The Hundred Years War, traditionally spanning 1337 to 1453, is better understood as a 200-year struggle rooted in France’s quest to establish a unified, sovereign nation-state. Rather than a simple Anglo-French conflict, it involved complex power dynamics with Burgundy, Flanders, and the Holy Roman Empire, reflecting broader struggles over territorial ownership, legal authority, and state legitimacy. The conflict began with friction over English-held lands in France, escalating after a 1292 murder that disrupted peace. Edward III’s claim to the French crown was a strategic move to secure English economic interests, especially in the wool trade, and to dissolve feudal oaths binding allies like the Flemings. Military successes, such as the Battle of Crécy and the longbow’s effectiveness, were amplified by superior leadership and poor French command. However, the war’s iconic moments—like Henry V’s victory at Agincourt—are exaggerated in popular memory and do not represent the war’s broader, more complex trajectory. Joan of Arc became a transformative figure not through combat, but through her unwavering belief and ability to inspire mass loyalty, marking a turning point in the French resistance. The war’s legacy includes the rise of modern nation-states, professional armies, and state taxation, and its conclusion in 1453 allowed France to consolidate its borders, setting the stage for European geopolitics and colonial expansion into the New World. The conflict’s enduring impact lies in its role as a foundational moment in shaping modern Europe’s political, military, and social structures.
A young woman had something to say about this.
Then comes Joan of Arc.
In some ways, a similar character to Henry V.
I mean, just sort of. A true believer.
A true believer.
What do we make of Joan of Arc within this greater story?
Her place is pivotal.
I adore Joan of Arc.
It's hard not to, if you read the transcripts of her trial and things.
She's incredible.
She is someone who truly does change history.
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Hello, everyone.
You're listening to This Is History in Conversation.
And it's my great pleasure and privilege to have Dr.
Michael Livingston, Professor Michael Livingston, but a doctor as well.
I'll give you all the titles.
Distinguished professor, no less, at the Citadel Military University in Charleston, South Carolina.
Author of many,
many brilliant books.
One of my favorites is your book on the Battle of Crecy, where you're well known for moving battlefields.
Perhaps we can talk about that in a minute.
But you're here today to talk about your new book, which is The 200 Years War.
Also known in the US, I think, as the Bloody Crown.
Bloody Crowns. Yeah.
Bloody Crowns, plural.
So lots of numbers to get stuck into.
Lots of medieval warfare.
I'm very glad you're here.
There are very few things I enjoy more than having conversations about history with you.
So let's get going.
We've covered The 100 Years War here and there and everywhere in the main episodes of this podcast,
A Dynasty to Die For, which is all about the Plantagenets.
You can't get into Plantagenet history without having The 100 Years War somewhere.
But let's address it head on.
So anyone who's coming to the subject fresh, give us the very broad outline of what is
The 100 Years War, why is it called The 100 Years War, and why the hell isn't it 100 years long when we're calling it that?
So the traditional start is 1337, and it's a fight between England
and France over, typically, people think, the Crown of France, England's claim to that.
And it lasts until 1453, which is not 100 years.
It's 113.
But that doesn't, like, roll off the tongue.
So 100 Years War sounds a little bit better.
And this is a fight that's got a lot of battles people know about, right?
This is the Battle of Crecy, Battle of Agincourt, Poitiers.
This is Joan of Arc.
This is Henry V, right?
This is really iconic.
Iconic stuff, especially through the lens of Shakespeare, I think.
You know, we get a lot of our history through Shakespeare.
Why is it called The 100 Years War?
Well, nobody who was fighting in it thought they were fighting in The 100 Years War.
That label actually comes in the 19th century.
It's in 1823 that a French scholar is
writing a textbook and has this sort of period of a bunch
of things happening and wants like a title for it and says, "Gare de Saint-Anne."
"The 100 Years War."
Because a bunch of things happening is, well, that's just history.
And you said that nobody thought they were fighting in The 100 Years War.
They weren't looking at their watches and going, "Well, I guess 15 or 16 years left to go."
Right.
Was there a sense at the time that this was a joined up conflict, that actually,
that, you know, whenever there was a sort of breakout of war between England, France,
and their various allies and neighbors during this long period, that one thing was connected to the last thing?
Certainly, because, you know, everybody's responding to everything that happened before, right?
But in this, this is part of the reason it gets hard to define it, right?
