Hundred Years War

10 Key excerpts on "Hundred Years War"

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  Events that Changed Great Britain from 1066 to 1714

  • Frank W. Thackeray, John E. Findling, Frank W. Thackeray, John E. Findling(Authors)
  • 2004(Publication Date)
  • Greenwood

    (Publisher)

  4 The Hundred Years' War, 1337-1453 INTRODUCTION The Hundred Years' War pitted England's kings against their French counterparts in an intermittent struggle that extended through the better part of two centuries. It affords an excellent example of a country winning the important battles yet, nevertheless, losing the war. Most of the major battles—Crecy (1346), Poitiers (1356), and Agincourt (1415)—resulted in spectacular victories for the English forces, but when the Hundred Years' War petered out in the middle of the fifteenth century, France emerged tri- umphant. Although 1337 is the traditional starting date for the conflict, its origins extend back at least several decades earlier. Toward the end of the thir- teenth century, problems that had long plagued Anglo-French relations grew more serious. At that time, the French king, Philip the Fair, entered into an alliance with Scotland directed against England. This inaugurated a Franco-Scottish relationship that was to last for almost three centuries. Acting through its Scottish ally, France could not only outflank England but also stir up trouble and even menace England's vulnerable northern regions. France also posed an increased threat to England's economic stability. Much of England's prosperity depended upon its ability to export raw wool to Flanders to be woven into cloth and reexported back to England. While the merchants and artisans of Flanders enjoyed warm relations with their English producers and shippers, the ruling counts of Flanders were vassals of the French crown. This proved worrisome to the English, especially in light of royal France's policy of expanding and centralizing 58 Events that Changed Great Britain from 1066 to 1714 Throughout the Middle Ages, mounted knights in armor usually enjoyed great suc- cess when attacking lightly armed infantry.

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  The Late Middle Ages

  • Ephraim Emerton(Author)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Endymion Press

    (Publisher)

  THE HUNDRED YEARS’ WAR (1328 – 1453) ~ THE LONG CONFLICT BETWEEN FRANCE and England, to which historians have given the name of “The Hundred Years’ War,” interests us chiefly as an illustration on a great scale of the transition from the mediæval, feudal order of society to the modern, national idea of political organization. Its nearer causes were largely feudal, and its methods were still, to a great extent, those of the earlier period. Its remoter causes, however, and the motives that kept it alive are to be sought on both sides in a steadily growing sense of national unity and national honor. Under the feudal régime it may fairly be said that it mattered little to the landholding aristocracy whether it were under the sovereignty of one king or another. The thing it really cared about was whether its privileges were such as it had a right to expect, and whether these privileges were likely to be fully and honorably maintained. So long as this was the case the barons found their profit and their glory in standing by their king in those undertakings which had a certain national character. But if their rights were tampered with, or if another sovereign offered equal guaranties of privilege, they easily took advantage of the flexible feudal arrangements to shift their allegiance. While this is true of both the countries engaged in this desperate struggle, there is evident by the close of the thirteenth century a very marked difference between them. English feudalism had always differed from that of France in its relation to the overlord. The impulse given to the royal power by William the Conqueror had never been quite lost. The rights of the crown had been steadily enforced, and what might have seemed a great disadvantage, namely, the absence of a large and compact domaine which might become the nucleus of a monarchical state, had really proved an element of strength

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  Feudal Empires

  • John F. Le Patourel(Author)
  • 1984(Publication Date)
  • Hambledon Continuum

    (Publisher)

  XI THE ORIGINS OF THE Hundred Years War THE series of conflicts between the kings of France and of England that historians have agreed to call the 'Hundred Years War' was of such importance in the history of the two countries that a good deal has naturally been written on the causes of so prodigious a conflict. Dr Templeman 1 in England, Professor Wolff 2 in France and Professor Cuttino in the United States 3 have each, in recent years, published papers which survey the literature on the origins of the war and make it unnecessary to attempt any such survey here. All three, and other recent writers also, 4 are broadly in agreement that the root cause of the trouble lay in the position of King Edward III, sovereign 5 in his king-dom of England, a vassal of the king of France in his duchy of Aqui-taine. 6 There are different nuances in their interpretations, as one would expect; Professor Wolff in particular addresses himself specifically to the problem presented by the fact that a relationship which appeared natural and reasonable in the time of St Louis and King Henry III proved impossible in the time of King Edward III and King Philip VI, a matter which certainly needs to be explained. Historians also seem to be mostly agreed that Edward Ill's claim to the throne of France was secondary, and was, indeed, little more than a tactical device for pur-suing other aims. But there are really two quite distinct questions in this old problem of the origins of the Hundred Years War: What were the origins of the war that started in 1337? and, why was that war a 'Hun-dred Years' war? These two questions should be tackled separately. By an order dated 24 May 1337, King Philip VI commanded his seneschal of Périgord and his bailli of Amiens, respectively, to take the duchy of Aquitaine and the county of Ponthieu into his hand.

