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The Hundred Years' War with France
Crecy and Poitiers; Part 1

Crecy and Poitiers; Part 1

Thus the Hundred Years' War differs from all the wars between France and England which precede it. These, in the French king's eyes at all events, were civil wars or feudal wars; the struggle of a feudal tenant against his suzerain. The Hundred Years' War was a national war, in which Edward III and, after him, Henry V played the part of a foreign conqueror. Hence the bitter feeling which developed as the war continued.

Edward Ill's claim to the throne was a mixture of policy and ambition. It was policy, in so far as it gave a cloak of right to what would otherwise have seemed pure aggression, and it offered a reason to those French dependents such as the Flemings who were ready to fight against their French master, all the more if they could allege that they were not rebels in doing so. Moreover, England as a wool-growing land had a close connection with Flanders, the great centre of dyeing and clothmaking. But we may be sure that the ambition of adding the French Crown to the English one also attracted the king.

The claim itself to the throne was a poor one. The three sons of Philip IV (The "fatal three", Louis X, Philip V, and Charles IV: compare the extinction of the house of Valois with Francis II, Charles IX, and Henry III (also three brothers)) had reigned and died leaving no male heirs. Edward, through his mother Isabella, was Philip IV's grandson. The throne, however, had been given to Philip IV's nephew, Philip of Valois (Philip VI). The French argued that by the old custom of the Salian Franks (the so-called Salic Law) which governed the succession to the French throne, no woman could succeed, and that therefore Edward's claim through a woman was worthless. Edward refused to accept this argument. But by doing so he knocked the bottom out of his own case, for though the three brother kings had left no sons, they all had daughters, and one of these daughters had a son, Charles the Bad of Navarre. Thus, if the Salic law held, Philip of Valois was the rightful king; if it did not, Charles the Bad should be on the throne; either way Edward had no title. Moreover, having, in 1328, done homage to Philip VI for Gascony, he had tacitly admitted Philip's title, and barred his own. Legal reasoning, however, was of as little real value here as in Scotland in the days of Edward's grandfather. Armed men were the only arguments that would command a hearing.

Having then laid claim to the throne of France; having secured as allies his two brothers-in-law, the Emperor Louis of Bavaria and William of Hainault, as well as the Flemish leader Jacques van Artevelde; being enthusiastically supported at home by all classes, who voted supplies with that eager liberality which accompanies the beginning of a war, Edward opened his campaign. Two fields of operation offered. The north-east, which lay close to England and to his Flemish allies; and the south-west, where his own duchy of Gascony gave him a convenient base. That there was a certain sense of material advantage in Edward's methods, as well as the quixotic ambition which led him to claim the throne, appears in the fact that these two districts, the north-east and the south-west, were, commercially speaking, the richest in France, the centres respectively of the woollen industry and the wine trade. Merchants would readily support a king who was warring for the control of such rich markets.

Crecy and Poitiers; Part 1

Chronology