The Hundred Years’ War and the English colonisation of France

The rise and fall of the First English Empire

‘Who can count how many churches you have left in ruins … how many widows, beggars, cripples and orphans you have made in Scotland and France … but although you succeeded in capturing the King of Scotland and triumphed by God’s leave on the awful battlefields of Crécy and Poitiers, yet now as we speak you hold scarcely a hundredth part of these two kingdoms.’

—Philip de Mézières

From 1337 to 1453, England found itself, in a fit of absence of mind, conquering an empire in France. The use of the word ‘empire’ (in the early modern and modern sense) in this context is not anachronistic. Calais was ethnically cleansed by Edward III and resettled with Englishmen. In the latter part of the war, there was a conscious policy to settle Normandy with thousands of English settlers. France was partitioned twice in England’s last attempt to found a great continental empire. What had started as a war against French expansionism in 1337 ended with one quarter of France’s territory being partitioned and annexed by Edward III in 1360. In the last stage of the war during the 1420s, Paris was a bastion of English rule in France, governed by an English regent.

A small island, regarded by contemporaries in the 1320s as militarily backwards and economically marginal, successfully crushed the greatest country in Europe. England had perhaps one fifth or one quarter of France’s population. It did not matter. Through a combination of military superiority, daring, and strong centralised government, English armies marched as far as the shores of the Mediterranean. Henry V raised parliamentary taxation on a scale not seen until the eighteenth century. At the height of England’s reputation on the continent, during the Council of Constance in the 1410s to reunify the Papacy after the Western Schism, England was allotted one quarter of the total votes of Western Christendom by an Anglophile German Emperor besotted with Henry V. A century later, when England’s continental possessions had been lost, Henry VIII was reduced to futilely attempting to balance France and the Habsburg monarchy under Charles V. Under Mary I, England was actually reduced to a Spanish satellite. Yet Mary’s ancestor John of Gaunt had claimed the Castilian throne and forced the King of Castile to marry his daughter after an English invasion. The Black Prince’s Ruby, set in the Imperial State Crown, was the reward for the Prince of Wales and an English army seating Pedro the Cruel on the throne of Castile as part of an Anglo-French proxy war. The England of Edward III and Henry V was the greatest military nation in Europe.

In 1328, the young Edward III was forced to sign the Treaty of Edinburgh-Northampton, ending the First Scottish War of Independence. Nearly four decades of English attempts to unify Britain had failed. Robert the Bruce had triumphed completely. The overlordship which English monarchs claimed over Scottish Kings was renounced. This was probably the nadir of England’s reputation for many centuries. Petrarch regarded the English of this period as ‘being the most timid of the uncouth barbarians’. On the continent, Edward III controlled only the worthless county of Ponthieu on the northern coast of France and the Duchy of Guyenne in southwestern France.

Guyenne, centred around Gascony and the city of Bordeaux, was the remnant of the Angevin Empire which the French had dismantled at the start of the thirteenth century. It prospered on the export of wine to England. Its customs revenue in peacetime was often equivalent to the entire customs revenue of England. It was effectively a profitable overseas territory controlled by the King of England. The native Gascons preferred English rule, which was fiscally lighter, to direct control by the Kings of France. It was worth keeping.

But it was still part of France. The Kings of England had been forced to swear fealty to the Kings of France in their capacity as Duke of Guyenne. The French King, Philip VI, decided that he would use his legal overlordship to destroy England’s last continental outpost. French officials used their feudal powers to interfere in the governance of the duchy. Malefactors would appeal to the higher jurisdiction of the Kings of France. Their cases would then be transferred to the law courts of Paris. During this time, plaintiffs were legally untouchable and enjoyed the protection of the King’s officers. Their land was totally removed from the jurisdiction of the Dukes of Guyenne. The power of the Kings of England to keep their own jurisdiction and dispense patronage in Gascony began to wane. French royal officers used their power to seize castles and enforce judgments. They tried to take strategic locations in the Duchy through the legal process. In 1337, Philip VI formally confiscated the Duchy of Guyenne from Edward III. The war started.