Because it's not as if in 1337, it's fundamentally different from some
of the things that had happened before, even all the way back to 1066.
I mean, you know, this friction between England and France goes quite a ways back.
So it's not as if people thought, "Wow, this really is fundamentally different."
It's just kind of like, well, it's Tuesday, you know?
This is what we're doing now.
And the same thing in 1453, the traditional end point is the Battle of Castillon.
It's not as if the English go home and say, "Well, that's it, boys.
You know, we're never going to try and get it back.
We're never, this is all done." That's not the case.
This is, I mean, you know, arguably is the Hundred Years War over today?
I don't know.
Sometimes I look at the news and I'm like, "I think they're still fighting this thing."
Well, but that's, you know, that's amusing, but it's also,
you know, an interesting and valid point.
It takes us to the framing of your new book, The Two Hundred Years War.
Talk to us about your reasons for framing this as 200 years, the terminal points.
Why start when you do and why end when you do?
I mean, this is really what it comes down to.
When I sat down to write the book, right?
And, you know, you know this as a historian, as a storyteller, essentially.
What's my frame? How am I going to start?
How am I going to end?
I intended to write the traditional story.
That was my
intention.
But when I really sat down and said, OK, what happened in 1337?
What happened in 1453?
They didn't match up.
It's not as if what had started it was now over and vice versa, right?
These things didn't match.
And then when it's like, well, like nobody
thought that they'd never declared a war started, they never declared it really
ended, like, so what is actually holding this together?
And it forced me to really kind of reconsider those dates.
You could have started at 1066, but God, that's a huge book.
Right.
So so no, I can't do that.
You could start it with the Angevin
conflict with Eleanor of Aquitaine and everything that follows that.
Again, that's its own book.
A peace happens between England and France in 1253 Treaty of Paris,
and that treaty establishes a working system that's going to keep everything fine.
And I thought that was enough of a break to say, OK, when does it start up again?
Right.
It starts up again in 1292.
OK, so we have the peace of France in the middle of the 13th century.
That's between Henry III and Louis IX of France.
And
in the traditional telling of the Hundred Years War, 1337 matters
to 1340 because early in Edward III's reign, he makes the claim to be not only
the king of England, but the king of France.
But there's something bigger going on that you have to understand to see why
Edward III makes that claim to the Crown of France.
And so you have to take us to the middle of the 13th century.
I wonder if you can sketch out what
the relationship at that point between the English kings and the French kings is
and what they fundamentally like drill down.
What is it that they're trying to thrash out between them?
What's the friction about?
What they're trying to thrash out is how is it that one king can be vassal to another?
So, you know, you have these lands in what we now think of as France, Aquitaine, Gascony.
The southwest corner of France.
And of course, Normandy comes and goes as another position here.
These are lands that are held for complex
historical reasons by the English king, but they are thought to be French lands.
Right. And so to hold lands, you have to perform homage.
You have to sort of kneel before another lord and put your hands together as a
whole thing and say that, you know, you're in charge.
I'm just sort of, in a sense, kind of renting this this this land.
I'm your guy. I'm your guy.
And this is that's what homage comes from.
I'm your man. Well, a king.
Doesn't like doing that to another king, like it means that king's bigger than better than.
So there was always this friction between
the English and French kings over how to to to deal with this.
And it sort of depended on on both sides.
Some of the French kings at times were like, yeah, dude, I know.
I know it's not cool. Like, don't worry about it.
Like, we'll do a minor version in private.
Don't worry about it.
Others were like, no, no.
We're doing this formally and
we're doing this big and large in public, you know.
And that kind of friction can comes and goes in actual warfare.
The peace that we get in 1253 establishes these are the rules.
Everything's going to be fine. Right.
And it's OK with those two kings.
They're like, this is solid. Great.
The problem is their kids, their kids think, man, you've taken something away from me.
Right. On the French side, the agreement says, yes, the English can hold these lands.
As long as we perform, you know, do some checks and boxes, the English can hold these lands.
Other French lords and the French prince things are like, dude, those are French lands.
We we should get these people out, get the English out entirely.
On the other side,
as part of those agreements, some lands that some of the English thought
were theirs are kind of just handed back to the French and young Prince Edward can
be Edward the first kind of a famous guy, not the kind of guy who's cool with that.
Right. And in 1292, it all blows up again.
