Dan Snow's History Hit - The Hundred Years' War

Episode Date: November 3, 2023

The Hundred Years' War plunged England, France and their allies into over a century of conflict. This bleak period of history had rebellions, assassinations, open warfare and even the Black Death as the two rival dynasties went head-to-head for the French throne.Dan is joined by the historian and former Justice of the Supreme Court Lord Jonathan Sumption to help rattle through this 116-year period of bloody history.Produced by James Hickmann and edited by Dougal Patmore.Discover the past on History Hit with ad-free original podcasts and documentaries released weekly presented by world-renowned historians like Dan Snow, Suzannah Lipscomb, Lucy Worsley, Matt Lewis, Tristan Hughes and more. Get 50% off your first 3 months with code DANSNOW. Download the app or sign up here.We'd love to hear from you! You can email the podcast at [e-mail] can take part in our listener survey here.

Hello everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History. The Hundred Years' War is a term we use to describe, well, a series of wars that were fought over 116 years between England and France, but also a dizzying array of other regional players. At various points, both kingdoms were plunged into rebellion, civil conflict, and so the fighting was widespread. On top of that, you can add the arrival of the Black Death, and this truly, truly is a bleak period of history. It's remembered largely for kings of England, five successive generations of them, claiming the throne of France. But as you're going to hear from today's guest, it's a little bit more complicated than that. I'm very happy to say I'm joined back on the podcast by the eminent author, the medieval historian, the former judge of the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom,

Lord Jonathan Sumption. He's just written a five-volume history of the Hundred Years' War, and he's going to help me rattle through it. In essence, there are three main periods of Anglo-French war that we're going to look at. The so-called Edwardian War. This is the war of Edward III and his son, Edward the Black Prince, and they wage a pretty successful war against France, certainly successful on the battlefield, less successful in terms of lasting gains on the negotiating table. That war lasts approximately 30 years, from the late 1330s to about 1360. Then you have a short period of peace, but from 1369 to 1389, a 20-year period of war in which the French claw back many of the gains that the English made. That part of the war

comes to an end, partly because Richard II, King of England, has absolutely no interest in it whatsoever. Then there's another period of peace, which is broken by what's become probably the most famous phase of the Hundred Years' War, thanks to Shakespeare and others, which is Henry IV and his son Henry V reasserting their claim to the French throne, the Lancastrian period of the war, massively helped by terrible civil strife, royal infirmity, and general chaos engulfing France. That runs from the Agincourt campaign in 1415 all the way through to 1453, when after decades of nearly uninterrupted war, the English are catastrophically defeated pretty much everywhere. So to take us all

through it, to remind us of the extraordinary, unlikely intervention of Joan of Arc, to tell us about the remarkable battles and the equally remarkable set of characters, here is Lord Jonathan Sumption. Enjoy. T-minus 10. Atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima. God save the king. No black-white unity till there is first and black unity. Never to go to war with one another again. And liftoff. And the shuttle has cleared the tower. Jonathan, thank you very much for coming back on the podcast.

It's a pleasure. First of all, the Hundred Years' War. Should we call it the it the Hundred Years War or was it several different wars jammed together? How should we think about it? Well, the name has become too familiar to be corrected now. Anyway, the wars were interrupted by brief and pretty dishonest truces and temporary treaties of peace that were repudiated. So I think you can say that there was a certain unity about the whole of this period. And what gives it that unity? Is it the English attempt to gain the French throne, or is it a sense of crisis within Western Europe, the space we now call France? Why do we lump them all together? Well, they've got this in common. It's quite controversial.

They've got this in common. It's quite controversial. Some people think that it's all about getting the throne. Some people think it's about other things. My own view is that there was a brief period quite towards the end of the wars, during the reign of Henry V and Henry VI in the 15th century, when the English kings really did think they might make themselves kings of France. And they came quite close to success just for one point. But before that, I think it was just a tactic. The claim to the throne of France was really designed partly as a pressure point in the

bargaining that was expected, something that could be given up with largesse in return for more important and realistic ambitions. Partly, it was designed to give some legal cover to the rebels within France on whose alliance the English kings depended at pretty well every stage. The real ambition of the English kings, I think, was to recover the previous much larger extent of their possessions in southwestern France, and if possible, to control the whole of the Atlantic provinces of France, from Flanders to the Pyrenees. That was their ultimate objective, in my view. Yes, because let's just give us a little bit of background. The famous bit is that Edward III, who had a decent claim through his mother to the French throne, when the French male line ran out,

