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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.Â
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.
The brutality of battle is unflinchingly evoked. At Verneuil (1424), for example, Livingston quotes a source which describes how the combatants ‘struck with axes and thrust with spears, then put their hands to swords to deal great and mortal blows upon one another… The blood of the dead and wounded flooded over the earth and ran in great streams across the field.’ We are reminded, too, that soldiers died not just of wounds but of disease. Dysentery, known to contemporaries as the ‘bloody flux’, was the most serious threat in army camps of the period, with Henry V himself its most prominent victim. Political assassination was never far away. High-profile killings – such as that of Louis of Orléans in 1407, and of his murderer Jean the Fearless, Duke of Burgundy, 12 years later – are related in gruesome detail.
Nor does Livingston neglect the impact of war on civilians, who endured increased taxation, economic dislocation, and massacres following the taking of besieged cities. Readers may be unaware that France was not only at war with England but also divided internally by civil strife. There was a serious peasant revolt following the French defeat at Poitiers in 1356 and, in the early 15th century, the 28-year-long Armagnac–Burgundian rivalry for control of the mentally ill King Charles VI.
A new perspective
As in his previous studies, Livingston is insistent on the importance of studying the ground, and he is good on the raw practicalities of campaigning. He has visited the battle sites, and he interrogates the terrain as well as written sources to draw conclusions about the nature of the fighting. Livingston vividly brings home the reality of medieval combat by highlighting the vulnerability of armies as they encountered rivers – the tricky ‘wet-gap crossing’ – and explains how armies travelled the roads of France with their slow-moving supply wagons. Few details escape him. He explains, for example, exactly how siege ladders were constructed, and how sappers mined under the walls of Limoges during the siege of 1370.
It would have been good if the author could have stood back more from the onrush of events to offer an overarching analysis of the reasons for military success and failure. The ‘infantry revolution’ of the mid-14th century, which transformed the battlefield by pitting integrated formations of dismounted men-at-arms and archers against armoured cavalry, is touched on. But the related organisational changes of the period, which saw English armies start to shift from feudal levies to troops receiving regular pay, are not discussed. In the second half of the period, we could have done with more on the evolution of gunpowder and artillery, which played a key role in the eventual French victory.
So, does the overall thesis of the book stand up? It is always good to have familiar understandings challenged, and a key strength of the book is Livington’s determination to see the conflict through a French as much as an English lens. We are reminded of this by his decision to use French names for individuals such as Philippe VI, King of France at the time of Crécy, and his successor Jean II, who was captured at Poitiers. The war played a crucial role in the evolving definition of France as a coherent political unit with its own developing national consciousness.
Livingston argues that the ending of the war encouraged England and France to look beyond Europe for a new, global role, although it is fair to say that this was just one factor in a slow reorientation of national policy. The author’s claim that the war gave birth to the modern age is perhaps going too far. Nor did 1492 definitively bring an end to England’s territorial interest in France. In some respects, it is a strange terminal date. For Henry VII, the Peace of Étaples was mainly about the indemnity paid to him by the French and their abandonment of Perkin Warbeck, the pretender to the English throne. In any case, Henry VIII was to make several more unsuccessful incursions into France in the early 16th century. Calais was not finally relinquished until 1558, when Queen Mary Tudor famously stated that its name would be found graven on her heart. Perhaps we should be wary of carving history up too neatly.
This is a thought-provoking book, which military history enthusiasts can read with profit, but it will not be the last word on the subject.
REVIEW BY GRAHAM GOODLAD
The Two Hundred Years War: The bloody crowns of England and France, 1292-1492
Michael Livingston
Head of Zeus, hbk, 496pp, £30
ISBN 978-1035906369