Not it's it's a strange event.
A guy is murdered.
We don't even know who, his name, we actually don't
know which side it is um but there is a murder that happens on a small little island in the
atlantic um and it sets off a series of reprisals that just escalate to the point we got armies in
the field um and all bets are off and from that point forward it's just kind of one fire after
another uh until in my view we get to 1492 that that point at the beginning in 1292 yeah is just
to be clear is a sort of this this little incident matters because it becomes a test of the
authority of the building blocks of authority right it's like who is actually in charge and
in the main episodes of this podcast which in which we've been looking at the plantagenet
dynasty i've always looked at that from the perspective of the english kings yeah let's
switch it round because i think this is so important in your book to that it's about the
switch of perspective
isn't it it's saying what is in the french what is in the mind of the french kings at this point
given that we're in 1292 we are the other end of the century from philip augustus that if listeners
go back and listen to season one two even three of this podcast i'll remember philip augustus
comes to the throne of france as a young man how does this sort of a picturesque image of him
sitting under a tree chewing a bit of straw and his advisors asking him hey what are you thinking
about philip well i'm just dreaming of the day when i restore the sort of the patronage of
charlemagne
whatever he's he's a guy he's about taking a weak french crown yeah mostly limited in its
territorial resources to the the isle de france to paris and its immediate environs and starting
to build it back into a unitary authority if we can use that term the french perspective is about
build france back correct okay so is that why 1292 matters so much because it's the inciting
incident to this next like phase of this right but but yeah you're absolutely right you know
the the philippe's
scenario that falls all after them they are really thinking about france and what it means to
constitute that and and fundamentally i mean look i'm i'm an american i don't have a dog in this fight
and so when i approach something like this yeah i i was taught a very anglo-centric view of it right
what did the english king want that's all that matters but as a historian that doesn't really
work for me so like okay what does the other side want and really quickly you see that that's
exactly right you know it's this we're going to define what france is and what the french
monarchy is right what is our power and authority um and that's obviously the english stand in the
way of that but so do other states that the state of burgundy is in the way of this state of navarre
is in the way of this uh the low countries are potentially in the way of this even other french
lords are in the way of this because as the french king tries to sort of consolidate power there's
sometimes powerful lords that say no no we we kind of like decentralized power thank you very much
and so you have friction within france and so this 200 years war
really view it as that is the frame this is about france defining what the hell france is
and that's territorial but it's also in terms of its legal frameworks in terms of
the relationship between the relative power between kings and lords yes between state and
church so that's the sort of so if if we accept that thesis and i think i i do that it's this is
this is really a war that's a that's that's about france kind of expanding redefining you know the
strengthening of the french monarchy i think it it helps to explain
in one sense you mentioned some of the territories that end up being it seems like they're dragged
into the orbit of an anglo-french fight burgundy navarre uh flanders low countries and and so on
but actually they're they're part of this broader story right that this if you view it as a french
story yeah i mean and it becomes essentially a continental war right right um but it's not that
it's the sort of case of everyone's going oh england and france are fighting i'll stick a
boot in as well it's i mean it's not quite as simple as it's not as simple as that right because
because again everybody's competing as france is
really kind of pushing outwards it's not just against english lands against everybody and they
push back right i mean the holy roman empire is a part of this the italian states why is that fight
attached to all this like it kind of doesn't make sense unless you see this broader perspective of
these powers struggling for what is our authority you know and where do our lands stop where do they
start what does it mean to have that authority legally politically theologically yeah right all
period thus, I think really kind of truly defines our world because it's really building
what Europe is right in that moment before it opens up into the new world.
I didn't, 1492, I didn't choose because of Columbus, but it actually works out really
well because from this point forward, that war, that conflict, right, takes on now an
imperial global scale.
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Well, we'll come to 1492 in a minute, but, you know, as I think you've made this point brilliantly,
you know, you can't understand war from one perspective alone.
You can't understand history from one perspective alone, but you as a military historian, I would venture to say that war in particular is about having all of these viewpoints, perspectives going on at the same time.
So let's move back to that English perspective and try and make sense of Edward III's decision in the 1330s, early 1340s to claim the French crown.
Is it as simple as Edward III saying, well, hang on a second, if there's a crown up for grabs, I've got a blood right?
Or is it more as a sort of defensive tactic against French expansionism?
