The Hundred Years' War lasted 116 years
The conflict called the Hundred Years' War ran from 1337 to 1453.
Established2 min read
Edward III claimed the French crown in 1337. The last English-held city in Gascony, Bordeaux, fell in 1453. The difference is 116 years. Inside that bracket are stretches of open fighting, long truces, the Black Death, and Joan of Arc, which is why no one who lived through it thought of it as one war with a tidy label.
Historians sometimes move the endpoints — a little earlier for the tensions, a little later for the English loss of Calais in 1558. Under the conventional name and the conventional dates, a hundred is simply the wrong count. It was already wrong when the name stuck.
Caveats
- It was not 116 years of continuous battle. It was a dynastic conflict with interruptions.
- Alternative brackets exist. None of the serious ones equals 100.
Sources
- 1Sumption J.. The Hundred Years War, volume I. University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990.