The Hundred Years War
The Hundred Years War was not a single conflict but a series of wars, truces, and renewed hostilities stretching from 1337 to 1453 — a period longer than any participant's lifetime. Its origins lay in the tangled feudal relationships between the English crown and French territory: English kings held Gascony as vassals of the French king, a humiliating and unstable arrangement. When the Capetian direct line died out in 1328, Edward III of England pressed his claim to the French throne through his mother Isabella, daughter of Philip IV. The French chose Philip VI of Valois instead, and Edward's resentment, combined with disputes over Gascony and Flemish trade, produced open war in 1337. The war's early phase demonstrated a military revolution that shocked European observers. At Crécy (1346), a much smaller English force of longbowmen and dismounted knights destroyed the flower of French chivalry. The Welsh longbow, requiring years of practice to master, outranged and outpenetrated the crossbows of the Genoese mercenaries and the armor of the French knights. When the mounted nobility charged anyway — following the logic of chivalric display rather than tactical sense — they were annihilated. Crécy killed the Valois confidence and killed thousands of French nobles; Poitiers (1356) repeated the lesson and captured the French king himself. Agincourt (1415) delivered the same shock a third time to a third generation of French commanders who had still not adapted. The economic and social costs were catastrophic. The English strategy of chevauchée — large mounted raids designed to devastate the French countryside, destroy crops and livestock, and demonstrate the French king's inability to protect his subjects — was systematic terrorism. Combined with the Black Death (arriving 1347), these raids depopulated entire regions, collapsed agricultural production, and generated peasant revolts including the Jacquerie (1358) in France and the Peasants' Revolt (1381) in England. War taxation ground down the populations of both kingdoms while enriching war captains who held noble prisoners for ransom. The conflict forced the development of institutions that would shape both nations for centuries. The English Parliament gained leverage by controlling war taxation; the French Estates General asserted themselves in similar crises; standing armies began replacing feudal levies; professional soldiers displaced the old chivalric ideal. Perhaps most significantly, the war generated something that had barely existed before: national feeling. English soldiers fighting in France were not just subjects of a king but Englishmen confronting Frenchmen; the French rallied around Joan of Arc not merely as a military leader but as a symbol of France itself. The final English expulsion from France by 1453 — leaving only Calais — ended a dynastic entanglement that had dominated English foreign policy for over three centuries. England turned inward to the Wars of the Roses; France emerged as a more centralized, more nationally conscious monarchy. The Hundred Years War is thus not merely a military episode but a crucible in which two modern nation-states were forged from the wreckage of the feudal order.
- Year: 1337 CE
- Category: Military