I think it's an offensive tactic against it, but it certainly is not like, oh, the crown is up for grabs, I'm grabbing it.
That's certainly the way I think we think of it, right?
There's nobody on the crown.
There's not a direct claimant.
Who's going to be the claimant?
He has a claim through his mother and this whole question of whether or not the crown can pass through a woman.
And ultimately, the French choose someone else.
Interestingly, when that moment happens, that's not when he makes the claim.
Because that's 1928, right?
Yeah.
He makes this claim a few years later.
Yeah.
He makes the claim because he's pushing against the French in the low countries.
It's a struggle over the low countries at that point.
And the reason low countries, this is Belgium, this is the Netherlands today.
The reason these are so important is this is where the center of the wool trade is.
The great backbone of the English economy is cheap.
It's wool.
uh and as the french are sort of like trying to flex to shut that down right you know if i can
shut down your economy i can damage you um and vice versa where the english are trying to keep
that open and make that tie that alliance they have with with the flemings and with other small
states and they're uh stronger this becomes another one of these kind of battlegrounds
uh and for the the the flemish in particular at this point they want to ally with the english
but they have gone through with these oaths homage i'll be your man with the french so how can i do
this i can't break my oaths man that's not okay right i mean you know sadly and i think our modern
world we think of people not going through with what they say as like well that's just being a
politician but but back in the day no it's like you gave your word that's a major major thing
word is bond yeah word is bond and and edward has the perfect solution for this particular conundrum
well you know what hey if i say that i'm the king of france then you're owes to the other king of
france are null and void right and we can have our economic deals we can have our political deals we
can work together so it's really a it's it's a very clever sort of uh manipulation of the of
the situation i don't think edward iii by any means thinks i can actually pull this off you
think it's it's totally cynical i i'm i'm i'm very skeptical about this i think he's well aware
look i can use this this is a loophole right and i'm you know i've got to go i've got to i've got
to look like i mean it i mean god damn he puts the fleur-de-lis on the flag he totally rearranges
the whole sort of iconography of of plantagenet kingship really uh in a way that we that is still
sort of, we can still feel today, but he's, he's, he's a cynical, tactical politician.
Yeah.
And I, and I think if you think about it in terms of, you know, strategy in terms of like,
you know, political strategy, this checks out now, right?
You know, this makes sense, but he doesn't really think.
oh, I'll make this claim and the French lords are going to be like, oh, our bad.
You know, like, I'm sorry, where did we send the crown?
Like, that's not a thing that's going to happen here, right?
So this is a move that's necessary to make.
It's lawfare as well as warfare.
Yeah, exactly, exactly.
It's only when he starts getting victories in the field that, hey, this might work.
Well, this is the next point, isn't it?
Because we have this moment where Edward III makes the claim,
sets up the framework for this sort of core bit of the 200 years war.
And then the English go on this remarkable series of victories.
And again, we've heard about them in the main episode.
You have Crecy at sea, Winchelsea, before that, the choice.
And right up to 1360, when the Treaty of Brittany is signed,
where Edward has very successfully used lawfare, as we've discussed,
and warfare to force a brilliant treaty.
I mean, he gets almost everything he's really gunning for.
Aquitaine massively expanded, a bit of territory elsewhere held in full sovereignty.
We don't go into the details.
Listeners can go back and listen to those main episodes.
But suffice to say, he has this brilliant period of military success.
I wonder if you can just give us your take, as someone so immersed in this period,
on why the English win and win and win and win in the 1340s, 1350s.
Is it just the longbow?
It's not just the longbow.
The longbow is massively important.
It is an amazing weapon.
But look, it's not complicated, right?
It's not like, oh, this is a top.
It's not like, oh, this is a top secret thing.
Bows and arrows are incredibly simple.
We've been using them for tens of thousands of years.
The reason that the English longbow is so effective is the longbow men, right?
The archers who are trained over their lives, essentially,
to use this weapon to absolutely obliterate the French way of war,
which is these cavalry charges.
And that, I think, yeah, I mean, the longbow is obviously essential there.
But I get really wary of people who think,
you know, the longbow is this, like, magnificent thing.
You know, oh, the French can't figure out how it works or something.
They know how it works.
So, to what degree does personal leadership right at the top matter?
You know, to what extent is it a determining factor in this war?
So, to use the example of Crecy in 1346, the first really big victory.
You know, Edward III, he gets caught.