Edward III went to war not to seize the Crown of France, but in pursuit of total legal supremacy. He wanted to destroy the feudal tie and replace it with an unlimited sovereignty, free of French control and the possibility of French meddling in Guyenne. Edward III claimed the French throne only in 1340, three years after the start of the war. This was in order to give a legal fig leaf to Flemish separatists who wanted to defect to the English side. It was a cynical bargaining chip. It was designed to make it easier for domestic opponents of Philip VI, like the Montfort claimants to the Duchy of Brittany, to oppose him. It was not taken seriously by either side. It was always intended to be traded away for sovereignty at the eventual peace conference. In 1360, the claim was, for a time, traded away.

The war was not caused, as Shakespeare’s Henry V gives the impression, by a sort of proto-rigmarole about the proper application of the Salic Law. Edward’s claim to be King of France had been dismissed in 1328 on the death of Charles IV, his uncle. He did not pursue the claim, and he had sworn homage to Philip VI, who had been chosen to succeed Charles by a French council. This was not a dynastic dispute. This was a modern war, with England as a revisionist power, seeking to take back control with violence.

But later generations during the long war did not share Edward’s cynicism. In The Collapse of British Power Correlli Barnett describes the phenomenon whereby the British during the nineteenth century began to believe in their own mythmaking. Earlier generations of Empire builders in the eighteenth century conquered without any of the hand wringing of the late Victorians. The belief that Britain annexed India in order to benefit the natives became a supposed truism. This moralism led to the British following policies which contributed to the eventual relinquishing of their empire. Much the same happened during the Hundred Years’ War. What in 1340 had been a cynical, self-serving claim traded away for territory was by the fifteenth century a holy article of faith. At the Congress of Arras in 1435, the English were aware that they were about to lose the war. When invited to compromise on the question of absolute sovereignty and put Henry VI’s claim on the French throne away in return for land, one English delegate stated:

It might be said, noised and deemed in all Christian lands where it should be spoken of, that not Henry the King nor his noble progenitors had, nor have, no right in the crown of France and that all their wars and conquest hath been but usurpation and tyranny.

In 1360, Edward happily traded away his claim to the French throne in exchange for one quarter of France. England had staged a complete triumph. At Crecy in 1346, the French were annihilated. At the Battle of Poitiers in 1356, an Anglo-Gascon army under Edward the Black Prince of Wales took the French King captive. A military revolution had taken place. After many years of fighting in Scotland, the English had perfected a system of warfare which led them to victory for almost a century. Knights fought dismounted. The age of mounted cavalry came to an end, for a time. Longbowmen, capable of a faster firing rate than crossbowmen, fought behind stakes on the flanks. The longbow was not superseded by steel crossbows and gunpowder weaponry until the fifteenth century. Almost every attempt at fighting a battle with the English led to defeat. Longbowmen enfiladed any troops which advanced towards them. For a century, the English had an unbeatable battle tactic. The only way to defeat them was to engage in what we might call ‘Fabian warfare’.

At the Treaty of Bretigny in 1360, John II gave Edward III everything he had wanted. Calais, which had been taken earlier in the war, was confirmed as an English territory. It was to become the gateway for English expeditions to the continent. An enormous Duchy of Aquitaine was carved out of southwestern France, including land that the English had never previously ruled over. John II undertook to renounce his sovereignty and Edward III became the absolute master of his land. The first stage of the war was over. Contemporaries did not understand what had happened. The Count of Saint Pol had been a hostage in England. He considered France’s crushing defeat:

He said that England was only a little country by comparison with France, for he had ridden the length and breadth of it several times and had given much thought to its resources. Of the four or five regions into which one could divide the kingdom of France the poorest would offer more revenue, more towns and cities, more knights and squires than the whole of England. He was amazed at how they had ever mustered the strength to achieve the conquests that they had.

A foreign commentator might easily have made a similar remark about post-war Britain.

After travelling through a French countryside wasted and devastated by English warfare, the poet Petrarch wrote:

In my youth the English were regarded as the most timid of all the uncouth races; but today they are the supreme warriors; they have destroyed the reputation of the French in a succession of startling victories, and men who were once lower even than the wretched Scots have crushed the realm of France with fire and steel.