he was overlooked and a cousin was put on the throne. That's thought to be the sort of beginnings of things. Edward III said, I'm going to enforce my claim. But actually, tell me what's going on in southwest France, the ancestral lands of the kings of England. Why is that the really important thing, do you think? Well, they had been in the possession of the kings of England. Why is that the really important thing, do you think? Well, they had been in the possession of the kings of England since the middle of the 12th century, so for nearly 200 years when the Hundred Years' War started. But the changing model of the French monarchy meant that there was much more centralization. From the middle of the 13th century onwards, the French kings set up really

powerful courts, which received appeals from subjects of the English kings in southwestern France. And some of these appeals were from seriously dangerous subjects, powerful men, basically simply wanted to stymie the government of southwestern France. Sooner or later, the English kings realized that they weren't going to be able to rule effectively their own dominions in southwestern France unless they freed themselves from this dependence on the French king's courts. That involved repudiating the feudal links. They were vassals of the French kings. That's what they had to repudiate. And one way of doing that was to say, well, actually, we're the real kings.

And so this attempt starts… And it starts in 1340. Edward III proclaims himself, three years after the war's begun, in the Friday market at Ghent, in what's now Belgium. He proclaims himself King of France. Why does he do that? It's a tactical move. He is trying to harness to his own cause the rebellion of the Flemings against the Kings of France. So he claims the Crown of France so that he can give them some legal cover. They weren't going to be rebels. They were simply going to be parties to a civil war. And that's a more comfortable legal position to be in.

And the war starts well for Edward III and the English. There's a good couple of decades, aren't there? There's the famous naval battle at Sluice, which is a crushing English victory. And then there's some of the famous victories that people will be familiar with, whether it's the Battle of Crecy, the capture of Calais. Why did things go well initially? Well, there's a very great writer of the late 15th century, Philippe de Comines, who remarked that the English won all their battles and lost all their treaties. And that's about the shape of it. The English were very good at winning battles until the very end

when the French developed a new model of army, which wiped the floor with the English. But until then, the English won almost all their battles. The trouble is winning battles doesn't win you a country. The only way of doing that is to occupy territory. And the English made no attempt to occupy territory in the 14th century. In the 15th century, they realized that's what they've got to do. Henry V and the ministers of Henry VI set about occupying a large part of northern France. But it's an incredibly expensive thing to do, and they just didn't have the resources to do it.

Well, and it's exhausting. And Henry V literally paid in his life for that strategy because he was besieging some hellish town somewhere and got dysentery and died. So it's harder to do that, isn't it, than that is to win eye-catching victories on a kind of a mad march through France. Yes, because basically what you've got to do is you've got to defend a huge long frontier, internal frontier in France, against an enemy who can choose his time and place. So you've got to be ready everywhere. You need many garrisons. The English had more than 40 garrisons in Normandy alone, as well as garrisons in other

parts of France. Keeping these people in wagers permanently was something that no state had tried to do on that scale before. They just didn't have the resources to manage it. And so Edward launches these so-called chevauchées, doesn't he, with his famous son, the Black Prince. So what's his plan? These are huge raids.

They're very tactically successful. They defeat French armies. They capture remarkable, lovely cities and lots defeat French armies, they capture remarkable, lovely cities and lots of treasure, but they don't leave behind a proper strategic footprint. That is absolutely right. The calculation was that if they defeated the French king in the field, he would sue for terms rather than endure another raid. That didn't really work out. There was also, I think, a calculation that by defeating the French king in the field, they could discredit him in the eyes of his own subjects and persuade those subjects to turn towards the king of England. That didn't

work out either. The only circumstances in which the English kings were ever able to get the sort of treaty that they wanted with the French was on the back of a French civil war. When France was divided down the middle, as it was at the time of the Battle of Poitiers, then you could get somewhere. The triumph never lasted long. You got a treaty, and the duress, and the moment that they had an opportunity to repudiate it, the French repudiated it. Utterly predictable. Why was Edward III and his relatives, why were they so successful? We got the Battle of Auberroche in 1345, which people should remember more probably as a hugely lopsided victory by the

English. We got the Battle of Crecy, which people remember for their remarkable longbowmen. And then Calaisols. Have I just forgotten other defeats, or is there something about the English that makes them quite potent at this time? The English had two major advantages. First of all, they had a technical advantage. The longbow in the 14th century dominated battlefields because it had quite a long range, longer than the kind of crossbows that they had at the time before improved models came on later. But the major advantage of the longbow was that successive flights of arrows could be fired off very quickly, whereas a crossbow was cumbersome

to reload and you couldn't get that many shots a minute. That was their big technical advantage. that many shots a minute. That was their big technical advantage. The second great advantage they had is that they developed a method of organizing their army in self-supporting companies of archers and dismounted cavalrymen. And that was an extremely successful model of organization. The classic English battle plan involved putting the archers at the wings, forward at the main body or dismounted cavalrymen, and inviting the enemy to charge them. They would then get enfilading fire from each side and suffer terrible casualties before they'd even reached the English lines. That was a successful way of dealing with French armies, which the French eventually got wise to, but it took them a long time.

