Generally speaking, the Middle Ages accepted war with fatalism. It was part of the divine plan, linked with famine, flood, and plague as a manifestation of God’s punishment for sins committed. A nation which experienced years of defeat and disaster (as France did in the mid-fourteenth century) beat its breast in self-reproach and accepted war’s afflictions. Since few questioned such a view, those of pacific leanings met with little sympathy. While war’s excesses were often condemned, war itself was taken for granted. In a society whose social and economic system had originally been, and to a certain degree still was, organised to provide for such eventualities, this was scarcely surprising. A world geared to war was unlikely to question why it should break out. It formed part of the accustomed and natural order.
In more questioning times, with the historian seeking to exercise his right to examine the past, people have tried to explain why wars occur. Attempts to do this are far from new. Long ago, Thucydides distinguished between causes and occasions of war. In modern times, people have looked to many different aspects of human activity as sources of conflict, not all of which may be seen as appropriate to medieval societies. But some are. The Crusades may be regarded as wars fought in the name of ideology and religion. The Italian city states, and others, were for centuries in conflict in the Mediterranean over sources of, and outlets for, trade.1 The movement of peoples, associated with the great increase in population of the thirteenth century, led to wars which, forexample, in Spain were associated with the Christian reconquest of the Iberian peninsula from Moorish control, but which were also waged to satisfy the urge to find new lands, as was to happen in northern and eastern Germany under the rule of the Teutonic Knights.
In France and England it was the breakdown of the historic feudal order, no longer able to meet the demands of changing times, and its gradual replacement by an order of nations increasingly aware of their growing national characteristics, which was the fundamental cause of the long conflict which forms the subject of this book. In all these cases, war was the result of major changes in the development of societies. In some, the need for land was important, if not paramount; in others it was the search for markets. In the case of the Hundred Years War, the causes of the conflict were to be found both in the long historic links between England and France, links which were gradually becoming weaker, and in the need to express in new terms the relationship between the two countries (arguably the two most powerful in western society in the late Middle Ages) taking into account elements such as national consciousness and diverging methods of government (to name but two) which historians recognise as being characteristic of late medieval European society as a whole.
Where have historians sought the causes of the so-called Hundred Years War? Traditionally, the answer has been found in the study of the two main factors which were at issue in the years leading up to what is regarded as the moment of outbreak of war, the confiscation of the duchy of Aquitaine by King Philip VI of France in May 1337. This act brought to a head problems of long standing whose roots were to be found in two factors.2 The first was that, since the eleventh century, the kings of England had been lords of much of north-western France, an area extending from Normandy (in the time of William the Conqueror) through Maine, Anjou, Touraine, and Poitou to the duchy of Aquitaine which, a century later, Henry II had come to control through his marriage to the duchess, Eleanor, previously the wife of Louis VII of France. There thus stretched from the Channel to the Pyrenees an ‘empire’ (termed Angevin), ruled by one man who was also king of England. At the same time there had grown up, mainly during the twelfth century, the extension of the authority of the royal house of France, the dynasty of Capet, through the insistence that the homage due from the great feudatories to their king should be ‘liege’. Then, when King John took over the French lands which he had inherited in 1200, he was allowed to do so only on condition that he should recognise them as being fiefs held of the king of France. The power of that king, Philip-Augustus, over his vassal was further increased when, in 1203 and 1204, he conquered Anjou and Normandy which John, in spite of an attempt to do so in 1214, never recovered. Nor was his heir, Henry III, any more successful, although he took part in an enterprise in western France in 1230. In October 1259 Henry sealed a peace treaty with Louis IX (St Louis) of France whereby, in spite of his son’s objections, he renounced his claim to Normandy, Maine, Anjou, Touraine and Poitou, while the French king, recognising Henry as his vassal in Aquitaine and other territories in the south-west, created him a peer of France. The terms might appear generous to the English. In reality, since they established a new feudal relationship between the kings of France and England, they sowed the seeds for much future trouble.
The sources of that trouble were twofold. The first was the liege homage owed by Henry III (and, in future, whenever there might be a change of king in either England or France) to the kings of France, a kind of ‘priority’ homage which could involve the giving of military aid against any enemy of the French crown whenever it was demanded. Equally, the giver of homage could not act in concert with, or give help to, any of his lord’s enemies. By creating a peerage for Henry III, Louis IX was only emphasising further the closeness of the allegiance which bound the two men.
