Jonathan Sumpton on the Hundred Years’ War: “It was Joan of Arc who persuaded the French that they could win”

They felt that the English had no support in France except from traitors, but the striking thing is that the English had a lot of support in the areas that they occupied until they started losing, particularly in Normandy.

This was a very early example of a military occupation, and the English absolutely grasped the fact that they had to win the hearts and minds of the subjects in order to survive. They did that, initially, simply by providing an effective government and a working system of law.

This had been completely missing in previous decades because France was in the middle of a civil war, and neither party to that war could supply that effective government.

As you alluded to there, when we’re talking about the Hundred Years’ War, France was not united, was it?

That’s absolutely right. The English only ever got a secure foothold in France when it was divided by civil war. The 15th century witnessed the most serious civil war that France had ever experienced – between supporters of the Duke of Burgundy and supporters of the monarchy [led by Charles VII, still known as the Dauphin] – and the English got into France under the cover of that war.

The Hundred Years’ War continued until, in the 1450s, the French were able to suppress domestic rebellions. They firstly detached the Burgundians from the English cause in the 1430s, then they progressively reduced the aristocracy to powerlessness. By the beginning of the 16th century, the English could no longer get a foothold because they could never find any domestic support.

This volume begins in the aftermath of Henry V’s death. How decisive a moment was this?

It was crucial because Henry V had been a remarkable ruler. Not only had he been an extremely efficient soldier and administrator, but his rather austere sense of justice and rectitude had been very attractive in a country that had experienced a decade of civil war and anarchy. So his death was a misfortune; what turned it into a disaster was the fact his heir was a baby [Henry VI], incapable of ruling.

The English were able to recover some ground because [Henry V’s brother] John, Duke of Bedford was ruling as regent in the English-occupied parts of France. He was one of the most remarkable figures of the late Middle Ages: a very rare example of a good uncle.

Medieval history is full of bad uncles, but the duke was an outstanding patriot who devoted his entire life to the service of his infant nephew. Unfortunately, the duke died in 1435. Things were already going badly at that point because of the extraordinary eruption onto the scene of Joan of Arc, but it got even worse after Bedford died.

As you say, in the 1420s the English were actually doing fairly well in military terms. Do you think we sometimes neglect this period in favour of more famous episodes like Agincourt?

We undoubtedly do. In the first two years after Henry V’s death, the Duke of Bedford and his generals succeeded in winning two major battles. One at Cravant, in northern Burgundy, and one at Verneuil, in southern Normandy.

The main significance of Cravant was that it destroyed the Scottish army operating in France which had, for four years, made life very difficult for the English. But the decisive moment was the battle of Verneuil in 1424, when the English defeated the largest army that the Dauphin had succeeded in assembling so far, including a whole new army recently arrived from Scotland.

It destroyed the morale of the French, it boosted the reputation of the English in the territories that they occupied, and for the next five years, until Joan of Arc’s appearance, the English had it almost entirely their own way.

Joan of Arc is, of course, a pivotal figure in this story. A lot has been written about her over the years, but what’s your take?

The fashion in recent years has been to belittle the contribution that Joan made to the war, but I think it was fundamental. She came onto the scene at a time when morale in the French government and its army was at rock bottom. They were, as they saw it, on the verge of losing the city of Orléans, which would have been a major disaster.

There was even talk within the French government of abandoning large parts of western France to the English. What Joan did was to persuade the French that they could win.

Napoleon once said war is three-quarters morale, and that is very much borne out by the story of Joan of Arc. She did not command armies, she rarely determined strategy and she did not even wield a sword in anger.

So what did she do? She persuaded French soldiers that God was bound to give them victory because they were the virtuous side. In addition, because she believed so totally in her visions and her guiding saints, she was completely impervious to danger and perfectly happy to place herself in a position where there was a high risk of being killed. Yet she survived.

People who saw this realised that they were in the presence of somebody remarkable. The Count of Dunois, the chief French commander, later said that before Joan came along, 200 Englishmen could defeat 1,000 Frenchmen. Whereas afterwards, the story was reversed: relatively small forces of French could defeat whole English armies.

And that wasn’t just a French point of view: the Duke of Bedford said that everything had been going fine until this “witch” came along who had deprived the English of their courage and boosted the self-confidence of the French. So you have a complete consensus that Joan was a critical figure.

