The Hundred Years War Was Not 100 Years (And Several Other Things About It Are Also Wrong)

Let’s start with the obvious one. The Hundred Years War lasted 116 years, from 1337 to 1453. Contemporaries did not call it that. Nobody who lived through it went around saying “ah yes, this is our Hundred Years War.” A French historian coined the term in the early 19th century, approximately 400 years after the fighting stopped, and it stuck because it captures the general vibe even if the arithmetic is wrong.

Also, it was not really one war. It was a series of conflicts, truces, resumed conflicts, and completely different wars that happened to involve the same two countries over a similar set of grievances. Historians typically divide it into three or four distinct phases with significant peacetime gaps in between. The people fighting in Phase One were not the people fighting in Phase Three. Their grandchildren were.

Additionally, it was not simply England versus France. At various points it involved Burgundy, Scotland, Castile, Portugal, Navarre, Flanders, and other powers choosing sides or switching them. France spent significant portions of the conflict in civil war between two domestic factions, the Armagnacs and the Burgundians, while simultaneously fighting the English. Understanding the war without understanding the French civil war is like understanding a house fire without noticing that the residents were already fighting each other when it started.

Why It Started

The short version: family drama over who got to be king of France. In 1328, the direct Capetian line of French kings died out. The throne needed a new occupant. The two main candidates were Philip of Valois, who was the dead king’s cousin, and Edward III of England, who was the dead king’s grandson through his mother. France, applying an old Salic law principle that women could not inherit the throne and therefore could not transmit a claim to the throne, chose Philip. Edward disagreed. By 1337, the disagreement had become a war.

There was also a long-standing territorial dimension. Since William the Conqueror had invaded England in 1066, English kings had held land in France and owed feudal duties to the French crown for those territories. The relationship had been uncomfortable for centuries. By the 14th century, the French monarchy was pushing to reassert full sovereignty over English-held French land, and the English were not interested in giving it up. The combination of a disputed succession and centuries of territorial friction created a conflict that neither side had an easy way to end.

What Actually Happened

The first phase went remarkably well for England. Edward III won major battles at Crécy in 1346 and Poitiers in 1356. At Poitiers, the English captured the French king, John II, and held him for ransom. The ransom was set at three million gold écus, roughly the entire annual revenue of France. France paid a large portion of it over several years.

After a period of relative peace, Henry V of England reopened the conflict and won what became the most famous battle of the war: Agincourt in 1415. His army of perhaps 6,000 soldiers, exhausted and suffering from dysentery, faced a French force three or more times larger. The English longbowmen destroyed the French cavalry in a muddy field in Normandy. Henry subsequently forced France to sign the Treaty of Troyes in 1420, recognizing him as heir to the French throne and arranging his marriage to the French king’s daughter.

It looked, briefly, like England had won. Then both Henry V and the French king Charles VI died in 1422, within two months of each other. Henry’s heir was nine months old. France fell into further chaos.

Joan of Arc: What Is True and What Is Complicated

In 1429, a seventeen-year-old peasant girl from Domrémy in northeastern France arrived at the court of the French claimant Charles VII and told him that God had sent her to drive the English out of France and see him properly crowned at Reims. She was illiterate and had no military training. Charles gave her armor, a banner, and command of a relief force heading to the besieged city of Orléans.

She led the French to victory at Orléans in nine days. The psychological impact was enormous. French morale transformed. Charles was crowned at Reims. The tide turned. In 1430, she was captured by the Burgundians, who sold her to the English. A trial court convicted her of heresy and burning at the stake. She was nineteen years old. The war continued for twenty-two years after her death.

What the popular telling often misses is the geopolitical context. Joan mattered because French morale was genuinely collapsing and because the Duke of Burgundy’s alliance with England was the structural key to English dominance. When Burgundy eventually switched sides back to France in 1435, English military power in France became strategically unsustainable. Joan had helped create the conditions for that shift, but the shift itself was as much diplomatic as military.

Also, twenty-five years after burning her, the Church declared the trial unjust and overturned her conviction. She was canonized as a saint in 1920.

How It Ended

Not with a peace treaty. The war simply ran down. France won the decisive battles of Formigny in 1450 and Castillon in 1453, the latter being the last significant land battle. England lost virtually all its French territory. Calais, the last English possession in France, fell in 1558, more than a century after the war was supposed to have ended.

England emerged from the conflict nearly bankrupt. The loss radicalized English nobles who had invested heavily in French campaigns, contributing directly to the Wars of the Roses, the civil war that consumed England for the following three decades. France emerged exhausted, depopulated, and having lost perhaps a third of its population to war, plague, and famine across the conflict. It also emerged, for the first time, with something resembling a national consciousness. The conflict had forced people across the country to identify as French rather than as Normans, Gascons, or Burgundians.

Joan of Arc was the symbol of that identity. She was also, structurally, a politically convenient symbol: a dead peasant girl whose victory could be claimed without sharing any actual power with her.