The Hundred Years' War

The intermittent conflict between England and France that Edward III opened in 1337 and that ran, with long truces, until 1453, fought chiefly over the French crown's confiscation of English Gascony and over Edward's own claim to the French throne itself, a claim resting on his mother Isabella's blood as sister of the last direct Capetian king, closer than that of the Valois claimant Philip VI. English archery and generalship won three great set-piece victories, Crecy (1346), the fall of Calais (1347) and Poitiers (1356, where the Black Prince captured the French king John II), and the 1360 Treaty of Calais briefly secured full English sovereignty over an enlarged Aquitaine in exchange for Edward renouncing his claim to the French crown. The war reopened under Charles V of France in 1369 and swung against England for the rest of Edward III's reign; it continued long after his death through his descendants' own campaigns, Henry V's victory at Agincourt (1415) among them, before ending with the French crown's reconquest of nearly all English continental territory by 1453. Following the standing HistoryAtlas convention for a long, phased conflict (the Punic Wars, the World Wars, the Crusades), the war's later English-named phases are treated as one umbrella event and named in prose rather than minted as separate entities.