He's trying to run away.
His campaign's gone terribly.
And he's on the run.
When he gets caught.
So, it's not as if this was like, oh, this really grand strategy to fight in this place.
No, he gets caught.
He takes a very good position, which is good leadership.
He does the best he can.
He's got a good plan.
His son, the Black Prince, completely bungles the whole operation.
He's 16 years old.
I can't be too mad at him.
But he completely bungles it.
You know, I mean, we later on think of the Black Prince as this great warrior himself,
this great leader.
He's the one who wins at Poitiers.
He's the one who wins at Nara.
But he completely bungles this, gets himself captured.
Just dumb luck that the English managed to get him out from being captured during the battle.
I mean, otherwise, the war's basically over, probably.
So, that's terrible leadership on the part of young Edward, the Black Prince.
But on the flip side, tremendously poor leadership on the part of the French.
The French king, Philippe VI, in that battle, loses command.
He loses command and control, which is the number one thing you have to have as a leader.
Loses control so badly that when he retreats, he doesn't call a general retreat for the army.
So, the fighting continues in his absence, just slaughter until nightfall.
And then the slaughter continues the next day.
So, you have great leadership on the one side, bad leadership on the other, but also dumb luck entering the picture.
Well, this is an interesting point, isn't it?
Because, you know, if people have any sort of instantaneous. Even thoughts about the Hundred Years' War, certainly in England, it's probably through the lens of Shakespeare,
and therefore through the lens of Henry V, and therefore through the lens of Agincourt.
Now, Agincourt, and indeed Henry V, are really quite exceptional, aren't they?
Because here you have a king, Henry V, who, I mean, you can tell me what you think,
but in my opinion, does believe that he should be king of France.
He's read as literal for a bunch of different reasons, what Edward III was reading as figurative.
Or at least sort of as tactical.
And then you have this, I mean, the miraculous victory at Agincourt, somewhat a crazy sort of 2.0 or redux or whatever,
but then a totally new strategy that the English managed to finance and pay for for a short time,
which is the conquest of Normandy, unlike the tactics that are being used by Edward III and everyone else before him,
in the middle of a French civil war, pretty much, due to the insanity of Charles VI.
Yeah, absolutely brilliant.
It takes advantage of the. The enemy's weakness.
Right.
So, this iconic moment, quote-unquote, of this conflict is actually probably the weirdest and least representative of it, would you say?
Absolutely.
I mean, you know, it is, but we see it incorrectly, right?
We see it as, oh, he beats France.
He beats, like, part of the French, right?
Because they're at civil war, right?
This, no, let's not say he doesn't do well.
He does very well.
Don't worry, I'm not too sensitive about Henry V.
We'll talk about it afterwards, but carry on.
But, you know, this, because we see it through the lens of Shakespeare,
we collapse all this stuff into these kind of big polarized binaries, right?
And, you know, and we forget, like, 1415 isn't the end, right?
You have this conquest of Normandy, and then everything goes terribly, right?
And the French end up winning this fight.
I hope they're going to let me out of the country, having said that.
We'll see about that.
But there's this moment, I don't want to fast forward too fast,
but if we go to, let's say, 1429, Siege of Orléans.
Siege of Orléans, yeah.
You have this moment where. To go back to the initial frame, the piecing together of the greater France,
the project of Philip Augustus, the project of Philip IV,
it's fucked.
France is partitioned.
It looks like it's going to be reduced to the Kingdom of Bourges.
That Paris is going to be in Anglo-Burgundian hands.
That if the English win the Siege of Orléans, I mean,
this country's getting partitioned along the River Loire.
That is that.
But a young woman had something to say about this.
In some ways, a similar. A similar character to Henry V.
A true believer.
A true believer.
I adore Joan of Arc.
She's incredible.
Before Joan of Arc, could the English have pulled off what they were trying to do?
Maybe.
I'm not sure I would put money on it.
But it was within the realm of possibility.
Right, yeah.
After Joan of Arc, there's no chance.
There's no chance.
It's over.
It's just going to be drawing it out now at this point.
And there's not that many people who are that pivotal, truly, in history.
And she is.
And many things are fascinating about her.
One is she's not unique.
There were lots of young women running around being like,
God is speaking to me and here's what needs to happen.
It's the fact that people followed her.
Her belief is kind of. It's not important to me.