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  Siege Warfare during the Hundred Years War

  Once More unto the Breach

  • Peter Hoskins(Author)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Pen and Sword Military

    (Publisher)

  Chapter 1 The Hundred Years War Sieges, like the great battles of the Hundred Years War, mean little out of the context of the broader history of the war, particularly as the strategies adopted by both sides evolved throughout the war. It was only in the nineteenth century that historians coined the term ‘the Hundred Years War’ to cover the conflict between the English and French kings between 1337 and 1453. The name is somewhat misleading since it gives the impression of a period of continual warfare, whereas there were several distinct phases of war interspersed by periods of truce and peace, and the strategies employed varied between these phases. The English strategy in the reign of Edward III from the outbreak of war in 1337 until his death in 1377 was largely one of mobile warfare through mounted raids called chevauchées. There were numerous sieges, most notably those of Tournai in 1340 and Calais in 1346–1347, but overall the objectives of the strategy were to take the war deep into enemy territory and to bring the French to battle if the circumstances were right. This strategy has been described by the historian Clifford J. Rogers as being focused on people rather than places, with a key objective to bring the French to battle in favourable circumstances for the English. Under Henry V, and until the end of the war, the emphasis of English strategy changed. Bringing the French to battle was still an objective, but taking and holding towns to establish English rule took primacy

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  Landscapes of Trauma

  The Psychology of the Battlefield

  • Nigel Hunt(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  This chapter briefly examines the late medieval and early modern period; in particular the period which became known as the Hundred Years War between the English and the French. The evidence for any psychological impact of this war is very limited, virtually non-existent. Languages change significantly over time. The English language has evolved from the languages spoken by the Saxons, Angles and others who came to the British Isles from the fifth to the sixth centuries. Along the way it picked up a lot of words and syntax from the Scandinavian languages and from French. For the purposes of the present book, at the time of the Hundred Years War the main language of many people in England was a form of Chaucerian Middle English, with many (not necessarily mutually intelligible) variants around the country. By this time English was also the dominant language of the ruling classes, after several centuries of the rulers speaking French. There are two key sources in this chapter, one English but writing a long time after the war and writing for entertainment – Shakespeare. The second is French, an older form of French, written by Froissart in his detailed account of the Hundred Years War.

  The Hundred Years War

  The Hundred Years War between England and France was not a single conflict, nor did it last 100 years. It lasted 116 years and was several conflicts, ending with England being ejected from most of what we now know as France, apart from Calais. We know very little about the ordinary soldiers of these wars, though the wars were chronicled in detail at the time of the wars by Froissart (1978) in Contemporary Chronicles of the Hundred Years War . Froissart details the key people and events of most of this period, including the killing of soldiers and civilians in battle and elsewhere, but there are few details of the impact these events had on anyone, other than minor details about the more senior personages. Contemporary accounts provide limited evidence for the psychological impact of war on soldiers or civilians.

  Froissart focused on the importance of honour in battle and on how war can appear like a tournament: “Many gallant deeds of arms were performed, many knights and squires on each side were unhorsed and pushed back into the saddle.” (Whittington, 2016, p. 27) In more practical terms, Froissart noted the growing importance of the English archer, first at Crecy in 1346, then at Poitiers in 1356, where he notes: “the English archers were an inestimable advantage to their comrades, and struck terror into the hearts of the French, for the rain of arrows was so continuous and so thick that the French did not know where to turn to avoid them, with the result that the English kept gaining ground,” and then again at Agincourt in 1415. The French had major difficulties in dealing with this weapon. “Most of the knights and all of their horses were driven back among the vanguard for fear of the English archers.” (Whittington, 2016, p. 28) The sheer terror of seeing hundreds of arrows flying through the air at the same time, with the rush of air, must have been for the French similar to that experienced by the Germans facing the Russian rocket launcher in World War II, the Katyusha, which the Germans labelled Stalin’s organ because the array of rocket launchers looked like a pipe organ and the howling sound was terrifying to the soldiers. Noise has always been used as a weapon to terrify the enemy, preferably attached to a lethal weapon, whether English arrows, Russian rocket launchers, or the German Stuka with its siren wailing as it divebombed the enemy.