And the Battle of Crecy, at any rate, does lead to an interesting lasting victory, which is Calais, and Calais remains in English hands for a long time after. And that's an example of where you do see battlefield success translated to something a bit more lasting. And that's an example of where you do see battlefield success translated into something a bit more lasting. Well, Edward III had to besiege Calais for 11 months and to fight off the big French relief army in order to get Calais. So it wasn't the direct result of the victory at Crecy. The French king, Philip VI, was able to raise a very large army in spite of Crecy a year later in order to try unsuccessfully, as it turned out, to relieve Calais. And Calais was important because it gave the English a secure base on the mainland of the continent where they could land an army without having to land on defended beaches.

That was a big advantage. But it was a long way to the north. That was the main problem about Calais. It was so far north that it wasn't a good base if you wanted to move down to the centre of France or the south. And then talk me through, in this phase of the war, we have the extraordinary incident, which is outside or very near Paris, of this hailstorm. I've always thought this is one of the weirdest moments of the Hundred Years' War, perhaps in English history. Talk to me about the famous hailstorm of 1360, because it does, although you say that England never really had much chance of actually seizing the French throne, it does feel that Edward III was reasonably close to it in 1360.

Then it all goes wrong. Yes, but the reason why he was close to it is that the King of France was his prisoner in London, and that created serious problems of France, which was in the King of France was his prisoner in London. And that created serious problems of France, which was in the middle of a civil war and widespread anarchy. So the English were able to use the leverage of their prisoner to get the terms that they wanted. That's the real reason why, in spite of the 1360 campaign not being a great success, they were able at the end of it to exact the terms that they wanted, which basically gave them control over most of Western France in return for surrendering their claim to the throne. That was what was agreed at the Treaty

of Bretigny. But once the king was released on ransom, once that happened, and once the king had then died and been replaced by the much more effective Charles V, his son, the English were in big trouble because the French repudiated the treaty and expelled them from pretty well all of the territories that they had previously gained. Yes, let's just quickly go on that because King John had been taken prisoner by the Black Prince at the Battle of Poitiers in 1356. I've always rather liked John. I think he sort of preferred, like it's one of those rare people in history that seems to have preferred England to France. Well, I don't think he did that. He spent a long time in England because he was a prisoner

there. And he went back willingly as well. Well, he went back willingly because he had a very pronounced sense of chivalrous honor. And his son, the Duke of Anjou, who had been one of the hostages for his compliance with the ransom treaty, hopped it. He escaped. He was given temporary leave to go back to France for a family occasion and refused to return. So his father, John, returned voluntarily to England in order to fulfill the terms of the ransom treaty. That was a naive but undoubtedly honorable thing to do. It's not something that any other French king would have done. No, exactly. Well, I've always taken that to think that John rather, you know, he thought Paris was rather rubbish and he thought that excitement of medieval London was... I don't think that's the reason at all.

Oh no, okay. Okay, so we're then coming to this funny moment with this hailstorm, which I just would like you to talk about for a second. The hailstorm disrupted the English army. It scattered it, the accompanying rain meant that they had to tramp through bogs through the Beaus district, which is essentially the district around Chartres, and it damaged English morale. It meant that their chances of actually forcing a solution on the French just by battle had frankly vanished. But they still got the deal that they wanted, because in spite of the fact

that the 1360 campaign was a failure, they had the king's body in their possession in London. Yes, they still had the king in London. So the hailstorm kills something like a thousand Englishmen, more than most of the battles of the period, remarkably. And then they have this so-called Treaty of Bretigny that you've mentioned. And then there is a period of peace at that point, but it's an uneasy peace. Well, it's the period of Edward III's greatest prestige, when he was basically regarded as the arbiter of all Europe. But Edward III realized that he hadn't won a permanent peace. That's why he built fortresses along the Thames estuary, for example, in preparation for the next attempt of the French to invade. It's why he made a large number of attempts to surround

