The Hundred Years War was really a series of wars beginning in 1337 (related wars had been waged in the 1290s and 1320s). At issue was English rule in Gascony, the last remnant of the great Angevin Empire of the twelfth century, which the English king held as a fief from the French king, an unstable arrangement. The French aimed at taking Gascony; Edward III of England aimed at gaining sovereign title to it. Edward also exploited his claim to the French throne, created by the end of the Capetian line of kings. Territorial and dynastic ambitions remained entangled until the end of the war.
Although both England and France sustained remarkable levels of military effort for much of the war, with sophistication achieved especially by the English military administration, the history of the war also reveals the weaknesses of both sides. Both sides raised large armies, especially prior to the Black Death, yet neither side could maintain such forces for very long without serious financial problems for the government and serious opposition arising among their subjects. Furthermore, armed forces proved easier to raise than to disband—much of the expansion of the war after 1360 was spurred by the private initiative of the Free Companies, professional mercenary bands threatened with unemployment by the peace negotiated that year. The scale of military effort spread the normal ravages of war far and wide through France and elsewhere, adding to the economic and social damage of famine, plague, and other crises sweeping Europe after 1348. French peasants rose in a bloody revolt (responding to the plundering of both sides’ armies) in 1358, and English peasants did the same (responding to the burdens of war taxation) in 1381. The concentration of government effort on the war also contributed to breakdowns in internal order, judicial functions, and social cooperation in both countries.
Longbowmen Practicing
Use of the longbow required long practice, not just to gain accuracy but even more to develop the strength necessary to draw these powerful weapons.
The war falls broadly into four phases. Up until 1360, the English were unexpectedly successful, achieving their territorial goals in the Treaty of Bretigny. From 1360 to 1396, the French recovered during a period of weak English leadership, and the war spread to Spain and Portugal while mercenary companies spawned by the war found employment in Italy and farther east. After a period of exhausted peace, Henry V led a new wave of English triumphs between 1415 and the late 1420s. Stalemate in the 1430s and early 1440s gave way to the final phase in the late 1440s—the rapid French conquest of all English territory in France.
From a military perspective, the war may also be divided more simply into two phases: a long period of English tactical dominance (with two subphases based on differences in English strategy) and a brief period of French tactical innovation at the end of the war.
Edward I had begun experimenting with the use of longbowmen (initially Welsh, then increasingly English as the weapon spread) in his wars against the Scots, and, by the 1320s, his grandson Edward III had developed the tactical methods that would dominate the Hundred Years War. Faced with battle, English knights dismounted and formed blocks of heavy infantry, using their lances as short pikes. Lighter-armed Welsh spearmen sometimes added depth to this part of the infantry formation. Long- bowmen formed up in solid masses on the wings of the heavy infantry, sometimes angled forward. Whenever possible, the defensive formation was arrayed at the top of a slope, maximizing the archers’ field of fire and slowing attackers, with natural obstacles protecting the flanks and rear of the line. The archers also sometimes placed artificial obstacles like sharpened stakes in front of their positions as further protection against cavalry attacks. This arrangement proved devastatingly effective in defense against both infantry and cavalry attacks, even against much greater numbers, as Dupplin Moor (1332), Halidon Hill (1333), Crecy (1346), Poitiers (1356) (see the Sources box “The Battle of Poitiers, 1356”), Agincourt (1415), and numerous smaller engagements testify.
While the defensive strength of the armored men- at-arms anchored these tactics, the longbowmen were crucial to their consistent effectiveness. The longbow, with considerably greater rate of fire and range than and comparable penetrating power to the crossbow, extended the range of the defensive formation and allowed the archers to provoke enemy armies at a distance into attacking, often rashly or prematurely. When an attack came, the massed fire of thousands of longbowmen (crossbowmen had tended to operate in smaller groups) transformed the power of missile weapons: Their withering fire inflicted casualties on men and horses, disrupted the momentum of an attack, and tended to channel it into the spearmen so that the attackers became overcrowded. The effectiveness of the archers is indicated by their increase in proportion to the men-at-arms in English armies, from about 1 to 1 in early campaigns to 4 or 5 to 1 seventy years later. Finally, the knights occasionally remounted for a counterattack or pursuit, as at Poitiers.
The effectiveness of the whole system was also founded on close military (and thus social) cooperation between knights and yeoman archers, which, in turn, reflected the ability of the English government to harness and mold the military skills and energies of its population more effectively than any other large kingdom. This, in turn, was an aspect of the political cooperation and broad participation that characterized the English kingdom and made it effective beyond its ability to raise tax revenues as well as troops. Indeed, English armies throughout the war were raised by contracts of indenture, in which the government contracted with captains to provide specified numbers of men for specified periods (a form of contract that dated back to Anglo-Norman times as the money fief ), a method that created paid, professional armies. In short, English infantry tactics were built in part on effective central government— perhaps not at the Roman level of achievement, but a significant pointer to the ongoing development of the European infantry tradition.
