Hundred Years' War, 1415–1453
Third phase of the Hundred Years' War / From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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The Lancastrian War was the third and final phase of the Hundred Years' War between England and France. It lasted from 1415, when Henry V of England invaded Normandy, to 1453, when the English were definitively defeated in Aquitaine. It followed a long period of peace from the end of the Caroline War in 1389. The phase is named after the House of Lancaster, the ruling house of the Kingdom of England, to which Henry V belonged.
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The early years of the Lancastrian War were dominated by the forces of the House of Plantagenet, who held the English throne and also claimed that of France. Initial English successes, notably at the Battle of Agincourt, coupled with divisions among the French ruling class, allowed Henry V to win the allegiance of large parts of France. Under the terms of the Treaty of Troyes of 1420, the English king married the French princess Catherine of Valois and was made regent of the kingdom and heir to the throne of France. A victory on paper was thus achieved by the English, with their claims now having legal standing. Some of the French nobility refused to recognise the agreement, however, and so military conflict continued. Henry V and, after his death, his brother John, Duke of Bedford, brought the English to the height of their power in France, with a Plantagenet crowned in Paris.
The second half of this phase of the war was dominated by forces loyal to the House of Valois, the French-born rivals of the Plantagenets who continued to claim the throne of France themselves. Beginning in 1429, French forces counterattacked, inspired by Joan of Arc, La Hire and the Count of Dunois, and aided by a reconciliation with the Dukes of Burgundy and Brittany, who had previously sided with the Plantagenets. Charles VII was crowned in Notre-Dame de Reims in 1429, and from then a slow but steady reconquest of English-held French territories ensued. Ultimately the English would be expelled from France, except for the Pale of Calais, which would be re-captured by the French a century later.
The Battle of Castillon (1453) was the final major engagement of the Hundred Years' War, but France and England remained formally at war until the Treaty of Picquigny in 1475. English, and later British, monarchs would continue to nominally claim the French throne until 1802 though they would never again seriously pursue it.