Three decades previously it had all been so different. Henry V had died, but only after masterful victories at Agincourt had meant he could win the Treaty of Troyes. Even with Henry V's death, the near complete victory over France left much of northern France in either England's hands or in the hands of those who were completely loyal to the new monarch. But despite this, England's collapse when it came at the end of the 1440s was rapid and inglorious.
But despite the claims of the English monarchy at the time, and popular belief now, England in the 1400s was not a particularly powerful nation. Henry V's victory had been, essentially, a technological one. His longbowmen were able to decimate the French Army at Agincourt and simultaneously the French ruling class. The latter was more devastating, weakening the French government and undermining their ability to challenge England. But England's position was a castle built on sand. As Sumption says:
Fifteenth-century England was a middling power with a population of about two and a half million... less industrialised tahn the Low Countries and less populaous than France of even than that part of France which regocnised the authority of the Dauphin. The country had suffered, like the rest of Europe, from sevrere depopulation during the pidmics of the previous century. Its population was still declinigng... In 1422 England was in the grip of a prolonged agricultural recession that had lasted with brief intermissions since the 1370s. The previous years had been diffcult and the following ones would be worse: abandoned fields, declinging agricultural prices, shrinking rent-rolls, falling land values, scarce and expensive labour. These changes were gradual but disruptive. They brought about a significant transfer of wealth from landowners to wage-earners.
For a mode of production were land, or those who worked the land, was the principle source of wealth, this was devastating. The ability of England to fight wars was badly hit. Sumption points out that it was the "nobility and the richer gentry" who were hardest hit. The problem was that despite the Treaty of Troyes seemingly offering peace, the war had to continue. England's rulers could pretend this wasn't the case because they felt they were in a position of strength. Normandy formed a buffer (together with the lands of allies like the Duke of Burgundy and neutral powers) that meant there was no enemy directly on the other side of the Channel. The French were arguing amongst themselves about who was to rule, and "the frontier of Valois France was more than 200 miles away".
The problem was that France, whoever eventually came to dominate politically, could not let this stand. If land was the source of wealth and power, then the loss of land to the English could not be tolerated. When French fortunes revived England was crucially hampered by its inability to pay for the war, or to raise money in time. The final decades of the Hundred Years War feel like the gradual and inevitable loss of land (despite occasional reverses) by England to a resurgent France.
France, as ever, benefiting from its larger size, the proximity of its lands (no need to hire ships) and an ability to fight a war to reclaim what it had loss. That's not to say that France was always ascendent, or free of economic concern. Both sides suffered reverses and both sides lacked cash. On one occasion in early 1423 the French commander Tanneguy du Châtel simply disbanded his army ahead of a crucial battle because he had run out of money.
But other factors were coming to the fore. While English castles and walled towns crumbled for lack of cash, the tensions created by the occupying power were causing discontent at the bottom of society. At the end of 1434 and the beginning of 1435 a peasant rising led to a peasant army uniting with French forces and challenging the English in several locations. In particular the English gave up their eighteen year long attempt to capture Mont-Saint-Michel. This "loss of nerve marked a profound change in the political mentality of the English in Normandy" writes Sumption, "Soldiers and administrators became more suspicious of their Norman subjects". Crucially:
Summonses of the indigenous nobility for field service became rarer and the response weaker. In the new forms of indenture issued to garrison commanders six weeks after the outbreak, the rules about recruiting local men to royal garrisons were tightened up... A government dedicated to the defence of the population against external enemies, gradually became an army of occupation whose priorities were internal control and counterinsurgency.
Nonetheless in this period, "neither part was strong enough to overcome the other". Indeed at times reading Sumption one is inclined to believe that the war could never end. Neither country could break out, however good their leadership or their weaponry. So why was France triumphant? Partly that has to do with the ineptitude of leadership in England, and the growing tensions within feudal England that would lead to the Wars of the Roses. Henry V was dead, and with him died the idea of a single strong military and political leader. Henry VI was inept at best and at worst a pawn in the hands of which ever court faction was stronger. Another key factor was economic - England could not draw on its rural hinterlands for manpower and money over and over again. The last few years of the War saw this financial crisis play out over and again.
Other factors are important too. While Sumption's analysis of Joan of Arc emphasises her lack of military prowess and instead her role as a useful figurehead, he uses it to demonstrate the way that a revitalised French monarchy was growing in confidence and power. While her military role was limited, her role as a harbinger of the ideal of nationhood was enough to begin a process that saw English allies and neutral lords swing behind the French monarchy. These would end up being crucial to undermining the position of England in Normandy in particular. Other things mattered too. French military prowess and technology was improving - though these are perhaps less important than purely military historians would like readers to believe.
