End of the Hundred Years' War — Battle of Castillon
The Hundred Years' War ended at Castillon in July 1453 without a treaty, and the English lost everything in France except Calais. The war had run for 116 years over the English kings' claim to the French crown and their older claim to Aquitaine, and had swung twice. Crécy, Poitiers and Agincourt had produced the Treaty of Troyes in 1420, under which Henry V married the French king's daughter and was recognised as heir; his son was crowned in Paris. Joan of Arc relieved Orléans in 1429 and had Charles VII crowned at Reims, which reversed the legitimacy argument. What finished the English was administrative rather than heroic. Charles reorganised his finances with a permanent tax, created standing companies of cavalry and a professional artillery train under the Bureau brothers, and took Normandy in a single campaign in 1450. Castillon is the demonstration. An English force under Talbot attacked an entrenched French camp near Bordeaux containing some 300 guns, on a false report that the enemy was withdrawing, and was destroyed by artillery in an afternoon. Talbot was killed. Bordeaux surrendered in October, ending three centuries of English rule in Gascony. Nobody signed anything, and English monarchs went on styling themselves kings of France until 1801. England then fell into the Wars of the Roses within two years, in part because the men and grievances the war produced had nowhere else to go. France emerged with a standing army and a tax to pay for it. The war also made both countries in the process of being fought. England lost its French-speaking aristocracy's continental identity and acquired an English one, and France acquired a monarchy with a standing army and permanent taxation that no assembly voted on.
- Year: 1453 CE
- Category: Military
