The Hundred Years' War

About This Book

For a hundred and sixteen years, from 1337 to 1453, the royal houses of England and France fought the longest war of the Middle Ages — a struggle that began as a dynastic quarrel over a crown and ended by forging two modern nations. It is a story of astonishing drama: the arrow-storm of Crécy, where common longbowmen shattered the flower of French chivalry; the Black Death, which killed more people than the war itself; the capture of a French king at Poitiers; the mud and slaughter of Agincourt; and the peasant girl from Domrémy who heard the voices of saints, relieved Orléans, crowned a king at Reims, and was burned at nineteen.

In this single gripping volume, E.B Cohen tells the whole sweeping story — and explains, from first principles, how it all worked: why a king of England had to kneel to a king of France, how English wool paid for the war, how a longbow really killed an armoured knight, how a siege starved a city, how a ransom made a fortune, and how, at the very end, French cannon rendered the castle and the mounted knight obsolete in a single generation. Even-handed between the English and French traditions, alive to the suffering of the common people as well as the glory of kings, this is the complete human history of the war that ended the Middle Ages and made England and France what they became.