France diplomatically with carefully chosen marriages and so on. Edward III knew that the Treaty of Bretigny was not enough. To secure his gains, he needed something more. He never got it. Indeed, Hadley Castle in the Essex March is one of those ones he built. I think he retired there eventually as well. It's a wonderful, it's an overlooked castle. It's one of my favourites on the Thames Estuary. It's a great castle and it's been painted in one of Constable's best landscapes. Ah, yes. And you can see the north coast of Kent where Edward also built castles, as you say, to prepare for the next war. And indeed, there was another war, 20 years of war, 1369 onwards. This is the bit of the Hundred Years' War that Brits have chosen

to mostly forget about. What happens in this bit? It's true of both countries. In both countries, historians have preferred to write about the period when they were doing well. And certainly, the period 1369 and the next 30 years after that were not years in which the English were doing well. Their problem was partly that Edward III suffered a serious personal decline in the early 1370s. I think he must have suffered from some form of dementia, but at any rate, he was not the man that he was. He was then succeeded by a child who grew up as a very difficult king, who found it completely difficult, impossible to get on with his barons. Yes, Edward III's warlike son, the Black Prince, pre-deceased his father and his son, the child Richard II, took over. And as you say, yes, so he over as a bit of a cutout character. He was an absolute model hero.

He was surrounded by incense and praise. And so people didn't really look into his character in any depth. But people like Richard II and Edward II earlier in the century, we know much more about them because they were regarded as oddballs. And people therefore studied their character quite closely and quite critically. Okay, and so we've got a child on the throne of England, the French under man who is happy to repudiate that treaty and start clawing back territory in France.

Yes, absolutely. Again, we don't hear about the English defeat at La Rochelle, which is very important, as you mentioned, this kind of Atlantic seaboard, this link between southwest France and England, a place like La Rochelle, very important way stations on that route, and they're badly defeated there. La Rochelle was important because it was the main port of the Atlantic coast. It was more important at the time, even than Bordeaux. And it was further away from England. So the trouble about the French Channel ports is that they were vulnerable to continual English raids.

So La Rochelle was strategically an important asset. And the English lost La Rochelle and gave the French a significant naval base on the Atlantic coast of France. And then John of Gaunt, the man who we're allegedly all descended from, the king's all-powerful uncle, leads a chevauchée, and it's a lot less successful than those of the Black Prince used to have been. Yes. Well, John of Gaunt was experiencing what, throughout the war, was one of the main problems that the English encountered, which is that they could not reach the southern provinces of France because of the geography of France, which is dominated by big east-west flowing rivers. These rivers were defended by bridges,

defended by bridges, defended by important walled towns. In order to get to the southwest without forcing yourself across the Loire and the other big rivers, you had to go right round to the east, which John of Gaunt did, through the massive Saint-Réal. And it's a very long march. It's a very difficult march. And in the course of it, John of Gaunt lost a large proportion of his army, not to fighting, but to disease, desertion, and just sheer exhaustion. Speaking of sheer exhaustion, both England and France, we see the so-called Peasants' Revolt in England, the civil strife in France. Are both sides feeling exhausted by this point? And does that help them come to an understanding in 1389, a sort of a peace treaty? Both sides, of course, did suffer exhaustion, but it affected the English much more because

England was a country with a much smaller population than France. France was a much richer as well as a much more populous country. France was a much richer as well as a much more populous country. So that exhaustion on the battlefield and in sieges hit the English very much worse. In addition, of course, the English had to recruit from their smaller population armies and send them across the sea. So exhaustion was a bigger problem for the English. What really led to the peace at the end of the 14th century, I mean, there was a long truce from 1389 and then a peace in 1396,

was the fact that the English were bust, that their king had no interest in the war, and that he was threatened by powerful forces within England. And the English were frankly in no position to continue. What does that piece look like, the piece that Richard II agrees with Charles in 1389? Well, it was technically not a complete piece. Theoretically, it was a long crux, which was secured or expected expected to be secured, by the marriage of Richard II to the very young daughter of the King of France. And we don't know what would have happened if that had lasted longer, but Richard II was deposed in 1399 by his own barons,

led by John of Gaunt's son,ingbroke who became Henry IV. That was effectively the end of the Treaty of Paris of 1396. How much does that piece have to do with Richard being deposed? I mean were the factions, even though England was bust, were the factions within the ruling elite, the aristocracy, who rather liked the war, they were able to personally enrich themselves on these great raids into France and win glory and have fun? Or was it more domestic, the reasons that Richard was deposed? Well, Richard was deposed for purely domestic reasons. The French certainly believed that he'd been deposed because he had favoured a peace with France. They were wrong about that. The French never really understood English politics as well as the English understood French ones.

