1.7: The Hundred Years’ War

The Hundred Years’ War (1337 – 1453) was not really one war, but instead consisted of a series of battles and shorter wars between the crowns of England and France interrupted by periods of peace.

The root of the problem was that the English kings were descendants of William the Conqueror, the Norman king who had sailed across the English Channel in 1066 and defeated the Anglo-Saxon king who then ruled England. From that point on, the royal and noble lines of England and France were intertwined. As marriages between both nobles and royalty often took place across French - English lines, the inheritance of lands and titles was often a point of contention. The culture of nobility was so similar that the “English” nobles generally spoke French instead of English in day-to-day life.

The war began in the aftermath of the death of French King Charles IV in 1328. The king of England, Edward III, was next in line for succession, but powerful members of the French nobility rejected his claim and instead pledged to give the crown to a French noble of the royal line named Philip VI. When Philip began passing judgments to do with the English-controlled territory of Aquitaine, Edward went to war, sparking the Hundred Years’ War itself.

The most famous victory was the Battle of Agincourt in 1415, when a smaller English force decimated the elite French cavalry through the effective use of longbows, a weapon that could transform an English peasant into more than the equal of a mounted French knight. In the aftermath of Agincourt, most of the French nobility accepted the Henry V of England as the king of France. However, Henry V promptly died, and the conflict exploded into a series of alliances and counter alliances between rival factions of English and French nobles. (One French territory, Burgundy, even declared its independence from France and became a staunch English ally for a time).

Between the fighting and the plague, the French population declined by half. Many French regions suffered economically as luxury trades shut down and whole regions were devastated. The French crown introduced new taxes, such as the Gabelle (a tax on salt) and the Taille (a household tax), that further burdened commoners. On the cultural front, the English monarchy and nobility severed their ties with France and high English culture began to self-consciously reshape itself as distinctly English rather than French, leading among other things to the use of the English language as the language of state and the law for the first time.