The Hundred Years' War: England vs. France
It lasted not one hundred years but one hundred and sixteen — from 1337 to 1453 — and it reshaped the political map of Western Europe, forged national identities, and introduced military innovations that would render medieval chivalry obsolete. The Hundred Years' War was not a single continuous conflict but a series of campaigns, truces, and dynastic crises that pitted the Kingdom of England against the Kingdom of France for control of the French crown.
The Roots of War
The conflict's origins lay in the tangled web of feudal obligation and dynastic inheritance that defined medieval European politics. Since William the Conqueror's invasion of England in 1066, English kings had held vast territories in France — not as sovereign rulers, but as vassals of the French crown. This arrangement was inherently unstable: how could a king be both a sovereign in his own realm and a subject in another?
The immediate trigger came in 1328, when the last Capetian king of France, Charles IV, died without a male heir. Edward III of England, whose mother Isabella was Charles IV's sister, claimed the French throne. The French nobility rejected his claim, invoking Salic Law — which barred inheritance through the female line — and crowned Philip VI of Valois instead. Edward initially accepted this, but in 1337, after Philip confiscated Edward's French territories, he reasserted his claim and declared war.
The English Ascendancy: Crécy and Poitiers
The early phase of the war was dominated by stunning English victories. At the Battle of Crécy on August 26, 1346, Edward III's army — outnumbered perhaps three to one — destroyed a much larger French force. The key was the English longbow. Welsh and English archers, capable of firing 10 to 12 arrows per minute at ranges exceeding 200 yards, decimated the French cavalry before they could close to fighting distance. The flower of French chivalry was cut down in a hail of arrows.
"The English archers then advanced one step forward and shot their arrows with such force and quickness that it seemed as if it snowed." — Jean Froissart, Chronicles
Ten years later, at the Battle of Poitiers (1356), Edward's son — Edward, the Black Prince — captured King John II of France himself. The ransom demanded — three million gold crowns — nearly bankrupted France and led to the Treaty of Brétigny (1360), which granted England a vastly expanded Aquitaine in full sovereignty.
French Recovery Under Charles V
The tide turned under Charles V of France (r. 1364–1380), who wisely avoided pitched battles and instead employed a strategy of gradual reconquest under his brilliant constable, Bertrand du Guesclin. Du Guesclin used guerrilla tactics — harassing English supply lines, recapturing castles one by one, and refusing to engage in the kind of set-piece battles where English longbowmen excelled.
By the time of Charles V's death in 1380, most of the territory ceded at Brétigny had been recovered. Both kingdoms then descended into internal crises — England suffered the Peasants' Revolt (1381) and the deposition of Richard II (1399), while France was torn apart by the rivalry between the Armagnac and Burgundian factions.
Henry V and Agincourt
The war's most famous chapter began when Henry V of England invaded France in 1415. On October 25, at the Battle of Agincourt, Henry's sick, outnumbered, and exhausted army achieved one of the most celebrated victories in military history. Once again, the English longbow proved decisive. Thousands of French knights and men-at-arms — advancing through a narrow, muddy field between dense woods — were slaughtered. French casualties may have exceeded 6,000; English losses were in the hundreds.
Agincourt broke French resistance. The Treaty of Troyes (1420) recognized Henry V as heir to the French throne and regent of France. He married Catherine of Valois, daughter of the French King Charles VI. It seemed that England had won the war.
But Henry V died suddenly in 1422, aged just 35, leaving his infant son Henry VI as king of both England and France. The dual monarchy proved impossible to maintain.
Joan of Arc: The Maid of Orléans
The war's most extraordinary figure arrived in 1429. Joan of Arc, a teenage peasant girl from Domrémy, claimed that the voices of saints had commanded her to drive the English from France and see the Dauphin (the uncrowned heir, Charles VII) crowned at Reims.
Against all probability, she was given command of troops and led them to relieve the Siege of Orléans — a turning point that earned her the title "The Maid of Orléans." She then escorted Charles VII to Reims, where he was crowned on July 17, 1429, in the traditional coronation ceremony that gave his claim to the throne immense symbolic legitimacy.
Joan was captured by Burgundian forces in 1430, sold to the English, and tried for heresy. She was burned at the stake in Rouen on May 30, 1431, at the age of 19. But her impact was irreversible. French morale had been transformed, and the military momentum had shifted decisively.
The End of the War
The final phase saw the steady collapse of English power in France. Charles VII reformed the French military, creating standing companies of professional soldiers and investing in artillery — a technology that would prove decisive. Castle after castle fell to French cannons.
The Battle of Castillon on July 17, 1453, is generally considered the war's final engagement. A French force equipped with 300 cannons routed an English army under John Talbot, Earl of Shrewsbury, who was killed in the fighting. By the end of 1453, England retained only Calais on the French mainland — the last remnant of centuries of English territorial ambitions in France.
Legacy
The Hundred Years' War fundamentally transformed both nations. France emerged with a stronger centralized monarchy, a standing army, and a growing sense of national identity — forged in the crucible of war and personified by Joan of Arc. England, stripped of its continental possessions, turned inward — and almost immediately plunged into the Wars of the Roses (1455–1487).
Militarily, the war demonstrated the declining effectiveness of armored cavalry and the rising importance of infantry, archery, and artillery. The feudal model of warfare — in which aristocratic knights dominated the battlefield — gave way to more modern armies that relied on professional soldiers, gunpowder, and tactical innovation. The medieval world was ending, and the Hundred Years' War had helped to kill it.
