By Philip Daileader, Ph.D., The College of William and Mary
During the first phase of the Hundred Years War, the kings of France and England hired many mercenaries who were paid by the campaign. When armies weren’t fighting, pay stopped and caused serious societal difficulties that left large numbers of armed, unemployed men to roam the countryside.
One of the most violent periods during the 14th century in France was the 1360s, when France and England were technically at peace. Violence was the norm because the mercenary bands were not paid during the 1360s since there was a peace treaty. In response, they began to pillage France and neighboring territories because they no longer had any income.
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The solution to this problem was permanent standing armies whose members were paid regardless of whether there was a war going on or not. This course of action would be adopted in roughly the middle of the 15th century, first by France, with other kingdoms following suit. It was an expensive solution, but it was preferable to disbanding armies at the end of every campaign and leaving them to pillage a kingdom and reimburse themselves from whatever they happened to find.
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Standing Armies and Foot Soldiers
Starting around 1450, the kingdom of France began to assemble the first standing army that Europe had seen in more than a thousand years. It was not a huge army.
By about 1500, the French army consisted of only about 20,000 to 25,000 men. For many centuries, it was standard practice for kings to go out and hire more troops whenever a war broke out. Nonetheless, the creation of permanent standing armies, paid a salary by kings, was going to benefit royal authority considerably because it was easier to cut off a moneyed salary than it was to repossess a fief from a knight. The kings now had an important counterweight to the authority of the nobility within their kingdoms.
At roughly the same time, a change in military technology made foot soldiers a more important part of any military campaign or strategy. This was a change that the English adopted quicker than the French, and that helps to explain, in part, why the English were successful at battles such as Crécy and Poitiers, and then, ultimately, at Agincourt.
Practice Makes Perfect
During the 13th century, England had been at war frequently with Scotland and Wales. In a sense, this had been good for England because it meant that its armies were in peak condition. At the time that the Hundred Years War broke out, there was a tradition of warfare that had allowed people to train and try out new tactics. France had been mostly peaceful during the 13th century and had not fought many wars. Perhaps more importantly, during their wars against the Welsh, the English had come across a new missile weapon the Welsh had developed and that the English were happy to borrow from them: the longbow. The longbow gave the English their great victories at Crécy, Poitiers, and Agincourt.
The Short Bow, the Crossbow, and the Longbow
The longbow was different from two other sorts of missile weapons that had been used earlier, the short bow and the crossbow. The short bow had the advantage of being small and easy to use, it didn’t require much training, and it had a very rapid rate of fire, but it did not pack much of a punch, certainly not when used against a knight in armor. The crossbow had a tremendous wallop and you could shoot a knight with a crossbow at a considerable distance and expect to transfix the knight to the knight’s horse. But there was a big disadvantage to the crossbow: While you can take down a knight with a crossbow, it takes a long time to load a crossbow.
While loading your crossbow, the knights would be charging you, however, you could speed up the process of loading a crossbow, but it was risky. This involved placing the crossbow on the ground and slowly cranking it up again, by lying down on the ground and cranking it up while you’re staring at the sky. But lying prone on your back with your stomach facing up is not the best position to assume when in a battle.
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The Downfall of the Medieval Knight
The longbow combined all the advantages of a short bow with all the advantages of a crossbow, with disastrous consequences for medieval knights. The longbow had a very rapid rate of fire—a good English longbowman could get off 10 or 12 arrows in a single minute—but it packs the wallop of a crossbow. If you hit a knight in armor with a longbow, even at a considerable distance, there was a good chance that you would penetrate that knight’s armor. If you’re able to amass longbowmen together and fill the sky with arrows, then charging knights, who happened to be French during the Hundred Years War, would be mown down. It required a fair amount of training to learn how to use a longbow properly. You couldn’t just pick it up the way you could pick up a short bow and hope to fire it effectively.
But it did not require the same amount of training to fight nor the same material resources that fighting as a knight. You didn’t need a suit of armor or half a dozen of the strongest war-horses you could find because, undoubtedly, many of those war-horses would be killed in battle. As a result, the spread of the longbow during the Hundred Years War, in an important sense, democratized warfare. It allowed individuals of a fairly humble social origin—peasants, townspeople, or artisans for example—to be militarily effective in a way they had not previously been during the Middle Ages. This spelled bad news for the nobility of late medieval Europe, which found its military effectiveness challenged and undermined.
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Common Questions About the Hundred Years War
In some ways, both England and France won as they both had victories. At the end of the war, both nations had achieved a strong sense of identity and sorted out who would own what. Initially, it was thought that with so many English victories, they would rule; however, the French monarchy’s larger coffers lent far more resources to the victory of the French. The final battle that ended the war resulted in the French victory of 1453 in Castillon.
France was thrown into a tumultuous mess as precious farmland had been destroyed, leading to vast masses of the citizenry perishing from famine, peasant revolts, war skirmishes, and the Black Plague. Rogue groups of bandits also ran amok in the lawless land, robbing and murdering at will.
Some of the major battles of the Hundred Years War were the Battles of Crecy, Poitier, and Agincourt won by the English. The Battles of Orleans and the decisive final Battle of Castillon handed the French ultimate victory.
While there were many small skirmishes and peasant revolts, the major battles that define the Hundred Years War number at 56.