England was a strong, unified kingdom with one parliament. France, despite having a population four to five times larger, was divided into a variety of feudal jurisdictions. Some parts of France were directly controlled by the French King. Others were feudal appanages with a variety of tax exemptions. Others like Brittany or Flanders were effectively independent states within a broader French polity. England had one House of Commons; France had multiple Estates-General, all of which levied taxes for their province, and assemblies in southern France did not want to raise money to defend northern France. It was not until the reign of Charles V and the resumption of war in 1369 that the French were able to impose taxation without consent. England was able to pursue the first stage of the war with a single-mindedness which the French could not match. 

The period between 1360 and 1369 was one of the high points for England’s international prestige before the eighteenth century. The Prince of Wales led an army into Spain and placed Pedro the Cruel back on the throne of Castile. At the end of the war, the numerous mercenary companies — mostly led by Englishmen who had fought in France — moved over the Alps into Italy. They were regarded with astonishment by the Italians. They campaigned in every season. They combined great discipline with psychopathic violence. Some, like Sir John Hawkwood, spent the rest of their lives fighting battles in Italy. English archers were employed as far away as the Transylvanian frontier by the King of Hungary. This level of prominence was completely disproportionate to a nation with three million people. It was perhaps inevitable that the French would at some point decide to get their revenge.

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In 1369, the war started again. The King of France disavowed the Treaty of Bretigny and attempted to take Gascony. Edward III restated his claim to the French throne. Charles V and the Marshal of France Bertrand du Guesclin pursued a Fabian strategy. They refused to fight pitched battles and conducted a strategy of guerilla warfare and sieges. This was overwhelmingly successful. They succeeded in driving the English out of the wider Duchy of Aquitaine. By the 1390s, England possessed little more than it had in 1337. A few strategic castles and towns on the French coast like Brest had also been captured. Both sides had fought themselves to a stalemate. The Anglo-French wars in Iberia between a French-backed Castile and English-backed Portugal came to an end. A long truce was agreed.

Very little happened until the accession of Henry V in 1413. The truce was fretfully interrupted by piracy and skirmishing. By this point, France was ruled by the insane Charles VI (he allegedly believed he was made of glass). The French state was divided between Armagnacs and Burgundians, factions of the mad French King’s brothers. The Duke of Burgundy, John the Fearless, was attempting to use his royal position to turn his holdings in the Holy Roman Empire and within France itself into a coherent Burgundian state. Henry V decided to invade France in order to enforce the terms of the Treaty of Bretigny from 1360. In negotiations, he stated that he was willing to disavow his claim to the French throne in return for land. On being rebuffed, Henry V reasserted his claim to the French throne and invaded.

At Agincourt in 1415, Henry crushed the French. The Emperor Sigismund visited London shortly after. He was spellbound by England’s military triumphs and signed an Anglo-German alliance. At the Council of Constance, which was convened to end the Papal Schism, the English became one of the four voting nations along with the French, the Italians, and the Germans (who also had Danes, Scandinavians, Poles, and Hungarians lumped in with them). At this point, England had perhaps one tenth of the combined Franco-German population. It was a tribute to England’s international prestige.

Over the next seven years, Henry conquered Normandy and much of northern France. The Duke of Burgundy, John the Fearless, was assassinated by the Armagnacs with the involvement of the French heir (known as the Dauphin), the future Charles VI. John the Fearless’ successor as Duke of Burgundy, Philip the Good, threw in his lot with the English. The Treaty of Troyes, imposed by Henry V on Charles VI, disinherited his own son and made Henry V Charles’ successor. Unfortunately, Henry V died two months before Charles VI. His infant son Henry VI was proclaimed King, but the Dauphin set himself south of the Loire, ruling a rump state larger but comparable in shape to Vichy France. North of the Loire was ruled by the English with their Burgundian collaborators, on whom they relied. John, Duke of Bedford ruled the territory of this new Dual-Monarchy from Paris in the name of his nephew, Henry VI. The complete collapse of the French was an unexpected outcome.

