CONCLUSION
1453
AND BEYOND
The
English defeat at Castillon and the fall of Bordeaux in the summer of 1453
marked the end of the Hundred Years War. It was, though, a somewhat
unsatisfactory conclusion, and not merely for the English and Henry VI. There
was no treaty; Charles VII took control of Gascony but not Calais; Henry did
not renounce his claim to the French throne, and nor would his successors do so
until 1802. Even then, and following the battles of Trafalgar (1805) and Waterloo
(1815), relations between England and France remained uneasy into the twentieth
century. But in 1453 the nature of the hostilities that had coloured
Anglo-French relations since the end of the Capetian dynasty changed radically.
Contemporaries recognised this and imbued the events of 1453 with great
political significance. The resonance surrounding the end of the war did not
compare with the fall of Constantinople which happened in the same year, but
for the English their humiliation marked a shattering change of circumstances,
and together these events marked the beginning of a new order in Europe. The
‘rebellion’ of the duke of Aquitaine and the war for the throne of France were
over, whatever the Yorkists, Tudors, Stuarts and Hanoverians might say. The end
of the war, however, did not bring peace. In France, Charles VII may have
become Charles the Victorious but he had to face the rebellions of his son
Louis and the growing threat of Burgundy. The country and countryside had to be
restored and tended. It had suffered horribly over successive generations and
required a great deal of care and attention. Fortunately, the economy improved
in the second half of the fifteenth century, as did the weather, leading to an
upsurge in trade.
In
England, by contrast, the scars of defeat covered the body politic and a bitter
sense of betrayal and of national humiliation soon fed the flames of civil war.
The losses between 1449 and 1453 had shaken the Lancastrian government and
shocked the country at large. The fiasco had to be explained; those responsible
had to be punished. At times war with France had bound the country together in
a national mission; now, the end of that war tore it apart. Many who had fought
side by side against the French would take up arms against one another in the
Wars of the Roses at St Albans (1455), Towton (1461), Barnet (1471) and
Tewkesbury (1471). One legacy of the Hundred Years War, therefore, was a France
resurgent politically and economically, but an England faced with devastation
as its leaders turned on one another to protect their power and pride, and to
assuage the nation’s shame[1].
But
the war did not only transform the political status of each nation; it
effectively reforged their identities. England and France had been set on
divergent evolutionary paths when the dispute began. The war accelerated their
progression along those paths. The connections between England and France were
virtually severed and their similarities were very much fewer in 1453 than they
had been in 1337. The war began as a feudal and dynastic struggle between two
monarchs; it ended as a national conflict. In many ways, of course, this left
England weaker and clearly inferior to France. In another sense, however, it
offered an opportunity for the English Crown, and perhaps also the English
state, to conceive a new status for itself. Even though this new identity was
the product of defeat, the feudal bonds between kings and countries that had
encouraged hostilities in the first place and had always marked England as
inferior to her neighbour across the Channel were erased. Rulers of England
were now, finally, compelled to seek a new independent identity and a new
political position for themselves within the British Isles, Europe and the
wider world[2]. The
Angevin Empire had been lost, irrevocably; the search for a new empire would
begin.
Another
legacy of the war was war itself: over the years of the struggle England and
France and their people became shaped by war and organised for war. English and
French society became increasingly militarised. More than a century of endemic
warfare resulted in the establishment of governmental, bureaucratic and
financial structures to support conflict on a wholly new scale. Without such
structures the English indenture system and the French ordonnances of
the 1440s would have been impossible. In England this formed part of the
precocious establishment of a ‘war state’ in which much of government became
shaped by and for military purposes. As a consequence of this, the army was
placed on a semi-professional footing early in the struggle. In France the
process was more protracted, but the Crown was eventually able to acquire
control over sufficient resources – financial and administrative – to enable it
to construct a permanent standing army that formed a vital element in the
emergent French state. These developments were deeply significant and not
solely in military terms. They also altered the relationship between the king,
the various representative assemblies (the Estates General and Parliament) and
the aristocracy. In financial terms the changes driven by the need to wage war
so regularly for so long meant that both monarchs enjoyed (potential) access to
far greater resources than had their predecessors. In France, however, access to
more extensive funds was acquired without a comparable rise in the influence of
the representative assemblies: the French Estates, generally speaking, remained
pliant and gained little influence over taxation. By contrast, members of the
Commons in the English Parliament became increasingly aware of their authority
and ability to influence the direction of royal policy now that this policy
depended on the money which the Commons could grant[3].
