The Hundred Years' War

England wins the sea at Sluys

On 24 June, in the crowded estuary of the Zwin off Sluys, Edward III destroys the French fleet, sinking or taking almost every ship. The victory gives England command of the Channel for a generation and ensures that the war will be fought on French, not English, soil. That same year Edward quarters the golden lilies of France with the leopards of England and styles himself King of France.

The longbow triumphs at Crécy

On 26 August, near Crécy in Ponthieu, Edward III's outnumbered army annihilates the flower of French chivalry. Massed English and Welsh longbowmen, shooting from prepared positions on a low ridge, cut down charge after charge of French knights. The blind King John of Bohemia is led into the fray to die; the Black Prince, aged sixteen, wins his spurs. It is a catastrophe for France and a revelation for Europe.

The longbow could be loosed far faster than a crossbow could be spanned, and its bodkin points punched through mail at range. Against dismounted English men-at-arms and a storm of arrows, the mounted charge that had ruled the battlefield for three centuries was broken. That commoners with a cheap wooden bow could fell armoured nobles carried a social meaning no one missed.

Calais surrenders

After an eleven-month siege, the starving port of Calais surrenders on 3 August. By tradition, six of its leading burghers walk out barefoot, ropes about their necks, to offer their lives for the town — spared only by the pleading of Queen Philippa. Calais becomes an English enclave and gateway into France, and will stay English for two hundred years. Within months the Black Death sweeps in, and the war pauses before a common death.

A king is taken at Poitiers

On 19 September, the Black Prince, raiding north out of Aquitaine, is brought to battle near Poitiers. Once again the longbow and the dismounted English line shatter a far larger French army — and this time King John II of France himself is captured and carried in triumph to London. Leaderless and humiliated, France dissolves into the peasant fury of the Jacquerie and the Parisian revolt of Étienne Marcel.

The peace of Brétigny

On 8 May, the Treaty of Brétigny grants Edward III an enlarged Aquitaine in full sovereignty and an immense ransom for King John, in return for renouncing his claim to the French crown. It is the high-water mark of English fortune. Yet the formal renunciations are never exchanged, and within a decade Charles V of France, served by his constable Bertrand du Guesclin, patiently wins back nearly all of it by refusing open battle.

Henry V and the field of Agincourt

On 25 October — Saint Crispin's Day — Henry V of England, his army sick and heavily outnumbered, meets a great French host on a narrow, rain-soaked field between Agincourt and Tramecourt. The French men-at-arms, packed together and floundering in deep mud, are cut down by the longbow and finished with mallet and dagger. Thousands die or are taken while English losses are trifling. The victory reopens the war and makes Henry the arbiter of France's fate.

Henry's opportunity was France's own ruin. King Charles VI descended into recurring madness, and his kingdom tore itself apart in a civil war between the Armagnac and Burgundian factions. With the Burgundians his allies, Henry conquered Normandy and drove toward Paris. The battle would be immortalised by Shakespeare as the deed of a band of brothers, but its lesson was the same as Crécy's: discipline, ground and the bow.

The Treaty of Troyes disinherits the Dauphin

On 21 May, with Paris and the north in the hands of Henry V and his Burgundian allies, the mad Charles VI sets his seal to the Treaty of Troyes. Henry marries Charles's daughter Catherine and is recognised as regent and heir to the throne of France, while the Dauphin Charles is disinherited as illegitimate. For a moment the two crowns seem destined to rest upon a single English brow.

Joan of Arc raises the siege of Orléans

Both Henry V and Charles VI died in 1422, leaving the infant Henry VI proclaimed king of England and France while the disinherited Dauphin clung to the lands south of the Loire. By 1429 the English are besieging Orléans, the gateway to his realm, and his cause seems all but lost. Then Joan of Arc, a peasant girl of seventeen from Domrémy, comes to the Dauphin claiming a divine mission to save France. Given soldiers, she enters Orléans and on 8 May drives the English from their forts. The tide of the war turns.

Joan said she was guided by the voices of saints. After Orléans she led the Dauphin through hostile country to Reims, where on 17 July 1429 he was anointed King Charles VII in the ancient coronation cathedral — the sacred rite that made his kingship unanswerable. More than any battle, Joan gave the French a cause that was at once national and religious, and the belief that God had not abandoned them.

Joan of Arc burns at Rouen

Captured by the Burgundians at Compiègne in 1430 and sold to the English, Joan is tried for heresy by a Church court at Rouen. On 30 May she is burned at the stake in the market square, nineteen years old. Her enemies mean to discredit the king she crowned; instead they make a martyr. A quarter of a century later the Church annuls her condemnation, and Charles VII, whom she saved, reigns on. In 1920 she is canonised a saint.

Castillon ends the war

On 17 July, at Castillon in Gascony, the veteran English commander John Talbot charges an entrenched French camp bristling with cannon and is killed as his army is torn apart by gunfire. Gascony, English since Eleanor of Aquitaine three centuries before, is lost. No treaty marks the ending; the war simply stops. Of all his French inheritance the king of England now holds only Calais, and France emerges unified, centralised, and armed with the first great royal artillery in Europe.

The long war forged the two nations that fought it. France was welded into a centralised kingdom with a standing army and a royal tax to pay for it; England, thrown back upon its island, turned toward the sea — and, almost at once, upon itself in the dynastic bloodletting of the Wars of the Roses. The age of the mounted knight was closing, and the age of gunpowder, standing armies, and the sovereign nation-state had begun.