England and France spent more than a century locked in a fight that started as a family argument over land and a crown. The war that history books call the Hundred Years’ War ran from 1337 to 1453—116 years, not a neat century—and it was never one continuous campaign.
A recent Origins Explained video (below) frames it as a royal family feud that grew into the longest major war of the Middle Ages, with roots that stretch back to the Norman Conquest of 1066. That framing holds up. The conflict was less a single grand struggle for the French throne than a series of overlapping fights over territory, feudal rights, and who counted as the legitimate ruler when the direct male line of French kings died out. Continued below the vid
The trouble began centuries earlier. William the Conqueror, Duke of Normandy, took the English crown in 1066. His descendants stayed tied to French lands. When Henry II married Eleanor of Aquitaine in the 12th century, English kings controlled vast stretches of western and southwestern France—including the valuable wine country of Aquitaine and Gascony. Those holdings made the English king a vassal of the French king. He owed homage, the formal act of kneeling and swearing loyalty for the land he held. The arrangement was awkward and unstable. French kings wanted the land back under direct control. English kings wanted to keep the profits and the independence that came with distance across the Channel.
In 1328 the last Capetian king of France, Charles IV, died without a son or brother. Edward III of England was his nephew through his mother Isabella. By ordinary rules of blood, Edward had a strong claim. French nobles instead chose Philip VI of the House of Valois, a cousin through the male line. They reached for an old legal idea—later called Salic law—that barred inheritance through women. Edward did not accept the decision. Tensions simmered for years over trade, Scottish alliances, and the status of Gascony. In 1337 Philip confiscated the duchy. Edward answered by claiming the French crown himself. Fighting followed.
1415: The Battle of Agincourt was a decisive clash in the Hundred Years’ War. Outnumbered and exhausted, Henry V’s army — made up largely of English and Welsh longbowmen — achieved a remarkable victory over the French, securing Henry’s place among England’s greatest warrior-kings https://t.co/mPqR3BnBvA
— Plantagenet (@Plantagenet1455) October 25, 2025
The war came in three main phases separated by long truces. In the Edwardian phase, English armies under Edward III and his son, the Black Prince, won decisive field battles. At Crécy in 1346 and Poitiers in 1356, English longbowmen cut down French knights before the heavier cavalry could close. At Poitiers the French king John II was captured. The 1360 Treaty of Brétigny gave England large lands in the southwest and a huge ransom, while Edward set aside his claim to the full French throne for the moment.
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The Caroline phase saw France recover under Charles V. He avoided open battle, used fortresses, and reclaimed territory. A long peace followed. Then Henry V of England reopened the fight in 1415. His army, outnumbered and short of supplies after the siege of Harfleur, destroyed a larger French force at Agincourt on 25 October. Mud, narrow ground, and English archers again decided the day. The 1420 Treaty of Troyes named Henry heir to the French throne and married him to the French king’s daughter. An English baby was later crowned king of France in Paris. For a time it looked as if England might actually win the whole kingdom.
#onthisday 25 October 1415
Henry V gained his greatest victory at the Battle of Agincourt
The Battle of Agincourt was a major English victory in the Hundred Years’ War. It took place on 25 October 1415 (Saint Crispin’s Day) in the County of Saint-Pol, Artois, some 40 km south of Calais (now Azincourt in northern France).
England’s unexpected victory at Agincourt against a numerically superior French army boosted English morale & prestige, crippled France, & started a new period in the war during which the English began enjoying great military successes.
👑 King Henry V of England led his troops into battle & participated in hand-to-hand fighting.
The battle is notable for the use of the English longbow in very large numbers, with the English & Welsh archers making up nearly 80 percent of Henry’s army. The devastation of the French cavalry at their hands signaled the decline of cavalry & the increasing dominance of ranged weapons on the battlefield.
◼ Agincourt is one of England’s most celebrated victories & was one of the most important English triumphs in the Hundred Years’ War, along with the Battle of Crécy (1346) & Battle of Poitiers (1356). It forms the centrepiece of the play Henry V by William Shakespeare.
📖 Read my full story of the Battle with biography of Henry V, where you can also watch clips of Shakespeare’s play, by Sir Laurence Olivier in 1944 & Kenneth Branagh in the 1989 version.
https://t.co/z8ngA370Nb
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#onthisdayinhistory #BattleofAgincourt #HundredYearsWar #agincourt #HenryV #KingHenryV #MedievalHistory #october25th #october25 #HouseofLancaster— BRITISH History – On This Day (@BritishHistorym) October 25, 2024
That prospect collapsed. Henry V died young. His son Henry VI was a child. France was already torn by civil war between the Burgundian and Armagnac factions. In 1429 a teenage peasant girl named Joan of Arc, who said she heard voices from God, reached the dauphin Charles and helped lift the English siege of Orléans. Her presence stiffened French resistance. Charles was crowned at Reims. Joan was later captured, sold to the English, and burned at the stake in Rouen in 1431. The French recovery continued without her. By 1450 Normandy was lost. In 1453 at Castillon in Gascony, French field artillery—massed cannons under Jean Bureau—shattered an English and Gascon force led by the veteran John Talbot. Talbot was killed. Bordeaux fell soon after. England kept only the port of Calais.