It's other people's belief in her that matters.
Right, that's interesting.
Anybody can claim to be a leader, right?
Being a leader is about leading people, like that people follow you.
It's actually about the followers, their belief that matters.
Henry V had that in spades.
People followed him, right?
Joan has that.
Again, lots of people maybe believed or whatever, thought things like what she did.
But they didn't have the kind of impact that she had, which is about other people's belief.
And so I really. I really view Joan of Arc really as a leader.
She doesn't do a lot, frankly, in terms of like on the field or anything.
The movies always make much more about her sort of active participation in things.
It's really almost like a sort of galvanizing figurehead.
There was this vacuum for that.
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And the final phase in the traditional telling of the Hundred Years' War goes 1429.
Siege of Orléans, Joan of Arc, all the way to 1453, Battle of Castillon.
The final battle that loses what remains of the once mighty Duchy of Aquitaine reduced to Gascony-Guienne.
It's gone.
It's gone.
Bordeaux then falls.
That's it.
The English are out of France.
And this long war seems inadvertently to have gone a very long way to completing that territorial reconstruction of greater France.
But that's not where you end the story.
So I wonder.
I wonder if you can tell us what is it about that period that makes you feel that it fits within a longer frame for the Hundred Years' War?
Well, what happens right after 1453, as you all know, is the Wars of the Roses.
Well, the Wars of the Roses are about what's happening in France.
Like, that's really kind of the tinder that's launched this thing, is what has happened in 1453.
And then now, you know, France went through this issue of having a mad king on the throne.
Now England's got one, right?
Right.
And the same.
kind of friction happens.
But it's not as if the English are left in 1453, left Bordeaux and thought we're never coming back.
It was, no, we're coming back.
And they did.
Right.
They come back in 1475.
With the under Edward IV.
Edward IV comes back against Louis.
And we get the Treaty of Pequigny.
So that's the English perspective.
We're coming back.
Hold on.
You know, hold on to your baguettes and wrap those onions right around your neck, you bastards.
We're going to come for you.
But what's the French perspective?
I mean, surely, like, bof, fuck off, you're not.
What's going on?
Brittany is still out there, for one thing.
So it's about the reconstruction.
Tell us about that.
We're still trying to reconstruct what it is, right?
And if you go back, I mean, you know, was Brittany ever really French, whatever that means, when you get back to the early Middle Ages?
God knows.
I mean, like, but you had a belief, right, that Clovis, Charlemagne, these great leaders in the past, that this was part of our.
Our inheritance, right?
And so that's what they're trying to get.
So 1492 is this point where, from the French perspective, it's done.
I mean.
It's done.
We have France now.
Yeah.
His history is always with hindsight.
We know that.
But that's the frame.
I wonder if, you know, big picture, what's the legacy of this war, whether we call it a hundred years war or 200 years war?
You know, where does it?
What's his contribution into the broader sweep of America?
Medieval and history and beyond?
I, it makes our modern world, I think, right?
This is a war that, because it goes on for so long, it's a generational conflict.
Nobody who's there at the beginning is there at the end.
Um, it's metastasized to such a high degree to, to end it required tremendous changes in how people fought, right?
This is where we get gunpowder.
It changed economics.
Part of that's also the black death.
Uh, but it changed how economies run.
It created modern states in the sense that we think of them today with taxation.
Mm-hmm.
You needed to pay for the armies because you've also had to build professional armies, unlike militia, right?
So all of these things that we think of as like, um, what a modern state is, look, they start here.
This is the starting point.
And then when you think about 1492 Columbus sort of moving to the new world and all that, that's going to entail and take this, this fight.
Now, now our, our borders are basically set in, in Europe.
Let's go fight about our borders somewhere else.
Right.
And that's going to dominate the next few centuries.
Um, this, this is.
Uh, this, this becomes our modern world, I think.
Well, what better place to leave it?
Um, Mike, thanks very much for coming in and talking to us about, uh, about one of our favorite topics on this podcast.
It's always a pleasure to talk with you.
And I always feel like I learned something and I feel like that because I do, um, listeners and viewers.
Thank you very much for listening and viewing.
Now you can find, uh, Mike's book, 200 years war, also known as bloody crowns in the U S in all good bookstores and libraries.
Um, for my Royal favorites and this is history plus subscribers stick around to hear Mike and I discuss what he feels are the most decisive military battles of all time.
