A century of French succession fighting remade two crowns
The Hundred Years’ War (1337–1453) stitched Anglo-French feudal fights over Aquitaine to a claim on the French throne, becoming Western Europe’s longest military conflict once later historians bundled related Spanish and Low Countries wars. Edwardian, Caroline, and Lancastrian phases frame the narrative.
The quarrel went back to 1066. Once a Norman duke became king of England, English monarchs held land in France and owed homage for it to the French king, an awkward arrangement that caused friction for centuries. The spark came in 1328, when Charles IV of France died with no son or brother. His nearest male relative was his nephew Edward III of England, through Charles's sister Isabella. But after a similar crisis in 1316, the Estates-General had ruled in 1317 that women could not succeed, and French nobles argued Isabella could not pass on a right she lacked. The barons preferred a native Frenchman, Philip of Valois, and Edward grudgingly did homage for Gascony.
Relations kept souring. In May 1337 Philip and his Great Council in Paris resolved to take Gascony back, and Edward answered by pressing his claim to the French crown by force. The war that followed was fought over the wealthiest, most populous kingdom in Western Europe, by five generations of kings from two dynasties, and it pulled in factions from across the region and a French civil war besides.
It was not continuous. Plague and long truces broke it into three phases: the Edwardian War of 1337 to 1360, the Caroline War of 1369 to 1389 and the Lancastrian War of 1415 to 1453. England did well early, but the Valois kept their throne in the end. The single name was applied later by historians, who also folded in linked dynastic fights in Spain and Belgium, making it the longest war in European history by that reckoning, spanning some 116 years.
Its effects outlasted the fighting. Both sides developed professional standing armies and artillery, changing European warfare for good. Chivalry peaked and then faded, while national feeling hardened and both monarchies grew more centralised, on the road to becoming global powers. The crowns stayed separate, although English and then British monarchs went on calling themselves sovereigns of France until 1802.
Source: Hundred Years' War