Secondly, and in this case a matter of particular importance, was the fact that the duchy of Aquitaine was held by a king who, for purposes of this treaty, had become a vassal of another king. Such a situation was likely to make for untold complications. Thus, for instance, there were places within the lands held by the king-duke which were subject to a hierarchy of courts ultimately controlled by the Parlement, the supreme court of France which sat in Paris. The sovereign legal rights of the French crown could, if and when required, be put to good political use in undermining the authority and prestige of the king-duke within his duchy. Appeals could be heard and judicial enquiries set in motion by bodies outside the duchy. And all the while such actions lessened the actual legal powers and authority of the king-duke, serving to encourage factional dissension within Aquitaine and, in particular, within its capital, Bordeaux.3
It was soon recognised that unity of interest between lord and vassal did not exist. In Flanders, an area in which French and English interests clashed over issues which were strategic, economic and legal, Edward I intervened in 1294 as king of England in defence of the count, Guy, then in dispute with Philip IV of France. But this intervention was more than a defence of English interests in north-eastern France. In the previous year Philip IV had summoned Edward I, as duke of Aquitaine, to answer for an allegedly illegal act at sea off the coast of the duchy, and for the capture of La Rochelle by men from Bayonne. Attempts to find a solution having failed, Philip announced the confiscation of the duchy of Aquitaine in May 1294. In the following month, Edward broke his feudal links with the French crown, and the two countries soon drifted into war. Although the fighting effectively ceased in 1297, peace was not established until 1303, when the duchy was returned and the status quo of 1294 was restored, Edward agreeing to marry his heir, the Edward II to be, to Isabella, daughter of the French king.
If, at least for some years afterwards, there was no real war, there was none the less plenty of tension in south-western France. The war just ended had shown up the divisions between the pro-French and the proEnglish factions within Bordeaux. In the summer of 1306 there took place at Montreuil the first of a series of meetings (‘processes’) between French and English representatives to try to work out the legal position of the lands held by the English in Aquitaine. The meeting was a failure, and was followed in 1307 by civil disturbances in Bordeaux and an appeal to Paris regarding the English appointment to the mayoralty of the ducal capital. In 1311, further discussions were held at Périgueux: but, like its predecessor, this ‘process’ also failed to resolve fundamental differences between the two sides.
The only way now open to the English, in these years deeply involved in war against the Scots and in a domestic situation turning more and more violent, was retaliation. When Vigier de la Rousselle dared to advocate the continuation of appeals to Paris in 1312, the whole matter was taken up in a very ‘political’ way by the authorities in Bordeaux, who accused Vigier of contempt of ducal authority and had him executed on a charge which was, in effect, that of treason. Likewise when, in 1323, King Charles IV ordered a new fortified town, or bastide, to be built at Saint-Sardos, this was ineptly taken as a physical and legal attack upon the authority of the English who, probably without the knowledge of Edward II, attacked and burned the town in November 1323. In its turn, such an act provoked French retaliation: the duchy of Aquitaine was again declared confiscate to the French crown, and an army was sent to take possession. Within a short time a truce had been arranged, and in September 1325 Prince Edward, soon to become Edward III, did homage, paid a relief (or fine), and thereby secured the return of much of the land which the French had overrun. But not all. The Agenais and other territories were not restored immediately; it needed a further war in 1326 and an agreement, concluded in March 1327, to secure the restoration of those lands. At this stage, it is unlikely that the French were anxious to carry out a conquest of Aquitaine. All that they wanted was the full recognition of their king’s sovereign rights in the duchy, a moderate enough approach in which they had the support of the papacy, now becoming increasingly aware of its obligation to help in the diplomatic negotiations between the two countries.
