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The Hundred Years War offers an opportunity to consider strategy in the context of medieval European warfare in general, while also considering the specifics of the Anglo‐French conflict of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Between 1337 and 1453, English armies invaded and occupied France with the ostensible aim of enforcing the English kings' claim to the French throne. In Chapter 4, Anne Curry explains why certain strategies were chosen at particular points, noting that strategic decisions in medieval warfare often appeared to result from personal choices by kings and princes at particular moments in time, with little attention to theory or to ‘lessons of history’. Throughout the period, rulers and commanders viewed warfare not simply as action against armies, with the ultimate goal of prevailing in battle. Instead, they also sought to demoralize the population, reduce economic sustainability, and weaken political authority through shifting alliances with continental rulers.

This chapter discusses how the recourse to exile entered a crisis during the mid-fourteenth century. It suggests that forces conspired to bring the system of extra-regnal abjuration between England and France almost to an end by the close of the Hundred Years' War. In the first place, such deportations were tantamount to acts of belligerency during the war. The exiles and potential exiles, felons all, were also volunteering for and being recruited to England's armies for the sake of pardons and then demobilized in France during the truces. Fear of Englishmen among the French population rose to an intensity not matched or exceeded until the aggressive and lethal rivalries of the Napoleonic era.

This chapter begins the investigation into the diversification of hostageship after the year 1000. The most striking change is the reappearance of female hostages. Only a handful of examples survive from Late Antiquity and fewer still from the eighth to the tenth centuries; by 1200 they are routine. The appearance of female hostages marks a shift of hostageship out of the framework of family and alliance that predominated in the early Middle Ages and into one that was at once more de-individualized, commercialized, and bureaucratic. The chapter examines how hostages become important not as individuals, but as representatives of larger groups; how they developed new roles in the conduct of warfare, particularly concerning ransom and conditional respite; and finally how they spread from the realm of war, politics, and diplomacy into the world of financial transactions.

Book IV includes private devotions, meditations, and autobiographical details, with many images drawn from St. Birgitta's own domestic world. Many of the important revelations deal with justice, judgment, and the law, and there are graphic depictions of purgatory that later became popular in 15th-century England. There are political messages addressed to individuals, including comments proposing a solution for the Hundred Years' War. There are continued attacks on the lapsed and laxity of the church, and there are concerns about the state of Rome. The last fourteen revelations in Book IV form a separate tract, known as the Tractatus revelacionum beate Birgitte ad sacerdotes ad summos pontifices (Tract of the Revelations of St. Birgitta on the Subject of Priests and Popes), which gathers together comments on individual contemporary popes during their residence in Avignon.

From the late 13th century, with gathering momentum in the early 14th, many parts of Latin Christendom experienced a marked upsurge in eremitical inclinations, which gained realization in ways of life offered by a range of religious orders both new and established: Paulines in Hungary, Celestines in central Italy and France, Olivetans in Tuscany, Jeronimites a little later in Spain, and not least the Carthusians. From the initial nucleus in the western Alps, the Carthusians during their first century had established some thirty houses, widening their network gradually further afield by attracting princely patronage to include 60 houses by the end of their second century. From the 1280s the Order generated a phenomenal expansion: ninety-one foundations in the course of its third century with a further sixty-seven from the 1380s, bringing the total of extant houses in 1520 to 194. The most intense phase of expansion came in the second quarter of the 14th century, with at least one new house founded almost each year. This chapter discusses patronage of the Carthusians as a somewhat paradoxical expression of cosmopolitan culture and identity during the Hundred Years War between England and France.

This chapter introduces the debate on war and state formation in early modern Europe, and describes the societies and governments of Tudor England and the Habsburg Netherlands. It analyses the legacies of the Hundred Years War and the Wars of the Roses for England, and the formation of the Burgundian state for the Netherlands. It briefly narrates the reigns, wars, and peace treaties of the period 1477-1559. In these, England and the Netherlands both repeatedly fought France, but other polities such as Scotland, Guelders, and the German Protestant principalities, and other peoples such as the Gaelic Irish and the Frisians were drawn into a web of dynastic warfare, civil wars, and rebellions.

