The Hundred Years' War & English Identity
A War of More Than a Hundred Years
The struggle remembered as the Hundred Years’ War was not really one war or one hundred years. It was a sequence of campaigns and truces fought between 1337 and 1453, sparked when the French king Philip VI confiscated English-held Gascony and the English king Edward III responded by claiming the French throne through his mother, Isabella of France. The war is normally divided into three phases: the Edwardian (1337-1360), the Caroline (1369-1389) and the Lancastrian (1415-1453).
For our thematic study the names of battles matter less than what the war did to the kingdoms that fought it. Crécy (1346), Poitiers (1356) and Agincourt (1415) showed that an English king could win pitched battles deep inside France using the longbow and disciplined infantry. Joan of Arc’s relief of Orleans in 1429 turned the tide; by 1453, when the French recaptured Bordeaux, every continental possession except Calais had been lost.
The Hundred Years’ War ran from 1337 to 1453. Crécy (1346), Poitiers (1356) and Agincourt (1415) gave England moments of dominance, but by 1453 only Calais remained of England’s once vast French territories.
The Rise of English
For nearly three centuries after 1066, English had been the language of the marketplace and the home but not of the elite. The Hundred Years’ War accelerated a switch already under way. From 1362 the Statute of Pleading required cases in English courts to be argued in English. From the same year, parliaments were opened in English. By the early fifteenth century Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (c1387) had shown that serious literature could be written in the vernacular. Henry V (1413-22) used English in his official letters — the first king since 1066 to do so consistently.
War with France made it politically awkward to keep speaking French at court. The barons whose grandfathers had been Norman were now being sent into battle in the name of an ‘English’ king against a ‘French’ enemy. Identity hardened along the language line. By 1453 ‘Englishness’ was a coherent idea in a way it had not been at the war’s start — a clear example of how war as a factor produced cultural change far beyond the battlefield.
The court’s switch to English did not erase French and Latin overnight. Latin remained the language of church, university and high government records into the seventeenth century. French survived in legal vocabulary (parliament, court, justice) and in the formal language of the royal household (the still-used ‘la reyne le veult’ that signals royal assent in modern legislation). What changed was the centre of cultural gravity: by Henry V’s reign the king of England spoke and wrote in English to his subjects.
Parliament’s Growing Role
War cost money. Edward III and Henry V could only sustain campaigns abroad if they could tax England at home, and from the 1340s only Parliament could authorise the taxes. Each grant gave the Commons a chance to demand reform — redress of grievances before supply, in the phrase of the time. The Good Parliament of 1376 impeached royal ministers; the so-called Wonderful Parliament of 1386 humiliated Richard II. Parliament thus became a permanent feature of government, not because kings welcomed it but because they could not pay for the war without it.
The institution that emerged was specifically English: a Lords and Commons that met at Westminster, debated in English by the late fourteenth century, and passed statutes binding on all the king’s English subjects. The institutional idea of England as a single political community was strengthened every time Parliament voted a war tax.
Loss of Empire, Birth of a Kingdom
The collapse of the continental empire after 1450 looks like failure, but it had a curious side-effect: England became more itself. The same kings who had owned land in Normandy, Aquitaine and Anjou now had to rule a smaller, island-and-Calais kingdom from Westminster. The Anglo-Irish lordship inherited from Henry II remained, but the focus shifted definitively to English politics, the English Channel, and an English-speaking court.
A second consequence followed quickly. With no continental wars to fight and no French territory to govern, the great noble families turned on each other. The Wars of the Roses (1455-1487) between the houses of York and Lancaster were partly a hangover from the Hundred Years’ War — military families with no foreign enemy turned to civil war. Out of that conflict came the Tudors, the Reformation, and the early-modern empire-building covered in the rest of this unit.
The end of the war removed England’s continental option. Looking outward now meant looking across the open Atlantic, not across the Channel. Little more than a century after Bordeaux’s fall in 1453, English ships under John Hawkins (covered in Lesson 6) were trading enslaved Africans across to the Caribbean, and Walter Raleigh (Lesson 7) was promoting a colony at Roanoke. The end of one empire helped open the door to another, very different one.
The Hundred Years’ War accelerated three changes inside England: English replaced French at court (1362 onwards), Parliament became indispensable for war taxation, and a sharper sense of Englishness emerged in opposition to a foreign enemy.