be overcome.
A Hundred Years Is Actually Way Too Short
The English and French monarchs had beef going back at least as far as when the upstart duke of Normandy decided to make himself a king in 1066, so why should we limit ourselves to just this century? While few historians would push for the Almost-Four-Hundred-Years War as an alternative, many have argued that we should expand our scope to include a much wider period. Michael Livingston, no stranger to challenging the status quo, has a new book coming out arguing for a two-hundred-year war covering 1292-1492, which shows that this strain of argument remains alive and well.
A more common extension is to push its start earlier, to around the marriage of Eleanor of Aquitaine to Henry II in the twelfth century and the creation of the so-called Angevin Empire (another historiographical construct) as the turning point. Philip II’s wars to reclaim French lands from the English monarch c.1200 certainly resemble the kind of inter-royal conflict that we see in the Hundred Years War. Others might only go back as far as Edward I’s conflict with Philip IV in the thirteenth century, since the peace that involved the marriage of their two children helped to create the problems that would generate the Hundred Years War.
The problem, as I see it, with this approach is that it risks diluting its subject matter and removing the elements that make the period of 1337-1453 stand out as a distinct section of Anglo-French conflict.
Partly, this is just practical. It’s already a challenge to fit 116 years of complex history into a single book. The wider a historian’s scope the harder it is going to be to cover that subject in detail. One could tackle this with a huge a multi-volume history, but that by its nature must carve the topic up (usually with each book needing to stand at least partially on its own, for commercial reasons if no other), and then it looks more like the subdivided approach above. While arguably not a great excuse for a scholarly framework, we can’t fully avoid the practical concerns if we want our history to be read and engaged with by others.
Beyond that, though, you quickly run the risk of oversimplifying because in linking together multiple centuries of history you are naturally going to highlight the continuity, the shared elements between periods, and you will lose the differences because there isn’t space for them. The 1200s were a very different century to the 1400s! You would naturally be quite skeptical if someone told you that The Seven Years War (1756-63) and World War II (1939-45) were part of the same conflict, but they’re less than 200 years apart, fewer years than Bouvines (1214) and Agincourt (1415). I think the Hundred Years War as a topic is already so long that it causes compression in our understanding of the times involved (histories often jump from Crecy to Poitiers despite there being a decade in between), and a wider view simply doubles down on this problem.
It's still standard for a history of the Hundred Years War to include some information about events before and after the war (mine certainly does, and it’s just a history of one battle), which on some level admits that we must view the conflict within a wider context. But then, this is standard in history: context is king and there is no part of history that can be written about with no context at all. What makes this approach different from just a standard history is in the emphasis it places on continuity between earlier or later periods and the time we call the Hundred Years War. It’s more than just adding context, it’s redrawing the borders.
As is maybe clear, I’m not exactly a fan of this approach, but I actually think the strongest argument against it is the argument for the traditional view.
Why the Hundred Years War?
Let’s get the weaker argument out of the way first: the Hundred Years War has brand recognition. It might seem trivial, but I think it matters. There are real benefits to the fact that when I say “the Hundred Years War” to someone, they have a general idea what I mean. A similar logic is why I still used the term “longbow” in my work even if I think it’s not the most accurate way to describe that weapon (we should call it a yew self bow). It is easy to parody academics by pointing out their love of arguing over what words mean and boring definitions (which, for the record, I do enjoy),but we still need some general agreed frameworks to use if we’re going to be able to talk to each other.
Since it’s such a recognisable name, the barrier to reject it is much higher. In changing it you are introducing needless complexity, so you should prove that the existing framework is actually making historical analysis or understanding worse, it can’t just be neutral it must actively be bad.
That’s just the practical side of things. In reality, I think the argument for the Hundred Years War as a single conflict remains incredibly compelling. In this period, we can see a significant transformation in the shape of Anglo-French conflict. While these two monarchs fought before and after this period, the nature of those fights were fundamentally different from each other because of what happened in this century (plus or minus sixteen years).