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Henry Bolingbroke comes in, Henry IV. Now he's got a lot on his plate. The Welsh rise up Eoghan Glyndwr. The Northumberlands are always causing trouble. He's fighting with Scots. He's fighting everybody. Does he have time to restart the Hundred Years' War? Or is that left to his Alexander-like child, Henry V? Well, it was broadly left to Henry V. But there were three important exceptions. One was that there was a lot of fighting at sea, which was essentially glorified piracy on both sides, but it caused immense ill will. The English were never really able to control the pirates' bases, particularly

in the West Country ports. Secondly, there was an attempted invasion by the French of Gascony in 1406. The English had no choice but to do their best to defend Gascony, which they successfully did, although it owed much more to the Gascons on the spot than to any help that they got from England. The really big exception was in 1412, after a really serious civil war had broken out. This was really the critical factor in the 15th century. The Duke of Burgundy had his great political rival, the Duke of Orléans, assassinated in the streets of Paris. And that provoked a civil war which lasted really for nearly 30 years. And that civil war opened the breach through which the English entered France.

The first time they did it was in 1412 under Henry IV, when they basically allowed the rebels against the French king's authority to hire the English as mercenaries. And the English crossed the channel, but before they could get engaged in the war, the French rebels made peace with the French king. So that was a waste of time. They got a lot of money out of it, but they got no strategic advantage at all. So really, things restart in a big way under Henry V in 1415. So as you say, the determining factor seems to be in the Hundred Years' War, when one side was enmeshed in its own civil war, the other side did quite well. That's absolutely right. Domestic civil wars are the key to the whole of the Hundred Years' War on both sides.

The English never succeeded, except at times when the French were crippled by civil war. And the same applies the other way around. The French were able to exploit English civil wars in order to impose peace on terms acceptable to them. And there was some wise man who once said that was the hole in the skull of John the Fearless, the Duke of Burgundy, the man whose assassination you just referred to, that was the hole through which the English were allowed back into the Hundred Years' War and into France. Yes, the Civil War started with the assassination of the Duke of Orléans by order of the Duke of Burgundy. But the Duke of Burgundy was then himself assassinated by the Dauphin's ministers with the Dauphin's consent on the bridge at

Monterey at the junction of the Seine and the Yonne in 1419. Those two murders basically framed the French Civil War and created a bitterness that extended the Civil War right through to the reconciliation between the French Crown and the Dukes of Burgundy in 1435. And that was the period during which the English were able to maintain themselves in France. They were able, in spite of the lack of resources, to maintain an effective army of occupation, but kings went pear-shaped quite quickly. And as you mentioned, I guess civil war and related to that, infirmity of commanders, because Charles, who had been rather effective, commanders because Charles, who had been rather effective, the King of France, declines very dramatically, poor thing, and develops numerous mental health problems. And he is faced by

extremely bad luck by one of England's greatest warrior leaders at that point, Henry V. So the nature, the characteristics of the ruler seemed to be very important here as well. Absolutely. Principally because medieval societies were critically dependent on a system of distribution of patronage and adjudication of disputes in which the king's personal role was absolutely critical. And so if you have an ineffective king, things start going to pieces. That happened in both England and in France, and it was the occasion for the English invasion of France. The trouble is that the incapacity of Charles VI of France led to a huge contest within France to plunder the monarchy because the French king wasn't capable of

looking after the monarchy himself. And it was really a dispute between the Armagnacs and the Burgundians for the right to line their pockets at the expense of French taxpayers. That was what led the English in. So it's a perfect storm for the French. You've got a civil war. You've got a king who is deeply infirm, and you've got a young thrusting prince, king now, Henry V, who takes the throne on the death of his father in 1413. He is extremely warlike. They have united the country after a decade of internal civil war

in England. Why does he decide to really kick off this next phase of the Hundred Years' War, we call it Lancastrian War? Because he saw the opportunity that was opened up by the civil war between the Armagnacs and the Burgundians. He was a very remarkable individual in many ways, not, I think, a very attractive individual, but a very skillful one. And in addition to his military skills, And in addition to his military skills, he was a very formidable politician, somebody who also, I think, recognized the limits of what force could do. In addition, he acquired a remarkable degree of respect from the French because the result of the Civil War had been complete anarchy in many parts of France. And many people said to themselves, well, we might as well be subjects of the King of England. At least he's strong enough to keep order. A wise French observer of the period once remarked

that the French were in such a state of anarchy in the 1420s that anybody who could come along and promise to restore order would be accepted as a ruler, even, he said, and I quote him, even if he was a Muslim. Wow. Well, that's the opportunity that Harry England passed up on by not washing his bloody hands and getting dysentery, silly man. None of us would be in this mess. Though actually, I think that at the very end of