While fighting in battle as infantry, English knights and, increasingly, archers were mounted for campaigning and were thus capable of rapid strategic movement. Mounted English armies typically launched chevauchees. These were long, destructive raids through the French countryside that fed English armies, reduced the resources available to the French armies, and harnessed the essentially defensive tactical capabilities of English armies into a kind of passive-aggressive offensive strategy: Chevauchees drew French armies into attacks on the raiders, who could then choose a site for a defensive stand. The chevauchee strategy was the basic English approach until the 1390s. But the limitations of the chevauchee strategy were exposed after 1360 in two ways. First, it was less effective in defense of lands already won, which required instead less rewarding and more expensive garrison defenses; second, it could be countered. Bertrand du Guesclin developed the Fabian approach of shadowing an English army to limit its foraging and destruction, while refusing battle.
Henry V succeeded in 1415 in using the traditional chevauchee to create and win the battle of Agincourt. Already at the beginning of the campaign, however, when he took several months to besiege Harfleur as a base of operations in Normandy, he showed that he would link the tactical abilities of English soldiers to a new strategy: systematic conquest through castle taking. This was made possible in part by French civil war and confusion in the wake of Agincourt, which allowed Henry to spread his forces over several sieges at once, and in part by his use of small but effective siege guns. Henry also proved himself a master of the logistical arrangements, including shipping of supplies from England, and he possessed the dogged determination necessary to such a strategy. Henry conquered Normandy and much of the Ile de France in a mere five years and had made himself heir to the French throne by treaty when he died prematurely in 1422. Able captains carried on English conquests on behalf of the infant Henry VI for another ten years, but in the absence of Henry’s leadership, the expense of maintaining a standing army of several thousand garrison and field troops eventually wore down the English people’s support for the war. Renewed French efforts after 1435 would meet an increasingly enfeebled English defense.
Charles VII, building on the recovery of French morale sparked by Joan of Arc, and on diplomatic successes that increasingly isolated English-held Normandy, and exploiting divided English command, began turning the tide of the war decisively after 1435. His gains were slow for ten years, but a truce in 1444 allowed him to reorganize his kingdom’s finances and finally exert firm control over royal armies. Establishing the first permanent standing units in French history, Charles was able to impose discipline on his troops, and for the first time, French forces began to demonstrate the ability to coordinate infantry, cavalry, and the newly established artillery forces on campaign and in battle. It was the artillery that proved most decisive. Reopening the war in the summer of 1449, within a year, Charles had reconquered all of English-held Normandy, as his culverins (long cannons), battering fortresses held by depleted, demoralized garrisons, made quick work of the sieges that usually were so time-consuming. French artillery even proved useful in battle. An English relief force landed in April 1450 and met a French force of roughly equal size. Drawing up in their traditional defensive array, the English found their wings battered by the French guns from beyond longbow range. Forced to abandon their position, they were routed in the subsequent melee by a French force with better discipline and morale. By 1453, all English possessions in France except Calais had fallen, and the war was over.
In the following excerpts from his Chroniques, the herald, or semi-official battle chronicler, Jean Froissart describes the devastatingly effective English tactics.
. . . the fighting became general. The Marshals’ battalion had already advanced for action, headed by men who were to break through the ranks of the archers. All on horseback they entered the road which had the thick hedge on either side. No sooner were they engaged in it than the archers began to shoot murderously from both flanks, knocking down horses and piercing everything before them with their long barbed arrows. The injured and terrified horses refused to go on. They swerved or turned back, or else fell beneath their riders, who could neither use their weapons nor get up again, so that the battalion of the Marshals never got near the Prince’s division. . . . Rarely have skilled fighting-men suffered such losses in so short a time as were inflicted on the battalion of the Marshals, for they became jammed against each other and could make no headway. Seeing the carnage and unable to advance themselves, those behind turned back and ran up against the Duke of Normandy’s division, whose ranks were close and numerous in front. But the rear ranks soon began to melt away when they learnt that the Marshals had been defeated. Most of them took to their horses and rode off, for the English detachment which had ridden round the hill with their mounted archers in front of them charged in and took them on the flank. If the truth must be told, the English archers were a huge asset to their side and a terror to the French; their shooting was so heavy and accurate that the French did not know where to turn to avoid their arrows. So the English kept advancing and slowly gaining ground.
When the Prince’s men-at-arms saw that the Marshals’ battalion was routed and that the Duke of Normandy’s division was wavering and beginning to break up, their strength flooded back to them and their spirits rose. They made for their horses which they had kept near them and scrambled on to them. . . . The English, now all mounted, made straight for the battalion of the Duke of Athens, Constable of France. There followed a great melee. . . . No one could face the heavy, rapid fire of the English archers, who in that encounter killed and wounded many who found no chance of offering ransoms or pleading for mercy. . . .
You read earlier in this chronicle about the Battle of Crecy, and heard how unfavorable fortune was there to the French. At Poitiers similarly it was unfavorable, fickle and treacherous, for the French were at least seven to one in trained fighting men. But it must be said that the Battle of Poitiers was fought much better than Crecy. Both armies had greater opportunities to observe and weigh up the enemy, for the Battle of Crecy began without proper preparation in the late afternoon, while Poitiers began in the early morning, and in good enough order, if only luck had been with the French. There were incomparably more fine feats of arms than at Crecy. . . .
source: Jean Froissart, Chronicles, ed. and trans. Geoffrey Brereton (New York: Penguin Books, 1968), pp. 134-138.