England & France · 1337–1453

How Long Was the Hundred Years' War?

By William Souef · Published August 19, 2026

What they were actually fighting about

The war looks like a national rivalry and began as a feudal problem. Since the twelfth century, English kings had held large territories in France — by 1337, principally Gascony in the southwest — not as sovereigns but as vassals owing homage to the king of France. Every French king wanted that anomaly ended; every English king wanted the land without the homage. When Philip VI confiscated Gascony in 1337, Edward III responded by escalating the claim rather than defending it: he asserted that he, through his mother Isabella of France, was the rightful king of France.

That claim gave the conflict its longevity. A dispute over a duchy can be settled; a dispute over a throne cannot be, short of one side abandoning it — which English monarchs did not formally do until 1801. What followed was less a war than a century-long state of hostility, with fighting where money and opportunity allowed and truces whenever they did not.

Three great victories that settled nothing

The English pattern was set at Crécy in 1346: dismounted men-at-arms and massed longbowmen in a strong position, receiving French cavalry charges. Ten years later at Poitiers the same formula captured the French king himself. At Agincourt in 1415, Henry V — outnumbered, his army sick, cornered on a narrow muddy field — produced the most famous version of it.

Each victory was militarily crushing and strategically limited. Longbow tactics were defensive; they destroyed armies that attacked them but could not take walled towns or hold countryside. After Poitiers, the Treaty of Brétigny (1360) gave England vast territory in exchange for renouncing the throne claim — and collapsed within a decade as France simply reconquered piecemeal, avoiding battle. Agincourt did more, leading to the 1420 Treaty of Troyes that made Henry V heir to France; then Henry died in 1422, at 35, leaving a nine-month-old king and a claim his marshals could not sustain.

Joan of Arc, artillery, and the end

By 1428 the English and their Burgundian allies held Paris and much of the north, and were besieging Orléans, the gateway to the south. What changed was partly morale and partly one person: Joan of Arc, a teenage peasant claiming divine instruction, reached the dauphin Charles, was given troops, and relieved Orléans in nine days in May 1429. Within three months Charles VII was crowned at Reims, the traditional coronation city — a legitimacy the English claim could not match. Joan was captured by Burgundians in 1430, sold to the English, tried for heresy and burned at Rouen in May 1431, aged about nineteen.

France won anyway, and increasingly by technology and administration rather than heroics: a standing paid army, a Burgundian alliance flipped to the French side in 1435, and gunpowder artillery that made English-held castles indefensible. Normandy fell in 1450, Gascony after Castillon in 1453 — a battle where French cannon broke an English attack, neatly inverting the century's pattern. There was no peace treaty; the fighting simply stopped. England kept only Calais and turned inward to the civil wars of the Roses. Both kingdoms came out of it with something new: taxation systems, standing forces, and a sense of national identity that had barely existed in 1337.

Frequently asked questions

Did the Hundred Years' War really last a hundred years?

No — 116 years by the conventional dating of 1337 to 1453, and the name is a nineteenth-century label rather than a contemporary one. It was also not continuous warfare: long truces, the Black Death, and periods of exhaustion meant active campaigning occupied a minority of that span.

Who won the Hundred Years' War?

France, decisively in territorial terms. England began holding Gascony and claiming the French throne, and ended holding only the port of Calais. The English claim to the French crown was retained on paper for centuries but never again enforced, and England's attention turned to the Wars of the Roses at home.

Why couldn't England hold France after winning Crécy, Poitiers and Agincourt?

Because the tactics that won those battles could not hold territory. The longbow-and-defensive-position formula destroyed armies that attacked it, but taking and garrisoning walled towns across a much larger and richer country required money and manpower England did not have. France learned to avoid pitched battles, reconquer gradually, and eventually deploy artillery that made English strongholds untenable.