When William the Conqueror became King of England, and more importantly when his heirs recombined the titles of Normandy and England, he created a natural conflict. Kings don’t like being vassals as well as kings, and as Duke of Normandy the Kings of England were vassals of the French king. As the English kings expanded their holdings in France to include Anjou and Aquitaine, among others, that just created even more potential friction points. This relationship naturally raised questions about the extent and limits of vassal relationships, especially when that vassal potentially holds more land and wealth than his overlord. You can see similar problems between the kings of England and Scotland, where the Scottish kings often owned lands in England and were thus English vassals as well as kings – something that would ultimately cause a century-plus long series of Anglo-Scottish wars (coincidence?).
Throughout this period, though, the English king acted in France as one of the senior princes of the kingdom. Edward III being excluded from consideration for the French throne was one thing, but they also largely ignored his potential contribution as Duke of Aquitaine. He was one of the chief princes of France, he should have had a say in the next king. While there are arguably good reasons to have excluded him giving what was happening in England, he arguably also had a legitimate greivance as well.
This changed when Edward declared himself the true king of France. Sure, he was still a senior prince of France throughout this period, but he was not just a prince in open rebellion with an established path to reconciliation (princes were always rebelling), he was saying that the sitting king had no right to be his overlord. Matters were made even worse (I would argue) with the coronation of Henry VI. Edward III was able to give up his claim in 1360 because it had largely been a political position, but when Henry VI was actually crowned king, that was a harder thing to go back on. English negotiators trying to find a peaceful solution could never agree that their monarch wasn’t the true King of France, but those representing Charles VII required that as a baseline, which made any peaceful settlement basically impossible.
This set the two monarchs on a crash course. While the Anglo-Scottish conflict was eventually (mostly) resolved by the combination of the two thrones (leaving aside things like the Jacobite rebellions), in France the opposite solution was employed: the two were ripped asunder forever. The English kings had previously managed to reclaim some of the lands that the French monarchs had seized from them, but that would no longer be the case after 1453. That’s because previously the English king had at least some claim to the titles, and the dispute was really over what its borders would look like (to somewhat oversimplify the matter). However, after 1453 the English king was no longer a prince of France – all of his titles were gone and his one remaining landholding, around Calais, was a foreign city largely populated by English immigrants (the native French population having long since been expelled). It was a colonial bastion in foreign lands.
So, while the English and French would continue to fight wars and the English monarch would only give up the claim to be the true ruler of France some years after Louis XVI lost his head, the loss of that princely status had changed the nature of those conflicts. The Hundred Years War is a period of change, a transformation in the relationship of these two powers that took over a century to complete. That, to me, is why it still makes the most sense to view the Hundred Years War as a singular event even if it also remains practically useful to split it into sections for analysis and to consider the wider context beyond its nominal beginning and end.
If you made it all the way to the end, thanks for reading! If you found this interesting, I would point you to my latest book on the Battle of Castillon. Castillon was the final battle of the Hundred Years War and often seen as marking the end of the war. In my book I, of course, discuss the specifics of the battle but I also reach beyond that to discuss the war’s origins and what it means for a historiographical concept to have an ending (kind of like what I wrote about here). Please do check it out!
Castillon: The Last Battle of the Hundred Years War covers the origins of the Hundred Years War, the Edwardian and Lancastrian phases of the war, the Military Revolution of the fourteenth century and Charles VII’s radical restructuring of the French military in the fifteenth century, as well as a detailed study of the battle and how we can know what happened on that day in Gascony. It is far reaching and comprehensive in how it analyses this key battle and will give readers a substantial understanding in not just Castillon but in late medieval Anglo-French warfare in general.
I also highly recommend the following books on this and related topics:
Curry, Anne, The Hundred Years War, 2nd edition (London, 2003)
Green, David, The Hundred Years War: A People's History, (Padstow, 2014).
Grummitt, David, Henry VI, (New York City, 2015).
LaBarge, Margaret Wade, Gascony: England’s First Colony 1204-1453, (London, 1980).
Prestwich, Michael The Three Edwards: War and State in England 1272-1377, 2nd ed. (1980, New York, 2003).
Prestwich, Michael, A Short History of The Hundred Years War, (London, 2018).
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