Henry V's life, he realized that he was not going to be able to conquer the rest of France. I think that had he lived, he would actually have strived to negotiate an arrangement under which Normandy and Gascony and possibly parts of the territory in between would be recognized as his free of any obligations to the French crown. And in return, he would have dropped his claim to the French shrine. Now, there's a speculative view, but there's a certain amount of evidence for it from people who remarked on his conversations just in the last few months of his life. But of course, his successors couldn't do that, because they were trustees for a baby king. Henry V wins the striking victory at Agincourt

in 1415, but actually that is not the most enduring of his campaigns. It was the one he launched in 1417, when he actually successfully conquers great chunks of northwest France. Yes. I mean, Agincourt was a spectacular victory. It discredited the Armagnac government of France, which had been attempting to defend against Henry V. But it actually had no immediate strategic consequences. The English basically scuttled home for the next two years. They were engaged in negotiations to find allies within France. But things really start changing in 1417 because Henry V invades France again, this time not to conduct a great chevauchée, which is essentially what Agincourt was. This time their object was to occupy territory. And that's what they did. It took them two years to conquer the whole of Normandy and some of the provinces around it

and to establish the beginnings of a permanent administration. And as you say, that's a long time, a lot of blood and treasure, just conquering one or two provinces. And Henry V, he did negotiate a treaty by which he was named the successor to the French king. But you think his chances of actually going, conquering all of the rest of France were pretty unlikely. Well, that became clear later. What happened was the Duke of Burgundy

was murdered by the Dauphin's associates on the bridge at Monterey. And that provoked a fresh outbreak of civil war between the Duke of Burgundy's heir, Philip, and the French crown. And Philip did something that his father, John the Fearless, had always stopped himself from doing. He actually entered into a formal alliance with Henry V, in which he promised to help

him become king of France. The Treaty of Troyes was made between Henry V and an incapable French king, Charles VI. It was really engineered by the Duke of Burgundy, Charles VI having at this stage become a mere puppet of the Burgundians and to some extent of his wife, Isabella Bavaria. And there was initially quite a lot of support for the idea of transferring the crown to the Lancastrian dynasty. That was because England was seen as much the most powerful actor. There were three groups. There were Burgundians, there were Dauphinists, and there was the English. And of those, the English were seen as the most powerful, and in alliance with the Duke of Burgundy, they were regarded as unbeatable.

So people said, look, the only way in which we're going to bring an end to this civil war is to accept him as king. A lot of people thought that way. Why didn't it happen? The reason it didn't happen is that Charles VII, as he became upon the death of his father, the former Dauphin, he had an outstanding generation of officials in his camp, and they successfully created a duplicate of every institution of the monarchy in Paris, in capitals

in the south of France, primarily Bourges, Poitiers, and Toulouse. So they basically reorganized a new French kingdom south of the Loire, where they had the allegiance and support of the population. And once that had happened, the likelihood that the English were ever going to be able to conquer it inch by inch was very small. And that likelihood was made even more pronounced by Henry V dying in his prime and replaced by a baby, and a baby who would turn out to be a particularly incapable king. He was replaced in reality by John Duke of Bedford, the dead king's brother. Duke of Bedford was a very remarkable individual. He never set foot in France until 1420, 18 months before his brother's death, but he spoke excellent French. He was an extremely

able diplomat. He managed to get on with the French. He married two French princesses in succession, and he devoted himself completely to preserving the heritage of his infant nephew. The Duke of Bedford was one of the very rare examples in European history of a good uncle. I tell you, Henry IV had decent sons, didn't he? They were an impressive bunch. And Bedford manfully tries to go on protecting and expanding the kingdom, but the resurgent force of the Dauphin, as you've said, very effective shadow government in the south of France. And then Joan of Arc comes along. And you've said to me in the past that if it wasn't well attested, you would have dismissed the Joan of Arc story as a myth made up by Hollywood filmmakers.

Did I really put it like that? Yes. I mean, Joan of Arc, the fashion of historians has been to slightly belittle the impact of Joan of Arc, but I think it was actually crucial. Joan of Arc persuaded the French that they could win after 15 years in which they had lost every battle with one exception. In the 1420s, the French basically depended on large mercenary armies importing from Scotland. The last of those armies had been completely destroyed by the English at the Battle of Verneuil in 1424, leaving the French with only small guerrilla bands, really, to defend their territory. The French were punch drunk. They avoided battle with the English for fear of a repetition of Agincourt, Bernays,