The English decided to put down roots. They had never settled heavily in Gascony or Bordeaux, even if most of the officers of the Duchy had been English. When Edward III captured Calais in 1347, he had ethnically cleansed it of Frenchmen and replaced the natives with English settlers. The French poet Eustache Dechamps visited Calais in the 1380s and described the shock of hearing English spoken in France. This was repeated in Harfleur after it was taken in 1415. The native population was expelled and settler-colonists invited to take up residence. Once Normandy had been fully taken, Henry V and Bedford set about granting confiscated land to English settlers. At first this was restricted to the nobility. This was widened in later years to include ordinary soldiers. The aim was to permanently detach Normandy from France. Norman provincial institutions were revived. The threat of French piracy would be permanently removed by controlling the French seaboard. When Bedford defeated the Franco-Scots at the Battle of Verneuil in 1424, his soldiers moved south into the province of Maine. The province was placed under military government. Land was immediately distributed to settlers who poured in from England. France was to be reconquered, slowly, province by province, and the conquest underpinned by English settler-colonialism.

This was far beyond what England had been seeking in 1337. England had successfully defended Guyenne. It had seized control of the Atlantic coast of France. The danger of invasion or piracy had completely gone. France had been successfully partitioned into three parts. The Low Countries, which were commercially important to England, were in the hands of the friendly Duke of Burgundy, who was pledged to the dual-monarchy. England in the 1420s paradoxically became a demilitarised country. Parliament had always made a distinction between the King’s interests in France and England’s interests. It was willing to grant Kings of England money insofar as they attempted to stop French invasions, or when fired up by patriotic sentiment as after Agincourt. Once the threat receded, they lost interest and were less willing to grant taxation. This was not an absolutist age. Kings of England required the consent of Parliament to raise money for war. A condition of the Treaty of Troyes imposed by parliament had been that England would be legally separate from France within a dual-monarchy. There was also no desire to legally incorporate any of the French possessions into England except for Calais. An English victory was unlikely to have led to England being absorbed into a more populous French state. The main problem is that England did not take the war seriously enough.

The profits of victory had mostly ceased as the war degenerated into a series of skirmishes, sieges, and border raids. In the first stage of the war, enormous fortunes had been won by private citizens. An elaborate code of honour regulated the capturing and taking of prisoners, who could be ransomed. Some of the fortunes generated were spectacular. There was also the promise of excitement and loot serving in English or mercenary garrisons. Some of the loveliest houses in England are a product of this period. Windsor Castle was greatly modified, paid for with the ransom of the French King John II. Bodiam Castle was built by Sir Edward Dalyngrigge in 1385 on the back of war profits and loot extracted from France. Bodiam, which looks like a picture postcard version of a castle, was built by a freebooter mercenary. Caister Castle and Wardour are further examples. These beautiful houses, like the eighteenth century stately homes of nabobs like Sezincote or Daylesford House, were the products of imperial expansion and aggression.

The English ruling class was no longer willing to trade Henry VI’s title as King of France in exchange for land. They were unwilling to compromise on the issue of sovereignty. Partly this was because Henry VI was still a minor. Anyone who traded away his throne during his minority might be subject to a treason trial when Henry came of age. But the adult Henry VI was just as obstinate. In the wider country, parliament and the English people were no longer interested in pursuing a war conducted in the interior of France which seemed likely to continue for decades. It was at this point that the French war effort began to revive.

Charles VI was extremely well advised. He and his council, aided by Joan of Arc, managed to lift the siege of Orleans. Charles marched on Reims, where the Kings of France were crowned, and staged his coronation. He was now regarded by most French people as being the legitimate monarch. The French state had become more centralised and had achieved more extensive tax gathering powers under the pressure of the English invasion. French armies had undergone a technological revolution. They now had steel crossbows and gunpowder weaponry which could match the longbow. French modern artillery meant that sieges could be conducted far more rapidly. The English had no answer to this. The disproportion between the two countries in population and taxbase began to tell. The English were now inevitably losing the war. They did not have the manpower to resist the tide of French armies taking castle after castle. It remained to be seen if they could salvage their position at the negotiating table.