The
professionalisation of warfare that drove these governmental reforms also
brought about the end, in both countries, of ‘feudal’ service, or at least its
widespread use. As a result, the role of the aristocracy altered very
considerably, as did its position in relation to the Crown and the part it
played in the business of the state. The establishment of a large standing army
in France not only strengthened the position of the Crown and linked it
directly to the development of the state but it provided a means of directly
co-opting a small but significant proportion of the nobility into national
service in a wholly new way. This, in turn, enabled the Crown to exercise
increasing influence over the nobility[4]. As a consequence
fighting became a career, one adopted by many outside the ranks of the
aristocracy; it was no longer (or not merely) an act of noblesse oblige:
this eroded the fundamental association between nobility and military service.
This was also the case in England, although the new priorities of the Wars of
the Roses ensured that the military function of the nobility could not be set
aside for some time.
The
militarisation of society in England and France also had the effect of drawing
certain groups together through employment and shared experiences. With the end
of the war came an end to some of those collective identities. For example, the
intense phase of ransoming that had characterised and bankrolled much of the
struggle concluded in 1453. The war had involved much of military society in
the ransom business for the potential opportunity to ransom a prisoner of war
had encouraged participation in the conflict, whereas capture, by contrast,
could ruin a soldier. The Hundred Years War had seen some major changes in the
practice of ransoming. As military conduct became increasingly professional, so
it became more difficult for individuals to take prisoners. Increasing levels
of mortality on the battlefield reflected the growing importance of tactics
that relied on order and discipline in the ranks. Despite this, ransoming
continued to be important throughout the war. With the rise of professional
armies, however, ransoming took on a more political character and it became
more a priority for the Crown and the state rather than for the individual
soldier. During the Hundred Years War the Crown had begun to exercise its
rights to politically valuable captives; this became the predominant model in
the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries[5].
The
transformation in the military role of the aristocracy and the changing
experience of taking prisoners was also the result of technological and
strategic developments. The greater use of infantry, missile weapons and the
introduction of gunpowder artillery were among the most significant
innovations, and they had widespread implications for the organisation and
financing of warfare, as well as for the social connotations of military
service. The military revolution that took place during the Hundred Years War
marked the beginning of a new age, one which Don Quixote would lament in Miguel
de Cervantes’s novel of 1605:
Blessed
be those happy ages that were strangers to the dreadful fury of these devilish
instruments of artillery, whose inventor I am satisfied is now in Hell,
receiving the reward for his cursed invention, which is the cause that very
often a cowardly base hand takes away the life of the bravest gentleman; and
that in the midst of that vigour and resolution, which animates and inflames
the bold, a chance bullet (shot perhaps by one who fled…) coming nobody knows
how, or from where, in a moment puts an end to the brave designs and the life
of one who deserved to have survived many years.
This
was the type of death that Thomas Montague suffered at Orléans in 1428 and John
Talbot at Castillon in 1453. Artillery, like the longbow before it,
revolutionised military strategy and had immense repercussions on the ways in
which campaigns were conducted; it forced a reassessment of the chivalric ethic
and transformed the role of the aristocracy on the battlefield. Indeed, as a
consequence of technological and strategic imperatives, by the end of the
Hundred Years War the knights of England and France had relinquished their
pre-eminent military positions. Longbows replaced lances, infantry replaced
cavalry and the social contours of military service were redrawn.