But there remains a final factor - the ordinary folk at the bottom of society in both France and England. Sumption makes an important point about the Congress of Arras in 1435. These peace talks were unlikely to ever bring lasting peace. But their failured was understood to mean "the continuance of the war" and for the peasants of Normandy in particular, it "fundamentally affected their attitude to the English occupation". Sumption explains that the local ruling class were loyal to the English throne, but this was
not widely shared in the Norman countryside or the smaller townsm where the new taxes served only to remind men of the burdens of the war. Conditions were particularly difficult in the north of the duchy where there was frequent contact between the inhabitants of the towsn and the French garrisons of Picardy and the Beauvaisis. In the following year, Poton de Saintrailles briefly occupied Gisors after the townsmen went over to the French in a body. The English sensed the change. "There was so much treason walking that men wist not what to do," a London chronicler wrote.
Similar tensions existed in England. Military failures (and it should be added local economic issues which Sumption downplays) and discontent at the lords around the King led to Jack Cade's rebellion in 1450. Wider discontent in England's rural regions and the tensions that led to the Wars of the Roses, were making themselves felt. While in the 1430s it seemed that the war could never be won, as the 1440s progressed things were much less certain for the English.
The end of the war was as brutal and violent as any other period. The details matter little here. What should, however, concern us in passing is the dislocation and horror of the process. One contemporary French account estimated that two million lives had been lost in the course of the war. The figures don't seem impossible. Whole swathes of the French countryside were abandoned for decades as a result. The War may have brought temporary glory for some commanders, and battles like Crecy, Poitiers and Agincourt are supposed to remind us all of "English glory" today. But they were won through the systematic destruction of thousands of lives. The flowers of English and French chivalry were rarely chivalrous to those whose villages they burnt. The Black Prince and his ilk were war criminals fighting for land for their power and glory.
Sumption finishes with some musings on the meaning of the war, and its historical legacy. France came out of the War a nation in the modern sense. While it was still a patchwork of territories, the centrality of the French government in Paris was obvious. England too, though impoverished and entering a prolonged period of Civil War, was also differently positioned, though this was far from obvious at the time. England became a nation off the continent, rather than one partially embedded in it. As Sumption concludes:
As Henry VIII eventually discovered, the growing disparity of wealth and power between the English and continental monarchies after 1453 made a revival of the dynsasty's old European ambitions unrealistic. The historic rivalry of England and France which had dominated European politics in the late middle ages gave way to a world in which Italy, central Europe and the Low Countries, and the European empires in Asia and the Americas were the focus of international tensions.
But this was a world that was changing fundamentally. The rise of the Low Countries, central Europe and Italy reflected a world were emerging social relations were displacing older ones. The feudal societies that had dominated, and had fought over every inch of Norman land, would soon be pulled apart by revolutionary change. If the Hundred Years War was not quite the final conflict of Medieval Europe, it was one that demonstrated the irrational nature of the feudal society better than any.
On the Five Volumes
Surprisingly my tweet announcing that I had finished the five volumes went viral. This was an interesting experience in and of itself. In one of the replies to that tweet I was asked "what was the war about?". Slightly facetiously I replied simply "Land". In doing so though I did hint at something frustrating about Sumption's work. While the detail is impeccable and at times overwhelming, I was often left frustrated that there was no theoretical depth to the analysis.
All of the volumes discuss broader aspects to the war beyond military history. Questions like economics, rebellion, the peasantry, technological development and even military architecture are discussed, sometimes at length. But what is lacking is any attempt to root the war in society itself. Sumption is no Marxist. But understanding the question of land, and its importance as a potential source of wealth for feudal lords, offers crucial insights into why the war happened and why it continued for so long. The political factions on both sides of the Channel that Sumption expertly describes, owe their existence to much more than personal allegiances and political ideas. They also represented the tensions within a ruling class whose figures were constantly at war with each other because they needed more land to pay the bills. As the war continued and money became short, this only exarcerbated the pressures for the feudal lords in England and France. In England the war ended in Civil conflict. In France a similar crisis led to England's greatest successes. But in coming out of that crisis and solving, temporarily, some of those tensions by making Charles VII King, the newly united French were able to drive England back in the midst of their own economic and political crisis. Sumption's work is monumental, and will probably be definitive for a long while in the English speaking world. But it doesn't quite get to the bottom of why the war happened.
That said these books are an astounding read and very accessible to the non-specialist. In telling the history Jonathan Sumption never neglects the horror and barbarity; the murder, pillage, rape and dislocation exprienced by thousands of people. While this is no peoples' history, these books are far more than a military history of the Hundred Years War.
Related Reviews
Sumption - Trial by Battle: The Hundred Years War I
Sumption - Trial by Fire: The Hundred Years War II
Sumption - Divided Houses: The Hundred Years War III
Sumption - Cursed Kings: The Hundred Years War IV
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