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  The English Experience in France c.1450-1558

  War, Diplomacy and Cultural Exchange

  • David Grummitt(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Taylor & Francis

    (Publisher)

  Only with the excessive taxation of those years and Wolsey's attempt to levy the Amicable Grant was the general support for war with France called into question. 27 By the 1540s government propagandists like Richard Morison were whipping up support for renewed war with the old enemy using the new, nationalistic language of the Henrician supremacy. 28 Even in 1557-8, when England was involved in war largely to meet the demands of Mary I's husband, Philip II of Spain, the political classes on the whole greeted war enthusiastically. Despite some grumbling from ordinary people reported by the Venetian ambassador, it was seen on the whole as an opportunity to unite a divided nation and win honour and advancement. 29 Diplomacy The English were engaged in open war with the French for less than fifteen years between 1450 and 1558. The end of the Hundred Years War marked a period of extended truces and, after the treaty of Etaples in 1492, an age of more formal peace treaties delineating intermittent periods of war. The conduct of diplomacy, as well as war and trade, shaped the experience of the English in France. To what extent though did English diplomatic relations with France represent a coherent policy in the century or so after 1450? It used to be thought that the Tudors, and Henry VII in particular, eschewed wars of conquest and sought to build a 'modern' foreign policy vis-a-vis France

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  Fortress Britain

  All the Invasions and Incursions since 1066

  • Ian Hernon(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • The History Press

    (Publisher)

  3 THE HUNDRED YEARS’ WAR ‘… slaying, burning, destroying and doing other mischief’ – The Calendar of Rolls 1360 Battle of Sluys, from Jean Froissart’s Chronicles, fifteenth century.

  Picturesque Winchelsea, which claims to be the smallest town in England, sits on top of a hill overlooking marshes near Rye, East Sussex. It is the epitome of tranquillity, bypassed by the main road and, it seems, by centuries. But on 15 March 1360 it was the scene of unimaginable horrors.

  Up to 2,000 French foot soldiers, bowmen, sailors and mercenaries fell upon the townspeople, many of whom took refuge in the stone church. They were butchered. No mercy was shown. The young women were raped before they were killed ‘or exposed to even more hideous atrocities’.

  It was not the first or last time the little town had suffered so. And the scenes of brutality were repeated along the coastline of England’s south-east. They were reciprocated many times by English forces on the other side of the Channel. Most were incursions rather than full-blown invasions, but at stake was the future of both England and France. The bloodletting was relentless in what later became known, inaccurately, as the Hundred Years’ War.

  Winchelsea was on the ‘invasion front’.

  The Hundred Years’ War, a series of conflicts waged from 1337 to 1453 between England and France, was the result of a dynastic squabble dating back to the Conqueror. As dukes of Normandy, the English kings owed homage to the king of France. That rankled, especially as the royal families of Europe were all inter-linked through bloodlines. Regal pride and a raw patriotism played their part in fomenting disputes, but the biggest factor was wool, by now the chief source of England’s wealth. Both sides sought to control the markets and when riches were involved, common humanity and the desire for peace had no chance.

  In most of the contests the English had superior firepower – the longbow – and the advantage of enclaves and territories adjoining France. For the English these wars were hugely profitable, enriching mercenaries and the growing landed gentry. Historian Desmond Seward wrote that ‘generations of Englishmen went to France to seek their fortunes in rather the same way that their descendants would one day go to India or Africa.’ In short, the English were largely the aggressors, the French mainly the victims. But that was no consolation for the peasants, clergy, merchants, artisans and farmers who bore the brunt of French retaliatory action.

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  The Medieval Python

  The Purposive and Provocative Work of Terry Jones

  • R. Yeager, T. Takamiya, R. Yeager, T. Takamiya(Authors)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  CHAPTER 15 CHAUCER, LANGLAND, AND THE HUNDRED YEARS’ WAR David Wallace It was not the inspiring vision of Chivalry taking to the field that his new eyes saw, but Destruction on the move. Terry Jones, The Knight and the Squire T he first three pilgrim portraits of Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales sum- marize English fighting capabilities during the Hundred Years’ War, the conflict between England and France and allied powers that dragged on from 1337 to 1453. Chaucer’s Knight carries himself with the meekness of a virgin (GP 1.69). His thoughts are not of Calais and Laon, but of fabulously distant locales at or beyond the far edge of Christendom: Alexandria, Morocco, al- Andalus, Turkey, Lithuania, Russia. The air of dreamy exoticism enveloping him seems to protect Chaucer’s Knight from association with the bloody, sharp end of war: except that, as Terry Jones has definitively shown, those distant locales witnessed some of the greatest bloodbaths of fourteenth-century Europe. 1 Chaucer’s “verray, parfit, gentil knight” (GP 1.72) might thus be imagined as the English military machine’s super ego: if so, his Yeoman (GP 1.101-117) pro- vides its id. At first glance, the Yeoman riding with the Knight and his son, the Squire, seems no more than a woodsman, a protector of the lordly domain. But although he knows woodcraft (GP 1.110), he is armed to the teeth. He carries a sword and a small shield (“bokeler”), “a gay dagere,” sharpened like a spear, and “a gay bracer” (GP 1.111-14). The bracer is an arm guard, worn by an archer; fully five lines attest to his proficiency in preparing and firing arrows from his “mighty bow” (GP 1.108). The great English chivalric pretense of the Hundred Years’ War is that key battles were won through English knightly valor and the will of God; the hidden truth is that they were chiefly won by the long- bow, and by the yeomen who stringed and fired them. Agincourt, the most