The English chose total defeat and expulsion. They chose the destruction of their empire sooner than compromise. At peace conferences such as Arras in 1435, the English refused to budge. Henry VI did not want to give up his claim to the French throne. By this point, even attempting to hold parts of France in full sovereignty with no feudal bond was unrealistic. The French offered to let the English keep Normandy in addition to Guyenne and parts of the wider Duchy of Aquitaine which they had ruled, but not with total sovereignty. This was probably the best the English could have hoped for given their military collapse at Patay and Gerberoy. During the 1380s, Richard II and John of Gaunt had been willing to accept a compromise peace on those terms.

The title of King of France, originally claimed as a cynical bargaining chip, was now too dear to the English court to be given away. It represented a century of military triumph. Relinquishing the claim would have meant repudiating the legacy of Edward III and Henry V. Exasperated by this, the Burgundians defected to Charles VI and the English position was completely undermined. In 1436, Paris fell to the French. As late as 1445, the French were willing to allow the English to keep most of their possessions in France, under some form of liege-homage, if only Henry VI would disclaim his title. It would have kept much of the Atlantic coast under English control. English settlers would have remained in France. England’s expulsion from the continent removed this as an option. Civil war was the result.

By 1453, the French had won. As a result of Formigny and Castillon, the French took Normandy and the last remnants of Guyenne. This was a catastrophe. Several thousand English settlers were given the choice of swearing allegiance to Charles VI or leaving France forever. Some, like Gaddifer Shorthose, the Mayor of Bordeaux, chose to stay on. But the vast majority, like pied noirs forced to choose between the suitcase or the coffin, fled. Some of them had lived in France for thirty years. They had built lives in France. They staggered in their thousands to the Channel ports, with little more than the shirts on their backs. This was the end of an empire. They were accompanied by streams of French officials who had supported the dual-monarchy and French soldiers who had fought for the English, like Algerian Harkis. These all returned to England, penniless, marching through the streets of London. They were enraged with Henry VI’s government and his councillors. They contributed to the political instability of the early 1450s which eventually led to the Duke of York claiming the throne. The incompetence of Henry VI and his government led to the Wars of the Roses. England descended into decades of civil war, partly caused by the collapse of England’s first overseas empire.

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England’s first Empire had ended. For nearly four hundred years, England had been associated with France, first as a Norman colony and eventually as a colonial master of Normandy itself. The world grew smaller. All that was left was Calais. The empty title of King of France remained until it was discarded in 1801. The Hundred Years’ War had provided opportunities for acts of heroism for generations of Englishmen. There is a hint of Mad Mitch or the mercenary Mike Hoare in Edward Woodville, Lord Scales, ‘the last knight errant’. Born in the 1450s, he spent his life fighting in places like Spain against the Moors and on the peripheries of France. Perhaps a century earlier he would have led armies into France itself. But England was now too small a country to contend against powers like France or the unified Spanish monarchy once they had centralised and effectively copied the things which had made England distinctive in the fourteenth century. For a century after 1453, England went from being a first-rate power to a power of the second or third rank. The spirit of adventure and the national characteristics which led to the heroism of Crecy, Poitiers, and Agincourt went dormant for want of opportunities.

A little more than a century after the Battle of Castillon, in late 1558, Mary I was dying. England had lost its continental empire. It had missed out on the Age of Discovery. Even Calais under Mary I had been taken by the French. Mary’s marriage to Philip II of Spain had turned England into a Spanish satellite. As Mary lay dying in the autumn, Philip began negotiations with her sister Elizabeth. It became clear to Philip’s advisors that Elizabeth would withdraw England from Spanish tutelage. Halfway across the world, the merchant-adventurer Anthony Jenkinson was voyaging through the river basins of Russia. After landing at the White Sea, he had travelled to Moscow to meet Ivan the Terrible. Jenkinson gained permission to travel down the Oka and Volga rivers into the Caspian, and establish a trade route with China. At the same time as Elizabeth was negotiating with Philip, Jenkinson reached Astrakhan and the mouth of the Caspian after a journey of more than a thousand miles from the White Sea. He was probably the first Englishman to see the Caspian. He procured a ship and raised the red cross flag of St George, which he ‘supposed had never been seen in the Caspian before’. By the time he reached Bukhara in Uzbekistan, his eventual destination, Mary had died.

The spacious times of great Elizabeth had begun. New colonies would be settled thousands of miles across the Ocean from Normandy. The new world beckoned. The decline had not been permanent.