The Hundred Years' War: Origins and the Edwardian Phase (1337-1360)

The war that historians would later name the Hundred Years' War — a nineteenth-century label; no contemporary used the term for what was in truth a discontinuous series of conflicts punctuated by long truces — grew out of a dynastic dispute layered onto older territorial and economic tensions. When Charles IV of France died in 1328 without a surviving son, the last of three brothers to do so since 1316, Edward III of England claimed the French throne as Charles's nephew through his mother, Isabella of France. French jurists invoked the Salic Law, an old Frankish legal code, to bar succession through the female line, and the peerage instead crowned Philip VI of Valois, a decision Edward III initially accepted, paying homage for Aquitaine in 1329. Beneath the succession question lay a deeper irritant: as Duke of Aquitaine, the English king was technically a vassal of the French crown, an arrangement the English monarchy found humiliating, and economic rivalry over control of Flanders, on which both English wool exports and the Flemish textile industry depended, sharpened the antagonism further.