and all these other English victories. Joan of Arc persuaded them that actually they could win. She persuaded them that God was on their side, a very important moral factor in the atmosphere of the time. The greatest of the French generals of their period, the Count of Dunois, who observed at the inquest into Joan of Arc's death, carried out after the war was over in the 1450s, that before she came along, 200 Englishmen could defeat much larger forces of French. Suddenly, their morale collapsed and the odds were the other way around. And interestingly enough, the Duke of Bedford said exactly the same thing when explaining what had happened to the council in 1434, a few years after Joan of Arc's execution. He said everything went fine until Joan of Arc came along. And then

suddenly, it was as if the courage of the English had drained away. What's more, we have exactly the same story told by English prisoners of war who were captured by the French when they were interrogated by their captors. So there's pretty well universal acceptance that Joan of Arc absolutely transformed the morale of the French and enabled them to succeed. from the greatest millennium in human history. We're talking Vikings,

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So she arrives to play a decisive part in the siege of orleans in 1428-29 it looked like the english had been on the verge of capturing that important city south of paris and then we get the victory the sort of french agincourt don't we the victory at patay in 1429 and then the dauphin is able to be crowned king of France. I mean, this is the start of the long road to total English defeat. The really critical stage of Joan of Arc's career was the March to Reims and the coronation of the King at Reims. After the events in the Loire Valley, she had basically had the Dauphin eating out of her hands. The Dauphin's military advisors were strongly opposed to the march to Reims.

They pointed out quite rightly that there were important garrisoned towns on the way which would have to be captured, but they had no siege equipment. They had some 6,000 men but no proper supply train to feed them, so they'd have to keep on the move so as to be able to feed themselves on the country. They said this is a hopeless task. And Joan of Arc not only persuaded the Dauphin to undertake the march against the advice of his military advisors, but she bluffed her way into these towns on the way. They were terrified by the reports that she had transformed the situation in the Loire Valley, reports which were actually exaggerated but were widely believed.

And they didn't wish to take issue with the agent of God, as they had come to believe that Joan of Arc was. So successive cities in Champagne and the route to-de-Rheims simply opened their gates without a fight. And without meeting any resistance, the French were able to reach Reims and occupy it. The English were impotent because their main army had been destroyed at the Battle of Patay, which you mentioned, and they needed to wait for fresh reinforcements to come over from England and from the Duke of Burgundy's domains, and that took time. There was a critical period of about six weeks when the English had no army in the field and were unable to do anything to stop the advance of the French king's army. The coronation was a really critical event. Many people who were ardent supporters of

the Dauphin continued to call him Dauphin rather than king until he'd been crowned. As a matter of strict law, the kings of France became kings upon the death of their predecessor. The coronation was simply God's endorsement of what had already happened. But that's not the way that most French people looked at it. To them, the successful coronation of Charles VII of Reims showed that he really was king of France and that the English were intruders and usurpers. And in addition to that, it gave them a passage round the east of Paris to the northern provinces of France, which had been dominated by the Duke of Burgundy, and which they had previously lost. And that was critical, because it meant that the English possessions in Normandy, which is the only area that they ever really securely held, were open to attack both from the north and from the south.

The same was true of the Paris area. And that transformed the strategic situation. So the Coronation March and the coronation itself were really central events. There were periods of trucing and some sort of peace, but this part of the story, the traffic is sort of moving in one direction, isn't it? And particularly as Henry VI achieves adulthood, reigns in his own right, he's a very, very ineffective king. As you say, probably rather nice man, but very ineffective indeed. I mean, he had one thing in common with Richard II. Richard II and Henry VI,

neither of them really believed in the adventure in France. Henry VI had a sort of intense Christian pacifism, and he wanted an end to the war, not as a matter of careful calculation of the odds, but simply as a matter of emotional instinct. There were many people in England who disagreed, but there was a limit to what they could do without royal support. So there is unhappiness within England that within a few years will explode into the War of the Roses. But England are also defeated on the battlefield in France. Now, how did the French work out how to win in the 1440s? They reconquered Normandy, which had been the only part the English had

really, as you say, been able to kind of build a proper presence in. Yes. Well, in the late 1430s, the Dauphin managed to put an end to the succession of civil wars within France, first by making peace with the Duke of Burgundy in 1435, and secondly by seeing off other less significant aristocratic rebels. And on the back of that, he restored order to those parts of France which he controlled. He eliminated the bands of brigands who had made French people's lives a misery for many years. And this enabled him to improve the tax base. The brigands and the civil wars had destroyed the French tax system. Their destruction enabled taxes to come back into power. Charles VII reconstructed the finances of the French state, and he used his newfound wealth from taxes to create a new army.