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  Disunited Kingdoms

  Peoples and Politics in the British Isles 1280-1460

  • Michael Brown(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  David II , 62–5.

  26. MacDonald, Border Bloodshed; Boardman, The Early Stewart Kings: Robert II and Robert III ; A. Grant, ‘The Otterburn War from the Scottish Point of View’, in Tuck and Goodman (eds), War and Border Societies , 30–64.

  27. Macdougall, An Antidote to the English: The Auld Alliance , 25–51; Penman, David II , 67–72; MacDonald, Border Bloodshed , 75–116; Sumption, Trial by Fire , 152–3, 171–4.

  28. Barrow, Robert Bruce , 183; Penman, David II , 185–93, 229–32; Boardman, Early Stewart Kings , 109–10; MacDonald, Border Bloodshed , 25–6; Brown, Wars of Scotland , 282–90.

  29. Brown, Black Douglases , 150–2, 210–14; MacDonald, Border Bloodshed , 97; Campbell, ‘England, Scotland and the Hundred Years War’, 155–83.

  30. Ormrod, ‘Edward III and his Family’, 409–15; Palmer, ‘England, France, the Papacy and the Flemish Succession’; Goodman, John of Gaunt , 48–51, 111–43.

  31. Le Patourel, ‘The King and the Princes’; M. Jones, ‘The Crown and the Provinces in the Fourteenth Century’, in D. Potter (ed.), France in the Later Middle Ages (Oxford, 2002), 61–89.

  32. D. Nicholas, Medieval Flanders (London, 1992), 150–230; J.F. Veerbruggen, The Battle of the Golden Spurs: Courtrai, 11 July 1302 (Woodbridge, 2002), 1–28; F. Funck-Brentano, Philippe le Bel et Flandre (Paris, 1897).

  33. P. Gaillou and M. Jones, The Bretons (Oxford, 1991), 199–206; M. Jones, ‘The Capetians and Brittany’, Historical Research , 63 (1990), 1–16.

  34. M. Jones, Ducal Brittany, 1364–1399 (Oxford, 1970), 20–2, 45–6, 93–7; P. Gaillou and M. Jones, The Bretons (Oxford, 1991), 217–29, 234–7; J.B. Henneman, Olivier de Glisson and Political Society in France under Charles V and Charles VI (Philadelphia, 1996), 1–54; Nicholas, Medieval Flanders

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  Violence and the State in Languedoc, 1250–1400

  • Justine Firnhaber-Baker(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  8 They were fought for reasons such as conflicts over the inheritance of a barony or possession of a castle; over the right to exercise justice or to collect taxes; or, as in the la Barthe/Arpajon case, over the right to marry an heiress to a barony. Sometimes they were fought to discipline recalcitrant vassals or to assert independence from an overlord. Such wars are historically significant in their own right as they obviously damaged local property and rearranged local power relations and land holdings. But they are also important because they speak to the relationship between lordship, violence, and justice during a key period in the devel- opment of French political history. It was in the thirteenth and early fourteenth century that the French crown consolidated and further devel- oped the territorial, administrative, and ideological advances begun under Kings Louis VI, Louis VII, and especially Philip II Augustus. Part of this development entailed channelling disputes into judicial courts and away from the sort of violent ‘self-help’ of the sort that wars like that of Arpajon and la Barthe exemplified. In the process, the crown asserted royal pre- rogatives over a seigneurial class accustomed to independence as a result of centuries of weak centralized power. But the fourteenth century, particu- larly in its later decades, was one of many challenges as the plague and the Hundred Years War took their toll on the country and the crown’s ability to rule. Moreover, as has been recently emphasized, monarchy was not the only type of political power undergoing change at the end of the Middle Ages. Political, military, and economic developments meant that 7 For a comparison of the military aspects of seigneurial and royal conflicts, see J. Firnhaber-Baker, ‘Techniques of Seigneurial War in the Fourteenth Century’, Journal of Medieval History 36 (2010): 90–103, mercenaries at 99–101, and Chapter 4, below.

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