The Hundred Years' War: Map of England and France, 1337–1453

Since 1066 the kings of England had also been great French lords, and in the 14th century they still held the duchy of Aquitaine, or Guyenne, around Bordeaux. For that land they owed homage to the king of France, and French kings kept pushing their rights there. When Charles IV of France died without a son in 1328, the nearest male relative was his nephew Edward III of England, son of Charles's sister Isabella, but the French nobility chose a cousin, Philip VI of Valois, ruling that the crown could not pass through a woman.

Friction over Gascony, Scotland (France's ally against England) and Flanders, whose cloth towns depended on English wool, came to a head on 24 May 1337, when Philip VI declared Aquitaine confiscated. Edward answered by claiming the French throne for himself, and in 1340 he took the title King of France. Turn the map to 1337 to see the English lands around Bordeaux and the Valois kingdom.

England's first great success was at sea: on 24 June 1340 the English fleet destroyed the French navy in the harbour of Sluys in Flanders, securing the Channel. In 1346 Edward landed in Normandy and marched across northern France, burning and plundering, the red line on the map. On 26 August 1346 the French army caught him at Crécy in Ponthieu. The English and Welsh longbowmen cut down the Genoese crossbowmen and wave after wave of French knights; the defeat was a disaster for the French nobility.

Edward went on to besiege Calais, which surrendered in August 1347 after eleven months. It became England's foothold in France for the next two centuries. Then the Black Death struck both kingdoms in 1347–1349 and forced a pause.

In 1356 Edward's eldest son, Edward the Black Prince, led a raid north from Bordeaux. Near Poitiers, on 19 September 1356, his smaller army defeated the French and captured King John II himself. With its king a prisoner in London and Paris in revolt, France agreed to the Treaty of Brétigny on 8 May 1360, ratified at Calais in October. Edward gave up his claim to the French crown, and in return he received a greatly enlarged Aquitaine in full sovereignty, together with Calais and Ponthieu, about a third of France, while John was ransomed for three million écus. Press 1360 to see England's French lands at their 14th-century height.

The peace did not last. Charles V of France reopened the war in 1369 and, avoiding pitched battles, let his constable Bertrand du Guesclin wear the English down with sieges and raids. A Castilian fleet allied to France destroyed an English fleet off La Rochelle in 1372. By Charles's death in 1380 the English held little more than Calais, Bordeaux, Bayonne and a few other ports; compare 1360 and 1380 on the map. A truce in 1389 led to almost 25 years of uneasy peace, while England was troubled by the Peasants' Revolt and the overthrow of Richard II, and France by the madness of Charles VI.

Henry V of England saw his chance in the civil war between two French factions, the Armagnacs and the Burgundians. He landed in Normandy in August 1415, took Harfleur and marched for Calais, but a much larger French army blocked his way at Agincourt. On 25 October 1415, on a muddy, narrow field between woods, Henry's archers and men-at-arms crushed the French. Henry then conquered all of Normandy in 1417–1419.

After the Dauphin's men murdered John the Fearless, Duke of Burgundy, in 1419, Burgundy allied with England. Under the Treaty of Troyes of 21 May 1420 the mad Charles VI disinherited his son, married his daughter Catherine to Henry and made him heir to the French throne. Henry died in August 1422, two months before Charles, and his infant son Henry VI was proclaimed king of both England and France. The map for 1422 shows the result: England and Burgundy held the north, including Paris, while the Dauphin Charles ruled only the lands south of the Loire.

In October 1428 the English besieged Orléans, the key to the Loire and the south. In early 1429 a peasant girl from Domrémy, Joan of Arc, convinced the Dauphin at Chinon that God had sent her to save France. She joined a relief army, and on 8 May 1429 the English abandoned the siege. Weeks later, on 18 June, the French routed an English army at Patay, and Joan led the Dauphin through enemy country to Reims, where he was crowned Charles VII on 17 July 1429. The blue dashed line follows her route.

Joan was captured by the Burgundians at Compiègne in May 1430 and sold to the English, who had her tried for heresy by a church court in Rouen. She was burned at the stake there on 30 May 1431, aged about 19. A later trial overturned the verdict in 1456, and she was made a saint in 1920.

The turning point came in 1435, when Philip the Good of Burgundy abandoned England at the Congress of Arras and made peace with Charles VII. Paris fell to the French in 1436. Charles built the first standing royal army and a strong artillery train, and in 1449–1450 he overran Normandy, winning at Formigny on 15 April 1450. Gascony followed. On 17 July 1453 the veteran English commander John Talbot attacked a fortified French camp at Castillon and was killed with much of his army by French cannon. Bordeaux surrendered on 19 October 1453, after three centuries under the English crown.

No peace treaty was ever signed, and English kings went on calling themselves kings of France until 1801, but the war was over. Calais remained English until 1558. Move the timeline from 1429 to 1453 to watch the English lands disappear.

The war helped turn England and France into nations: it gave both a sense of national identity, made English the language of the English court and government, and left France with a standing army and a royal tax system. Warfare changed too, from armoured knights to archers, infantry and gunpowder artillery. For the people of France, it meant more than a century of raids, sieges, plunder by unpaid soldiers and, on top of the Black Death, a sharp fall in population. Defeat turned England away from the continent and, within two years, into its own civil war, the Wars of the Roses.