Chronicles

The term “Hundred Years War” is something of a misnomer. Rather than a continuous conflict, it was a series of wars between England and France from 1337 to 1453. The immediate reason for the war started with the death of King Charles IV of France in 1328 without a son or brother to succeed him. By then, the French laws of succession followed what was known as the “Salic Law,” which barred any woman from inheriting the crown of France no matter her relationship to the previous king. However, the question of whether a claim to the French throne could be passed down to the male descendants of a female member of the royal family was unsettled. On this basis, when Charles IV was succeeded by his cousin, who became King Philip VI, King Edward III of England claimed he was the rightful king of France because his mother Isabelle was Charles IV’s sister.

However, there were also two wider motives for the war. The first was the desire to recover lost territories in France that once belonged to the kings of England. As a result of various inheritances over the centuries, the kings of England once held the territories of Normandy in northern France and Aquitaine, Gascony, Anjou, and other lands in southern and western France, a collection of lands historians label the Angevin Empire.