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No formal peace treaty ended the war in 1453. A later truce at Picquigny in 1475 largely closed the fighting, though English kings kept a paper claim to the French throne into the early 19th century. The name “Hundred Years’ War” itself was invented by French historians in the 1800s. People who lived through it did not think of it as one war.
On this day in 1453, the French defeat an English army at Castillon. It’s the last major battle of the Hundred Years War. https://t.co/8jaQK19lx8
— Military History Now (@MilHistNow) July 17, 2024
Other views expand the picture. Some historians treat the 116 years as only the sharpest stretch of a longer Anglo-French rivalry that began with the Norman Conquest and continued, with interruptions, until the Entente Cordiale of 1904. Others note that the fighting pulled in Scotland, Burgundy, Castile, and Flanders, and that both kingdoms suffered the Black Death in the middle of it. The war accelerated the rise of professional armies and gunpowder weapons while weakening the old dominance of armored knights. It also sharpened the sense, on both sides of the Channel, that English and French people were distinct nations rather than feudal subjects of overlapping lords.
England won most of the famous pitched battles. France won the war. The costs in England helped feed the civil strife of the Wars of the Roses. In France the long ordeal left a stronger monarchy and a clearer national story built around figures like Joan of Arc. The family feud over land and legitimacy had remade both kingdoms.
— The Whatfinger News Team: Sgt L and Sgt R, with Lisa, and Grok on edits
From Origin Explains: What started as a royal family feud over the French crown turned into a war that lasted 116 years. Today we’re exploring the Hundred Years’ War between England and France, from the Norman Conquest to Agincourt and Joan of Arc, plus the centuries-long Reconquista that shaped medieval Europe.
From Medieval Scholar: The chivalric French knights that you are attempting to dunk on with the depiction of the Battle of Agincourt on the bottom right there ended up winning the war btw France literally won the Hundred Years’ War. You talk about how they eat shit once the fighting starts, but at the Battle of Castillon, the final battle of the war, the French suffered only around 100 casualties while the English suffered about 4,000. The English were almost immediately routed into a retreat after the heavy cavalry led by Peter II, Duke of Brittany slammed into their flank.
The chivalric French knights that you are attempting to dunk on with the depiction of the Battle of Agincourt on the bottom right there ended up winning the war btw
France literally won the Hundred Years’ War.
You talk about how they eat shit once the fighting starts, but at the Battle of Castillon, the final battle of the war, the French suffered only around 100 casualties while the English suffered about 4,000.
The English were almost immediately routed into a retreat after the heavy cavalry led by Peter II, Duke of Brittany slammed into their flank.
— The Medieval Scholar (@MedievalScholar) June 28, 2025
From Culture Explorer: They thought it would be a massacre. On a rain-soaked field in 1415, twenty thousand French knights, Europe’s proudest aristocrats, closed in on a starving, half-dead English army led by Henry V of England. The French came for ransom, for glory, for an easy kill. What they got instead was humiliation. The “unwinnable” Battle of Agincourt ended with six thousand French dead, their shining armor buried in mud and blood, not because the English had more men, but because they had the longbow. Five thousand yeomen unleashed seventy-five thousand arrows a minute.
A storm so thick it blotted out the sun. Horses panicked. Formations shattered. The mightiest nobles in Europe drowned in the chaos. Agincourt was a reckoning. Power shifted from the highborn to the skilled. From titles to precision. From cavalry charges to long-range volleys. Six hundred years later, we still use their language “highly strung,” “cock up,” and the infamous V-sign. We still remember the day when common archers brought a superpower to its knees. Agincourt is a reminder carved in bone and mud: sometimes history belongs not to the powerful… but to those who can hit their mark. Video by History Hive
They thought it would be a massacre.
On a rain-soaked field in 1415, twenty thousand French knights, Europe’s proudest aristocrats, closed in on a starving, half-dead English army led by Henry V of England. The French came for ransom, for glory, for an easy kill.
What they got instead was humiliation.
The “unwinnable” Battle of Agincourt ended with six thousand French dead, their shining armor buried in mud and blood, not because the English had more men, but because they had the longbow.
Five thousand yeomen unleashed seventy-five thousand arrows a minute. A storm so thick it blotted out the sun. Horses panicked. Formations shattered. The mightiest nobles in Europe drowned in the chaos.
Agincourt was a reckoning. Power shifted from the highborn to the skilled. From titles to precision. From cavalry charges to long-range volleys.
Six hundred years later, we still use their language “highly strung,” “cock up,” and the infamous V-sign. We still remember the day when common archers brought a superpower to its knees.
Agincourt is a reminder carved in bone and mud: sometimes history belongs not to the powerful… but to those who can hit their mark.
Video by History Hive
— Culture Explorer (@CultureExploreX) October 25, 2025
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