Events
The Hundred Years' War
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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.
Facts
Disputed
Death Toll, Low EstimateRough order-of-magnitude estimate for direct and indirect (famine, associated violence) deaths across the war's 116 years (1337-1453), per general military-historical demography; medieval record-keeping cannot isolate war deaths cleanly from the concurrent Black Death and recurring regional famine, so this range is treated as illustrative rather than precise. Death Toll, High EstimateUpper bound of the same rough estimate; see death-toll-min's StatusNote on why this range is not precise. YearMarks Edward III's 1337 assumption of the title king of France and the opening of hostilities. The conventional close is 1453, the fall of English Bordeaux, though no single peace treaty ended the war. LocationFrance, chiefly Gascony, Normandy, Picardy and Brittany 1 Cross-Tradition Connections
Associated With
Opened the war in 1337 and led it in person through Sluys, Crecy and the siege of Calais.
England's adversary and, through Edward III's claim, the crown he and his successors contested.
In Era
The full 1337 to 1453 span falls entirely within the Post-Classical and Medieval Period (476 to 1453), ending in the same year the era itself is conventionally closed.
Participant
In the Other Atlases
Sources
1. Edward III (Britannica)
Wikipedia: Charles V of France
WikipediaParticipant: Charles V of France, Lead section, recovering territory from the EnglishQuote, Participant: Charles V of France, Lead section, recovering territory from the English
his armies recovered much of the territory held by the English and successfully reversed the military losses of his predecessors
Joan of Arc (Wikipedia)
Wikimedia FoundationParticipant: Joan of Arc, Lead section (edge: participant Joan of Arc)Quote, Participant: Joan of Arc, Lead section (edge: participant Joan of Arc)
honored as a defender of the French nation for her role in the siege of Orleans and her insistence on the coronation of Charles VII of France during the Hundred Years' War
Dissenting Readings (1 dissenting reading)
Death Toll, Low Estimate
The 2.3 to 3.3 million range above is a rough order-of-magnitude figure, and some military historians decline to offer any single Hundred Years' War death toll at all, on the grounds that the war's 116 years overlap almost exactly with the first and worst waves of the Black Death (from 1347) and with recurring regional famine (the Great Famine of 1315-1317 predates it, but subsequent local famines recur throughout), so a rural death recorded in a 14th or 15th century French or English parish cannot reliably be attributed to war violence, disease or hunger individually from surviving records. A number presented without that caveat reads as more precise than the underlying sources can support.
A dissenting reading, from an independent laneEdward III (Britannica), Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc.
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