When questioning how far political change and conflict affected the growth of diplomatic and administrative practices in late Medieval Europe, and how human agency contributed to bureaucratic reforms, especially with regard to record-keeping, the outbreak of the Hundred Years’ War in 1337 ought to be considered as a major turning-point. This chapter specifically focuses on Pope Benedict XII (1334–42) to see how the outbreak of the conflict between England and France impacted on Anglo-papal diplomatic discourse and practice during his pontificate. First, it addresses the Anglo-papal diplomatic relations in the period 1335–42. Second, it focuses on the chancery records of the English crown, especially the Roman rolls and the so-called Treaty rolls, which enroll most of the diplomatic correspondence exchanged between England, the papal curia, the Empire, and France in the 1330s, as well as other diplomatic documents. These records will be investigated to question how diplomatic and administrative practices provided a satisfactory means to inform the diplomatic discourse between England and the papacy, especially within the political milieu that characterized the first few years of the Anglo-French conflict, itself notoriously subject to sudden changes of alliances.

The book concludes with the two most celebrated symbols of Anglo‐French nation‐building, Jeanne d'Arc and Shakespeare's Henry V. Jeanne's story occurs in the last stages of the Hundred Years War, in a period where early modern historians have conventionally sought to locate the birth of nationhood. Reclaimed repeatedly for different ideological ends, her case exemplifies the contortions and contradictions of nationalist assertion. Shakespeare acts with analogous power to articulate a drama of nation that has proved infinitely appropriable to modern histories of English and Englishness. Just as Chaucer has been used retrospectively to create an incipient Englishness well before its time, so Shakespeare's French Catherine has served as a type of subservient Frenchness to an inflated English patriotism. Yet in both writers we see a long history of creative linguistic friction that bears witness to the contrariness of the categories of ‘English’ and ‘French’ in the medieval period.

Although the conflict evident in the Hundred Years War between France and England may have been related to the Realpolitik aspirations of both parties, the conflict fundamentally involved a dispute for rights. During Henry V's term, legalism in negotiations which involved both the state councils, and propaganda reached its peak and was not merely about issues concerning marriage, dowries, territories, and other such issues, as Henry could have easily obtained a generous dowry. Although the French Ambassador may have appealed to the Henry's Chancellor Beaufort, Henry's French inheritance made compromise efforts difficult if not completely impossible, so that the war could not be stopped easily. Looking into earlier events, though, exposes how the royal courts of both England and France had already made attempts to achieve positions in law and were able to gain authority to express their claims regarding legal principle.

This chapter considers the military service of knights in the Hundred Years War; their commitment to warfare; how often they fought; how long careers in arms were; why they served; their variety of service (land expeditions, naval service, garrison service). What was their place in the military retinue? How militarized were they as a group? What proportion of the knightly class served in warfare? Did they serve continuously or occasionally? Can they be described as professional? We also question whether they became demilitarized during our period. Was military service linked to the knight’s position and were men knighted as a result of military service? We describe their function in English armies as men-at-arms, their leadership roles, and their recruitment role

A profound alteration of England’s foreign and military policies in 1689 led to a century and more of global warfare with France which ended only in 1815. This reorientation of British priorities was accomplished not by the Glorious or bloodless Revolution of Whig mythology, but by a Dutch invasion of England resulting from the largest joint military and naval amphibious operation ever launched in early modern Europe. The decision to declare the throne of England vacant and to offer the crown to William III, prince of Orange, and thus commit England to a mainland war, was taken by the Convention Parliament while London was under Dutch military occupation. James II, whose courage had been so resolute in earlier military and naval battles, lost heart as his senior officers deserted, and he and his army never offered resistance.

The first chapter examines how in 1400 Gower oversaw and ultimately withdrew his last ambitious project, the Trentham manuscript (British Library MS Additional MS 59495) conceived for the recently crowned Henry IV. I show that the Trentham manuscript remained in Gower’s possession at the monastery of St Mary Overy in Southwark, where he lived and died. It started out as a trilingual collection for the king, offering the new ruler robust advice on foreign policy, yet Gower chose not to present this work, instead withdrawing from public life. Henrici Quarti primi, the final poem in this manuscript, which I argue is written in Gower’s own hand, features the poet’s most personal self. The trilingual Trentham manuscript, just as Gower’s trilingual tomb in Southwark Cathedral, is an indexical work, explained only through recourse to Gower himself.

This chapter discusses the earliest stages of the decline of marriage diplomacy by focusing on the most important marriage treaty during the Reformation: the 1559 Peace of Cateau–Cambrésis, which ended more than a half century of war between France and Spain. That war and its eventual resolution looked like a replay of the later phases of the Hundred Years War of 1337–1453. Proponents of the treaty used the new medium of print to interpret Philip II's marriage to Elizabeth de Valois according to the centuries-old discourse of Virgilian peacemaking. The chapter also examines changes in religion and the dissemination of diplomatic literacy to an expanding political nation whose interests diverged from those of ruling dynasts. It concludes by showing how diplomats and heads of state availed themselves of several marriage treaties in their efforts to end the Hundred Years War.