The structural problem is easy to state and was impossible to live with.
The king of England held large territories in south western France, inherited through marriage in the twelfth century. He held them as duke of Aquitaine, and a duke of Aquitaine was a vassal of the king of France, owing him homage and subject to appeals from his courts.
So one man was a sovereign king in one country and a subject in another. Every dispute in Gascony could be appealed to Paris, and every appeal was an assertion that the English king was answerable to the French one. He had to perform homage in person, kneeling, which several English kings found ways to postpone for years.
That would have been enough on its own. Add two aggravations. Flanders, the wealthiest manufacturing region in northern Europe, bought English wool and was politically subject to France, so both crowns had reason to interfere there. And in 1328 the French royal line ran out of direct male heirs, and the English king had a claim through his mother, which the French assembly of nobles rejected on the argument that a claim could not pass through a woman.
Edward the Third let that rest for nine years. In 1337, when the French king confiscated Gascony, he revived it and declared himself king of France, which converted a feudal dispute into a war of succession that could only end with somebody renouncing a crown.
Not by battles. The characteristic English operation was a long mounted raid across French territory, burning villages, crops, mills and barns, and driving off livestock.
The purpose was not plunder alone, though there was plenty. It was fiscal and political. A king's revenue came from his land and his subjects; destroy the land and you destroy his ability to pay soldiers. And a king who cannot protect his people from an army riding through them is visibly failing at the one thing a king is for.
This is what the war meant for almost everybody who experienced it. Not archers at Crécy but a column arriving in the afternoon, and no harvest, no seed, no roof and no oxen. The regions that were fought over repeatedly, Normandy, the Loire, the south west, show the effects for generations in abandoned villages and depressed population.
Between campaigns there were long truces, and in the truces the soldiers did not go home. Companies of unemployed men with weapons roamed and extorted protection money from towns and monasteries, and the French crown at one point tried to solve the problem by hiring them to invade Spain. Contemporaries called them the free companies, and they were, for decades, a worse affliction than the war itself.
The English won three famous battles and lost the war, which should be the first clue that the battles have been overweighted.
At Crécy in 1346, at Poitiers in 1356 and at Agincourt in 1415, a smaller English army in a chosen defensive position destroyed a larger French one. The usual explanation is the longbow, and the longbow was real: a heavy draw weight weapon shot by men trained from boyhood, capable of a high rate of shooting, and lethal against horses.
But the tactical system mattered more than the weapon. The English fought dismounted, with men at arms in the line rather than mounted behind it, on ground chosen to be narrow or muddy, often behind stakes, with archers on the flanks shooting into the sides of an advancing mass. What killed French armies was being funnelled, crowded and unable to deploy, then broken by men on foot at close quarters. At Agincourt the mud is not colour, it is the mechanism.
The French learned. From the 1370s a competent king and a very competent constable simply refused battle for a decade, shadowed English raids, retook fortresses one at a time, and reduced the English holdings to a few ports without a general engagement. It was unglamorous and it worked, and it is the reason the English gains of 1360 had almost entirely evaporated by 1380.
And at the end the technology reversed. The French crown invested in gunpowder artillery, built a professional siege train, and between 1449 and 1453 took Normandy and Gascony fortress by fortress. At Castillon in 1453 an English army attacked a fortified artillery park and was destroyed by gunfire. That battle ended the war, and nobody at the time noticed that it had.
The armies of this war were not feudal levies, and the change is one of the more important things in the chapter.
The English system was contractual. A captain signed an indenture with the crown, a written agreement specifying how many men at arms and archers he would bring, for how long, at what daily rate, with clauses covering the division of ransoms and plunder. Copies survive in the thousands. This is an army raised by procurement, and it means soldiering had become a paid profession open to anyone who could ride and shoot.
That created a career. A man from an ordinary background could serve, take a share of loot, capture somebody worth ransoming, and come home with capital. Some did spectacularly well; a great many did not come home. The trade also ran the other way in the truces, when the same professionals sold themselves to Italian cities, where the imported captains and their companies dominated warfare for a century.