This happened in stages, mainly in the early 1440s, where the French built up a full-time army and a reserve army. And this policy paid off spectacularly when the French reconquered Normandy in the space of just over a year. The interesting thing is it almost ends where it started in southwest France in Guyenne around Bordeaux which is ironically where lots of English people choose to go retire to today. The French had to work hard to conquer that the final piece of the jigsaw. The French had to work hard to conquer that, the final piece of the jigsaw. Well, not in the end, because the English were never really able, until right at the end, to reinforce Guienne. And so a lot of Gascons, who basically preferred the idea of an English ruler because he was further away and could deal less powerfully, a lot of them basically gave up

hope. They said, look, the English are going to lose Gascony because they just don't have the resources or the ability or the sheer power of decision to send a large army to the southwest. And without that, we're going to lose sooner or later. So we may as well make some decent terms with the more powerful party who is the king of France. So there were two French invasions of Gascony, both of which succeeded. The first one was launched in 1450 and completed in 1451

and resulted in the complete reconquest of the whole of southwestern France. Then the English, for the first time, it was really too late, managed to send a really very large army under Talbot, Earl of Shrewsbury, to Bordeaux. And they landed near Bordeaux and recaptured Bordeaux and some of the towns along the Garonne and the Dordogne, the major rivers of southwestern France. This was a pretty spectacular thing to do. But of course, the inevitable counterattack ultimately overwhelmed them. And on the battlefield of Castile, Talbot was killed and his army defeated. It would have happened anyway, but Talbot was a very impetuous commander.

He was much admired because he was extremely bold. But there are occasions when boldness is not what you need. And this was one of those occasions. He threw part of his army, his mounted section, into the battle before his archers had arrived. He failed to properly reconnoiter a French camp which he was attacking, which was defended by powerful forces of artillery, and the army was wiped out. That was the end. The end of the Hundred Years' War, effectively. You paint a picture of France having to rebuild its finances to sort of modernize. Did that have a lasting effect on French power? I mean, is the Hundred Years' War, was modern France forged in this terrible crucible

of war? I think it was. First of all, France had, with a few interruptions caused by internal wars, a highly authoritarian model of government from the 15th century to the 18th century. The reason for that was that in order to defeat the English, the French kings had had to make themselves very powerful with a standing army, something that was very unusual in Europe at the time, and permanent taxation levied by mere royal command with no process of consent. Now, that made the French kings very powerful within their own country and naturally very powerful in Europe.

And the following century was to see a serious attempt by the French to conquer Italy, which was ultimately defeated by Spain. It re-established them as one of the dominant powers of Western Europe. It was their misfortune that this period when they might have swept all before them, and when they had virtually no opposition from England, and when they had virtually no opposition from England, coincided with the golden period of Spanish power. And the Spanish proved more effective, even than the French. They managed to create an army which technologically and organizationally was superior to anything else in Europe. And perhaps England benefited in the long term because it could concentrate, or even though Henry VIII sort of messed about in France, on the whole in the 16th century,

England could focus on the new Atlantic world rather than the old world of Europe. It was a marginal player. It did intervene, though never very decisively, in the Netherlands and in France on a number of occasions under both Henry VIII and Elizabeth. and in France on a number of occasions under both Henry VIII and Elizabeth. But it was essentially a marginal player. And the reason for that was that whereas the Hundred Years' War had made it necessary for the French kings to free themselves from any kind of parliamentary or representative government because it was the only way they could defeat the English

and raise the money to do it. In England, the opposite occurred. The English Parliament supported the English kings in their adventures in France, not to the extent that the English kings would have liked, but enough. And the result was that the English Parliament acquired and kept complete control over tax revenues. and kept complete control over tax revenues. That meant that the English were never going to be able to operate a dominant foreign policy in Europe because they never had the tax revenues to do it until about 1700 when the situation was transformed partly by the English mastery of credit operations at the end of the 17th century, and partly by a reform of the tax system, but above all, by the growth of a worldwide empire, which brought them very significant

revenues. Yes, let's not even talk about Eberlitho's relationship with his creditors. That was not a modern relationship, a modern relationship that worked for either party. Well, it was a relationship characterized by bankruptcy and default. There's something modern about that. That's true. That's true. Jonathan, thank you for ending on that point. Your wonderful epic, epic series of books has come to an end now. This is the last one.

That's the end. The books are called? The Hundred Years' War, five volumes, each with its own subtitle. Brilliant. Go and get them all, everybody. Thank you very much, Jonathan Sumption, for coming on the end. The books are called? The Hundred Years' War, five volumes, each with its own subtitle. Brilliant. Go and get them all, everybody. Thank you very much, Jonathan Sumption, for coming on the podcast. It's a pleasure. you