The Two Hundred Years War: The bloody crowns of England and France, 1292-1492

This article is from Military History Matters issue 152

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The sheer length of the Anglo-French conflict known as the ‘Hundred Years War’ – which actually lasted 116 years – has long invited debate about the label. Contemporaries, of course, did not use the term, which was first coined by a French historian in the early 19th century. The fighting was not continuous, prompting some scholars to argue that the war should be divided into shorter sub-periods. Others have seen the period between 1337, when hostilities broke out over legal rights to the Duchy of Aquitaine in south-west France, and the expulsion of English forces from most of the country in 1453, as part of a longer continuum.

Michael Livingston’s book is firmly within this second camp. He makes the case for a conflict that spanned a total of 200 years. In his account, it began with the so-called ‘Pirate War’ of 1292, a clash between Norman and Gascon sailors over access to water on an island off the coast of Brittany. And it ended in 1492 with the Peace of Étaples, by which England’s Henry VII renounced his claim to all French territory except a small enclave around Calais. How convincingly has Livingston made his case?

The author comes well-equipped for his task. He is a well-respected historian based at the Citadel, the Military College of South Carolina, and has already produced studies of the two best-known encounters of the conflict: Crécy and Agincourt. Both books attracted praise for their immersive narrative, while arousing controversy by challenging the accepted view of the exact location of the battles. In The Two Hundred Years War, Livingston is working on a larger canvas, offering a reinterpretation of the conflict as a whole.

To set the scene for this epic struggle, however, he goes back even further – to outline the formation of the French state from the reign of the Frankish king Clovis in the early 6th century. Livingston takes us through the complex relationship between England and France – from the fateful clash at Hastings in 1066, through Henry II’s acquisition of the territories known as the Angevin empire a century later and beyond. He identifies the 1259 Treaty of Paris as a critical turning point leading to war. By this agreement, Henry III agreed to do homage for the right to rule a now-truncated Aquitaine. This subordination to the French king’s authority would become a sticking point – leading, under Henry’s great-grandson Edward III, to an overt English claim to the French throne.

The English longbow arrows, falling in great numbers, were lethal when they found seams or eye slits. 

The brutality of battle

Livingston has an engaging, often informal style which makes The Two Hundred Years War a pleasure to read. He helpfully explains the complex dynastic disputes that were the backdrop to the Anglo-French struggle for land and power. The major clashes are here, alongside less familiar incidents such as the 1377 French raid on Winchelsea, repelled by the redoubtable Abbot Hamo of Battle Abbey. The author brings to life the key personalities of the period, such as Edward the Black Prince and Henry V, whose popular reputation as England’s greatest warrior king he confirms. Livingston’s treatment of Joan of Arc’s inspirational leadership of the French fightback in the late 1420s is particularly well done. The narrative is supported by a collection of well- drawn maps that relate to the text – vital to our comprehension of events but not something that all military history books manage to include.

Perhaps, however, Livingston attempts too much. The Battle of Bouvines (1214), which lies outside the chronological limits of the book, receives as much attention as Castillon (1453), which is normally seen as the last major encounter of the war. The intermittent conflict between the English and Scots is also covered – readers may be surprised, for example, to be taken through the events of the Battle of Bannockburn.

Livingston is at his best when describing the military clashes, invariably locating the memorable details that will arrest the reader’s attention. At Agincourt, for example, we read about the shower of English longbow arrows, falling in great numbers though not as thick and fast as in feature films. Nor could arrows puncture plate armour. Rather, they were lethal when they found seams or eye slits, and when they splintered and ‘exploded among the French riders, spraying fragments like wooden grenades’. On the ground, fallen horsemen sank into the mud to be finished off by archers using small daggers to dig for arteries.