Ransom was central and it distorted everything. A captured noble was worth money, so the rich were taken alive and the poor were killed, and the wars of this period have a mortality gradient that runs precisely opposite to rank. A French king captured in 1356 was ransomed for a sum equal to several years of the entire royal revenue, and the effort to raise it wrecked French finances for a decade.
The exception proves how strong the convention was. At Agincourt the English king ordered the killing of prisoners already taken, in the middle of the battle, because he feared a renewed attack and had too few men to guard them. His own men are recorded as reluctant, and the chroniclers were uneasy about it, and the unease is about the money as much as the morality.
In 1429 the English and their Burgundian allies held Paris and the north, the French heir was uncrowned and nearly broke, and Orléans was under siege.
A peasant girl of about seventeen from a village on the eastern frontier presented herself at his court saying that voices had told her to raise the siege and have him crowned. She was examined by theologians, given armour and a household, and sent with a relief force. The siege was lifted in nine days. Within three months the heir was crowned in the cathedral at Reims, which was the traditional and legitimating place, and which was deep inside territory that had been hostile.
She was captured the following year, sold to the English, tried by a church court for heresy on charges centring on her claim to divine instruction and on her wearing of men's clothing, and burned at Rouen in 1431 at about nineteen.
What is remarkable, for a figure who has been mythologised in every direction since, is the evidence. The full record of the condemnation trial survives, including her answers, which are quick, exact and frequently devastating. Asked whether she knew she was in God's grace, a question designed so that either answer would convict her, she replied that if she was not, may God put her there, and if she was, may God keep her there. A quarter of a century later a second trial reviewed the case, took depositions from over a hundred people who had known her, and annulled the verdict. Between them, the two files are one of the richest bodies of testimony about any single person in the Middle Ages.
Her military importance is genuinely debated. What is not in doubt is the effect on morale and legitimacy, and that the war turned in the years after she appeared.
Wars of that length have to be paid for, and paying for them changed both kingdoms permanently.
In France the crown obtained the right to levy a direct tax, the taille, and by the 1440s it was collected annually without needing to ask the estates each time. That is the foundation of French royal absolutism: a monarchy with an independent revenue does not need to negotiate. In 1445 the same king established permanent paid cavalry companies, the first standing army in western Europe since Rome.
In England the opposite happened, for the same reason. English kings could not tax without parliament, and a century of war meant a century of asking. Parliament met more often, established that taxation required the consent of the commons, gained the right to audit how war money was spent, and acquired the habit of attaching conditions. The divergence between the two constitutional traditions, which chapters thirty and thirty one are about, was widened enormously by this war.
England also lost, and losing had consequences. Expelled from the continent apart from Calais, with a weak king and a nobility full of soldiers with retinues and nothing to do, it fell into thirty years of dynastic civil war. The turn towards the sea, and eventually towards the Atlantic, begins with the closing of the continental option.
And something happened to identity, though it is easy to overstate. The war was fought by armies raised on a national basis, funded by national taxation, and justified in propaganda addressed to a public. English replaced French as the language of the English court and of parliament during it. French writers began describing the enemy as a people rather than as a rival lord's men. This is not nationalism in the nineteenth century sense, which is chapter forty, but it is not nothing.
Firm: the administrative record. Both crowns generated tax accounts, muster rolls, indentures of service and diplomatic correspondence in quantity. We know a great deal about how armies were recruited and paid.
Firm: Joan's trials, uniquely. Almost nobody of her social origin in this period is documented at all, let alone at that length in her own reported words.
Soft: army sizes and casualties at the famous battles. The chronicle figures are conventional and inflated, and the modern estimates, particularly for Agincourt, vary widely and are argued about with some heat.
Soft: the longbow's dominance. Experimental archaeology on draw weights, arrow performance and armour penetration has complicated the traditional picture considerably, and the current view gives more weight to position, dismounting and terrain.
Contested: the name. The Hundred Years War was christened by nineteenth century French historians, and treating a series of connected conflicts, truces and dynastic quarrels as one war is a decision rather than a discovery. It is a useful frame and it makes the fighting look more purposeful and continuous than it was.