The Hundred Years War

The short analysis

When Edward III of England pressed his claim to the French throne in the late 1330s, he was not launching a modern war between nations. He was playing a feudal game whose rules both sides understood, one rooted in inheritance, homage, and the tangled cross-Channel holdings that had tied English and French aristocracies together since the Norman Conquest. What followed across roughly the next century was something neither side fully anticipated: a grinding, intermittent series of campaigns, truces, sieges, and political crises that transformed the very nature of kingship and belonging on both sides of the Channel. England produced famous battlefield victories at Crécy, Poitiers, and Agincourt, and at moments seemed on the verge of absorbing the French crown entirely. France endured occupation, civil war, and the near-collapse of royal authority. Yet it was France that ultimately expelled the English from virtually all of their continental holdings, and it was a peasant girl from Lorraine whose brief military career became the most enduring symbol of the entire war. By the time fighting effectively ended in the 1450s, both kingdoms had changed in ways that owed everything to the pressure of prolonged conflict. Taxation had become routine, armies had professionalised, and ordinary subjects on both sides had begun to think of themselves as French or English in ways that their great-grandparents simply had not.