Even
among the command ranks, increasing numbers of leaders were drawn from those
first found clinging to the lower rungs of the aristocracy, men such as
Bertrand du Guesclin, John Chandos, Walter Mauny and the Bureau brothers. The
social fluidity that the war promoted and which repeated outbreaks of plague
encouraged meant that membership of the growing ranks of the aristocracy became
more achievable for those who traditionally would have had no means of gaining
acceptance. The development of sub-knightly ranks of the aristocracy – in
England the gentry, in France the petite noblesse – and the
emergence of a wealthy merchant class and upper stratum of the peasantry,
allowed families and individuals to ease their way in and perhaps fall out of
the ranks of the aristocracy. Furthermore, with the expansion of the state and
a new conception of nationhood, men could now find careers away from the
battlefield; there were new ways to serve in the governmental and bureaucratic
institutions that had developed to promote, organise and bankroll the war. Men
such as William de la Pole (d.1366), a merchant from Hull, founded a baronial
dynasty because of his ability to lend money to the Crown, much as Jacques
Coeur (c.1395–1456) became hugely significant because he could fund Charles VII[6].
The
changes in the ways in which war was prosecuted, financed and organised ensured
that it became, to a new extent, a national business. The nation was investing
its wealth and strength in a collective venture and it required a return on
that investment. Central authorities did much to encourage this collective
attitude and sought to engender a sense of community. Sophisticated systems of
propaganda were employed at elite and popular levels to justify the war and
encourage support for its prosecution. Partly as a consequence of this, new
conceptions of national identity emerged on both sides of the Channel. The very
meanings of nationes, patria, res publica, status, and so on,
changed as both countries fought for domination and faced, or claimed they faced,
destruction. The words and what they represented gained new connotations; they
implied a greater sense of community and, perhaps it would not be too
anachronistic to say, of fraternity[7].
One
product of this insistent stream of propaganda was the reification of the myth
of a unified France. The dream of Valois hegemony within the ‘natural’
geographical area of France came to be realised through military success
against England – all but completely achieved by 1453 – and over the following
half-century by the Crown’s reabsorption of the apanages and
other independent estates into the royal demesne. This geopolitical process was
a remarkable achievement given the sheer size of France and the long-standing
links that many regions had with England. The extended southern shore of the
‘English Channel’, the area that stretched from Gascony, through Saintonge,
Poitou, Brittany, Normandy and across to Flanders, had enjoyed close ties –
economic, political and geographical – to the northern shore, many of them more
important, historically, than those which bound them to Paris. A further
problem took the form of the burgeoning power of Philippe the Good and his
successor Charles the Bold who, in addition to the county and duchy of
Burgundy, ruled Flanders, Brabant, Holland, Zeeland, Hainault and Luxembourg,
and so formed a bloc to the extension of royal control within that natural
geographic (hexagonal) area of France[8].
Regional
particularism also remained potent elsewhere. In some cases local loyalties had
been accentuated over the course of the war by tensions such as the
Armagnac-Burgundian struggle. Political differences generated by that conflict,
and the various additional disputes that had combined to intensify the Hundred
Years War, would take several generations to cool. There were also further
areas of contention that had to be settled, such as those which arose from the
trial and condemnation of Joan of Arc, hence the need for her rehabilitation
(nullification) trial in 1455–56. In more general terms, despite ever greater
political unity, a range of social, cultural and linguistic differences
remained evident in France for some time. However, in Rosier des
guerres (a work now widely agreed to have been dictated in 1481–82 by
the king to his physician for the instruction of his son), Louis XI wrote a
powerful statement of the loyalty to the nation that had been engendered by the
Anglo-French war and which now characterised attitudes to and in France: ‘None
may doubt the merit of death in defence of the common good. One must fight for
one’s country.’ No doubt this represented an exaggerated vision of conditions
and feelings in the country, but it reflected a new conception of the nation
and of the responsibilities of all Frenchmen to fight in the motherland’s defence[9].
In
England a comparable process of geopolitical unification took place during the
war and thereafter, although it was fraught with difficulties. Henry
Bolingbroke’s usurpation of the throne in 1399 brought the Lancastrian
‘apanage’ within the royal demesne, and one of the few advantages of the Wars
of the Roses was to continue this process – more estates returned to the king’s
direct control. Greater cultural unity was gained through the increasing use of
the English language for governmental and popular purposes, although
dialectical differences remained widespread throughout the country. The use of
the language for official ‘publications’ encouraged an increasing
politicisation of the population that did, at times, generate a powerful sense
of national sentiment. However, it also led to divergent attitudes concerning
the proper direction for the nation and what constituted the common good. The
rise of the ‘Commons’ in Parliament, the various peasant revolts that
punctuated the conflict and the civil war that grew out of its failure, are an
indication of the problems involved with this growing sense of popular,
political awareness. The assertion of the 1381 rebels that they were ‘the true
commons’ reverberated through political society[10].