That's going to be on this week's bonus episode for the next episode of this is history in conversation.
We have the historian illustrator, medievalist, uh, Dr.
Amy Jeffs joining us, and she's about to release a book called Arthur, a new life, uh, which invites us to reconsider the man behind the myth.
I'll see you for that next week.
We're the Templars, a party like, uh, it depends if you believe Philip the fourth or not.
Uh, true, true, true.
It's that it's a certain kind of party when, uh, everyone's getting naked and kissing each other's butt and there's a black cat present.
Uh, and they all, they all get pissed.
Uh, yeah, it was nice.
Portugal's nice.
I'm glad you had a good time.
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Podcast Summary
Key Points:
The Hundred Years War is a misnomer, lasting 113 years from 1337 to 1453, and the name reflects 19th-century labeling rather than historical reality.
The conflict is better understood as a 200-year struggle centered on France’s efforts to define its sovereignty, territorial integrity, and legal authority against English and regional powers.
Key turning points include the 1292 murder that reignites tensions, Edward III’s claim to the French crown as a strategic defense of English economic interests, and the longbow’s military effectiveness alongside superior leadership and battlefield tactics.
The war is not just Anglo-French but a broader continental conflict involving Burgundy, Flanders, the Holy Roman Empire, and Italy, reflecting struggles over state power and borders.
Joan of Arc emerges as a pivotal figure—not through battlefield action, but through her ability to inspire belief and unify resistance, which shifts the momentum decisively in favor of French reintegration.
The war’s legacy includes the development of modern state structures, professional armies, taxation, and gunpowder warfare, laying foundations for Europe’s political and military evolution.
The war continues beyond 1453, with English resurgence in the 1470s and France’s ongoing efforts to consolidate its nationhood, culminating in a completed territorial and political framework by 1492.
The war’s conclusion reshapes Europe’s geopolitical landscape, enabling colonial expansion and a new global order focused on defined borders and nation-state identities.
Summary:
The Hundred Years War, traditionally spanning 1337 to 1453, is better understood as a 200-year struggle rooted in France’s quest to establish a unified, sovereign nation-state. Rather than a simple Anglo-French conflict, it involved complex power dynamics with Burgundy, Flanders, and the Holy Roman Empire, reflecting broader struggles over territorial ownership, legal authority, and state legitimacy. The conflict began with friction over English-held lands in France, escalating after a 1292 murder that disrupted peace.
Edward III’s claim to the French crown was a strategic move to secure English economic interests, especially in the wool trade, and to dissolve feudal oaths binding allies like the Flemings. Military successes, such as the Battle of Crécy and the longbow’s effectiveness, were amplified by superior leadership and poor French command. However, the war’s iconic moments—like Henry V’s victory at Agincourt—are exaggerated in popular memory and do not represent the war’s broader, more complex trajectory.
Joan of Arc became a transformative figure not through combat, but through her unwavering belief and ability to inspire mass loyalty, marking a turning point in the French resistance. The war’s legacy includes the rise of modern nation-states, professional armies, and state taxation, and its conclusion in 1453 allowed France to consolidate its borders, setting the stage for European geopolitics and colonial expansion into the New World. The conflict’s enduring impact lies in its role as a foundational moment in shaping modern Europe’s political, military, and social structures.
FAQs
The name was coined in 1823 by a French scholar who wanted a catchy title for a period of conflict. It does not reflect the actual duration, which is about 113 years from 1337 to 1453.
The author expands the timeline to include the 13th century conflicts, such as the Angevin struggles and the 1292 murder incident, to show how the conflict was a long-term struggle over sovereignty and state identity, not just a single 100-year war.
Joan of Arc was a pivotal figure who inspired French resistance during the Siege of Orléans in 1429. Her leadership and belief in divine mission galvanized French forces and shifted the momentum of the war.
Edward III claimed the crown through his mother, but it was not a direct bloodline claim. His claim was primarily a strategic move to counter French expansion and secure economic alliances, especially in the Low Countries.
The English used the longbow, which was highly effective against French cavalry. Combined with strong leadership and tactical planning, these weapons and strategies gave the English decisive victories, especially in the 1340s and 1350s.
The French viewed the war as a struggle to define and consolidate a strong, unified monarchy. They were fighting not just against England, but also to reclaim power from feudal lords and establish a centralized state.
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