So far the issues had been largely feudal. By 1327, however, a second matter was poised to sour relations between England and France. In January 1327 Edward II was deposed and succeeded by his son, Edward III. Little more than a year later Charles IV, uncle (through his sister Isabella) of Edward III, also died, leaving no direct heir as king of France. As nephew of the late king, Edward appeared to have a good claim, indeed perhaps the best claim, to succeed him. His right, however, had been transmitted to him through his mother, and it was this transmission through the female, later explained as the inability of a woman to pass on a claim which, as a woman, she could not herself exercise, which worked against Edward’s ambition. When the French nobility, in whose hands the resolution of such a crisis lay, made its choice, that choice was to make one of their number, Philip, count of Valois, king. The grounds were essentially those of suitability: Philip was French; he was eighteen years older than his English rival (then aged only fifteen); and he had always lived in France. Although not, as Edward III was, a direct descendant of Philip IV, he was at least his nephew through his father, Charles of Valois. In the circumstances the degree of kinship was sufficiently close to secure him the support he required.
Yet, in the context of the long-standing dispute of Aquitaine, Edward III’s claim was strong enough to persuade him that he ought to pursue it, if only as an alternative means of achieving sovereign rule in Aquitaine. Certainly, the claim was there to be used to Edward’s advantage. None the less in 1329 he did simple homage (all that was asked of him for the moment) at Amiens, following this up with liege homage in 1331. In this mood of optimism negotiators met for another ‘process’, this time at Agen, in 1332 and 1333. In their discussions the fundamental differences between the two sides slowly emerged: the legal position of the king-duke and the lands held by him; and, secondly, the problem of which lands the French were to control. At the same time a polarisation of opinion in Aquitaine was gradually taking place, largely in favour of English rule, and by 1337 tension had reached a high level. On 24 May Philip VI declared the duchy confiscate to the French crown because of Edward’s many acts of disobedience and rebellion. It is this decision which is taken to mark the beginning of the Hundred Years War.
The medium and short-term causes of the outbreak of the war were, as we have seen, the problem of the feudal relationship of the king of France with his most important vassal, the duke of Aquitaine, otherwise the king of England, and that of the disputed succession to the crown of France. By changing the historian’s focus, these problems can be put into another perspective. Traditionally the period of the Hundred Years War has been regarded as the time when the crown of France made great steps forward towards the achievement of a policy of centralisation begun under the Capetians some two centuries earlier. While the differences between the crown of France and its vassals were expressed in a language which was essentially feudal (a new political vocabulary more suited to developments had not yet evolved), what was really happening was something remarkably ‘modern’, the laying of the foundations of a national state under one monarch whose territorial authority could only be effectively exercised through annexation or conquest. Such a view tends to place less emphasis on the war between two countries and more on the internal conflict between the king of France and the duke of Aquitaine, a struggle between two blocks of territory and two rather different legal traditions: the ‘Angevin empire’, once ruled by the English, representing the area of customary law and local independence, the other part of France the more centralising tradition based on Roman law.
The alternative and, in the last resort, not so very different view is that which sees the Hundred Years War as a wider civil war in which a policy of royal centralisation, based on Paris, was opposed not only by the dukes of Aquitaine and Normandy (in both cases king of England), but by those of Brittany, and (late in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries), Burgundy. On the one hand was the development of the French state, its administration, its budget, its army, together with its emphasis upon the attributes of monarchy. Pitted against it were the great princes, some with ambition to achieve political and legal independence of the crown. To a slightly later age, the idea of France as a geographical unity, with Paris as its capital, seemed self-evident. But men of the late Middle Ages did not always see things that way: for reasons of history, language, sentiment, as well as political expediency, their own independence and, consequently, the continued fragmentation of France, ought to be maintained.
Yet another view would see the war in terms of the relative geographical positions of France and England, and of the influence of these upon economic interests. On the one hand, France needed to bring her ‘natural’ maritime provinces (which included Aquitaine, Normandy, Brittany and Flanders) under royal control in order that the ports might be used for both commercial and military purposes. On the other, England’s best interest lay in denying the French king the use of ports and access to other coastal activities such as fishing, so that English trade, whether with Flanders or Aquitaine, might be conveyed in greater safety. Aquitaine, with her valuable wine trade, was a major trading partner. Flanders, at the beginning of the war, was still the principal manufacturer of cloth made from English wool, although from the mid-fourteenth century more and more cloth was to be made in England. The loss of trade in either case (and there was the matter of England’s wider markets to be considered, too) would mean a grave financial loss to the country, not to forget the crown which, since the reign of Edward I, had been taxing certain commodities, such as wool and cloth, as they left and arrived in the country. The ability to do this must be defended, by war if need be.