A
mounting political awareness was perhaps the most benign impact of the war on
the populations of England and France. The direct effects of the conflict
tended to be less abstract and more violent. Community life was seriously
affected in many areas. Normandy, Paris and other areas of northern France had
experienced foreign occupation with all its problems, and some of its benefits.
Other regions, such as Gascony, would now have to adapt to a different sort of
occupation – a new governing culture and political dispensation: rule from
Paris would prove as foreign in its way as government from London. Throughout
both countries taxation had become all but permanent. Indeed, few aspects of
economic life had remained untouched by the conflict. For the French peasantry,
in certain parts of the country, the series of attacks from English soldiers,
foreign mercenaries and the exploitation of their own side must have felt
unrelenting. Although certain merchants and manufacturers benefited a great
deal from the war, in some (few) parts of England and (many in) France
communities declined or disappeared because of raiding or the effects of war on
trade. Plague also played a vital role in this process, exacerbating the misery
and yet providing new opportunities for those who survived[11].
Women
were among those who could, if lucky, take advantage of the greater
opportunities for social mobility in the century after the plague. It was a far
from easy time, of course, especially in France where attacks on women were all
too common, but acceptance into new trades and a greater level of personal
independence were significant developments. The benefits, however, did not
last. Although the war demonstrated the political abilities and great fortitude
of many women in France and England, the treatment meted out to the most famous
woman of the period, Joan of Arc, revealed the underlying levels of misogyny
that would be reinstitutionalised when socio-economic conditions slowly
reverted to ‘normal’ in the later fifteenth century.
Many
ecclesiastical communities also suffered. Despite spiritual sanctions and
certain military ordinances those churches and monasteries that were
unfortunate enough to lie in the paths of English or French soldiers were
rarely spared the horrors of war. The Church and its members were also co-opted
by the Crown in both countries to legitimise their respective claims and to
wage a propaganda war in support of their conflicting aspirations. Both sides
were successful in this, although the focus of French and English propaganda differed.
In general, however, the involvement of the Church in the struggle did little
for its reputation. The period of the Hundred Years War saw the spiritual
authority of the Church and many of its members compromised by a new awareness
among congregations of its political corruption and worldliness. The power of
the papacy waned in the context of the ‘Babylonian Captivity’ in Avignon, the
Great Schism and the Conciliar Movement. Monarchs on both sides of the Channel
took the opportunity to assert greater authority over their ‘national’ Churches
while the impact of the Black Death seemed only to confirm the failures of the
institutional Church. What emerged to fill the spiritual vacuum was a vibrant
lay piety that, in time, encouraged further reform.
The peoples
of England and France and the countries in which they lived were therefore
changed in deeply significant ways by the experience of the Hundred Years War.
No one realised that with the battle of Castillon and the fall of Bordeaux the
war, in one guise at least, had ended; no one knew that they were witnessing
the end of an age. However, in more than one way the Hundred Years War gave
birth to a new era and to modern Europe.
[1] Vale, Ancient
Enemy, 106–7; Lewis, Later Medieval France: The Polity, 377.
[2] M. M. du
Jourdin, La Guerre de Cent Ans vue par ceux qui l’ont vécue (Paris,
1992), 153.
[3] Allmand, Society
at War, 189.
[4] Small, Late
Medieval France, 168–70.
[5] Ambühl, ‘Prisoners of
War’ (PhD), 188–90; Ambühl, Prisoners of War, 262–3.
[6] Allmand, Society
at War, 187–8.
[7] Allmand, Society
at War, 190; Jourdin, La Guerre de Cent Ans, 154;
Beaune, Birth of an Ideology, 283–309.
[8] Lewis, Later
Medieval France: The Polity, 376.
[9] D. Potter, ‘Conclusion’, France
in the Later Middle Ages, ed. Potter, 210.
[10] Ormrod, ‘Voicing
Complaint and Remedy to the English Crown’, 152.
[11] Lewis, Later
Medieval France: The Polity, 377; Harris, Valois Guyenne, 8–19.
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