History books usually make it sound like one long, exhausting slog. It wasn't. Honestly, the hundred years war with france was more like a series of family feuds, broken truces, and localized massacres that just happened to last for 116 years. It’s the ultimate "it’s complicated" relationship. You’ve got the English kings claiming they owned the French throne, the French kings trying to evict them like bad tenants, and a whole lot of armored knights stuck in the middle.
It changed everything. Before this mess started, a knight was the undisputed king of the battlefield. By the time it ended, gunpowder and longbows had turned those knights into expensive tin cans.
Why the Hundred Years War with France Even Started
Basically, it was a giant real estate dispute. Edward III of England looked across the English Channel and decided he wasn't just the King of England—he was the rightful King of France, too. His mother was Isabella of France, the "She-Wolf," and when her brothers died without sons, Edward did the math. The French nobility, predictably, hated this. They dug up an old legal code called Salic Law to argue that the throne couldn't pass through a woman. They crowned Philip VI instead.
Then there was Gascony.
England owned this massive chunk of Southwest France. It was where all the good wine came from. Philip VI tried to seize it in 1337, and Edward III responded by declaring himself the true King of France. That was the official kickoff. It wasn't a world war; it was a dynastic struggle that bled the taxpayers of both countries dry for over a century. People didn't wake up in 1337 thinking, "I'm starting a century-long conflict today." They just wanted their land back. Or their wine. Mostly the wine.
The Longbow: The Medieval Machine Gun
If you were a French knight at the Battle of Crécy in 1346, you were having a very bad day. You spent your whole life training to be an unstoppable force in heavy armor. Then, some English peasant who’d been practicing with a yew bow since he was five years old starts raining down 10 to 12 arrows a minute.
These arrows could pierce mail. They could kill a horse from 200 yards away.
The Battle of Agincourt in 1415 is the one everyone remembers because of Shakespeare, but the military reality was brutal. Henry V’s army was starving and sick with dysentery. They were outnumbered maybe three to one. Yet, because the French moved through thick mud in heavy plate armor, they became sitting ducks for the English longbowmen. It wasn't "chivalrous" in the way the French expected. It was a slaughter.
However, the English had a major problem. They could win the battles, but they couldn't hold the territory. France is huge. England is a small island. You can win at Agincourt, but you still have to occupy thousands of square miles of hostile countryside while the locals hate your guts. Eventually, the math stops working.
That Time a Teenager Named Joan Changed Everything
By the 1420s, England basically had the win in the bag. They controlled Paris. They had an alliance with the Burgundians. The French "King," Charles VII, was hiding out in the Loire Valley, looking pretty pathetic.
Then Joan of Arc shows up.
She was a teenage peasant girl who claimed she heard voices from saints telling her to drive the English out. In a move of pure desperation, Charles VII actually listened to her. She didn't lead armies like a modern general with maps and tactics; she led them like a mascot with a religious fervor that terrified the English. She broke the Siege of Orléans in 1429. It was a vibe shift of historic proportions. Even though the English eventually captured her and burned her at the stake for heresy in 1431, the momentum had shifted. The French finally felt like a nation, not just a collection of feuding dukes.
The Boring (but Important) Logistics
War is expensive. Really expensive.
To pay for the hundred years war with france, English kings had to keep asking Parliament for money. This gave Parliament a lot of leverage. Every time the King wanted to invade Normandy, he had to trade away some of his absolute power to the commoners and lords. On the flip side, the French crown eventually created a standing army and a permanent tax system to keep the war going.
- The English developed a stronger sense of "Englishness" because they stopped speaking French at court.
- The French developed a centralized monarchy that would eventually lead to the powerhouse of Louis XIV.
- The Black Death hit right in the middle (1348), killing about a third of the population and making everyone wonder why they were fighting over dirt while the world was ending.
- Gunpowder made its debut, eventually making the English longbow and the French knight equally obsolete.
By the time the fighting actually stopped in 1453 at the Battle of Castillon, the English were kicked out of everywhere except Calais. There was no big treaty that said "The Hundred Years War is over." People just sort of stopped showing up to fight. England descended into its own civil war (the Wars of the Roses), and France started looking like the modern country we recognize today.
What Most People Get Wrong
People think it was 116 years of constant screaming and sword-fighting. Most of it was actually "chevauchées"—basically, the English army riding through the French countryside, burning barns and stealing cows to ruin the economy. It was a war of attrition.
Also, the "English" royalty were basically French. Richard the Lionheart, who fought in earlier crusades, famously spent almost no time in England and spoke French as his first language. The war was less about "England vs. France" and more about which branch of a French-speaking family got to wear the fancy hat in Paris.
By the end, though, the identities had split. The English started feeling like a separate island people. The French started feeling like a unified kingdom. That's the real legacy of the conflict. It turned two messy feudal territories into two distinct nations that would spend the next several centuries being "frenemies."
Actionable Insights for History Lovers
If you want to actually see the scars of this war today, you don't need a time machine. You just need a plane ticket and a bit of curiosity.
- Visit the "English" Castles in France: Head to the Dordogne region. You'll find castles like Château de Beynac and Château de Castelnaud facing each other across the river. One was French, one was English. You can literally see the frontline of the 14th century.
- Check out the Agincourt Battlefield: It’s in Azincourt, Northern France. There’s a great museum there (Centre Historique Médiéval) that explains how the mud, more than the arrows, actually won the day.
- Read the Primary Sources: Look up Jean Froissart’s Chronicles. He was a contemporary writer who interviewed knights and soldiers. His descriptions of the battles are vivid, biased, and way more entertaining than a textbook.
- Trace the Longbow Legacy: Go to the Mary Rose Museum in Portsmouth, UK. They recovered actual longbows from a shipwreck, and you can see the sheer size and power required to pull one. It explains why English archers had skeletal deformities from the strain—they were the elite athletes of their time.
The hundred years war with france wasn't just a long time ago. It's the reason English sounds the way it does, why the British Parliament has the power it has, and why the French are so fiercely proud of their national sovereignty. It was the birth pains of the modern West.