One thing is clear: the march on Reims, to crown the dauphin as Charles VII [in 1429], was her strategy. All the experienced soldiers in the Dauphin’s court advised against it, but by that time she had achieved such a hold on the Dauphin’s mind that she made him do it.

The coronation was a seminal event because it conferred a measure of legitimacy on the Dauphin, which he hadn’t had before. Although he had been proclaimed king in 1422, he was normally referred to as the Dauphin – not just by the English but by many French leaders and even Joan herself.

After the coronation, he was referred to as the king and a great majority of people, including many of the English and the French in English service, now regarded him as king and the English as interlopers. That was a very big psychological change – and psychology matters in war.

Your book also covers Joan’s trial and execution. As a former judge, what’s your view on the legal proceedings against her?

It’s difficult for modern people to get into the mentality of her judges, because she was charged with offences – heresy, blasphemy, witchcraft and so on – which nowadays we regard as absurd and fanciful. But you have to remember that, at the time, both sides viewed her as a miracle worker.

The French regarded her as having achieved miracles because she was the instrument of God for the salvation of France. The English tried to blunt the moral effect of the French victories by portraying them as the work of Satan.

Her judges, who were pro-Burgundian French, could not accept that her visions and achievements were inspired by God. It was always clear that once she was accused of blasphemy, of misusing the name of God, she was going to be condemned, because the alternative would have been to accept that she had a God-given mission to expel the English from France.

The procedures themselves strike most of us as extremely unfair because they pitted a 19-year-old, uneducated girl against trained theologians, philosophers and academics, who were trying to fit her into established categories of heretical belief and behaviour. But although the trial was a very unequal battle, she acquitted herself with extraordinary skill.

Reading the transcripts is a remarkable experience because we have an almost verbatim record of the many days of cross-examination that she endured at the hands of hostile judges. And she was articulate; she understood what was going on. She would say things like: “That question is irrelevant to your inquiry.” Or: “I already answered that five minutes ago,” or sometimes she would simply say: “Next question please.” This kind of conduct coming from an uneducated but very self-confident woman was extremely disconcerting to the judges.

When Joan was executed in 1431, the war still had more than 20 years to run, but had the tide decisively turned?

Yes it had. Before Joan came along, the English controlled more or less the whole territory north of the Loire. The result of the march on Reims was that the French were able to take control of the bridge towns over the Marne, east of Paris, and to seize the territory north of Normandy.

So, for the first time in many years, the French were in control of the territory north and south of Normandy and north and south of the Paris area. The English had to fight in Normandy on two fronts; sooner or later, that was a situation in which they were bound to lose.

The English were on the defensive, and they didn’t have the resources to clear the French from the territories that they had conquered in the time of Joan of Arc. The inevitable result was that their territory would be nibbled away until they were left with nothing.

The traditional end of the Hundred Years’ War is 1453. What happened then?

That was the year in which the French, having already conquered Normandy three years earlier, finally completed the conquest of Gascony. The English kings had controlled this territory in south-western France since the 12th century. It was their oldest possession in France and, in fact, the English had held it for longer than any of their subsequent colonies, other than the island of Jamaica. The conquest of Gascony meant that, with the exception of Calais, England no longer had a foothold in France.

In England, the Wars of the Roses followed hot on the heels of the Hundred Years’ War. Did one beget the other?

The common cause in both cases was the incapacity of Henry VI. But there was also rage and disappointment and a desire for scapegoats for the loss of Normandy and Gascony. The English looked back at the victories of Henry V, and could not believe that such a dramatic reversal of their fortunes could have happened without treachery on the part of Henry VI’s ministers.

Conversely, had there been popular support for the French campaigns in England when things had been going well? English sentiment was ambivalent. There was popular support for the war, provided that they did not have to pay for it through their taxes.

For years they took the view that English taxpayers ought not have to pay for wars that their king was fighting in his capacity as king of France. After 1428, they became more realistic, but would never fund the war on the scale required.

The people most affected by the war were those living in the battleground regions of France. What was life like for them?

It was terrible. The physical destruction is difficult to imagine. The problem was not just the size of the armies, which by modern standards were quite small. But each army was followed by numerous camp followers and people who were non-combatants but pretty violent all the same. In addition, in areas where the army passed through, law and order broke down completely. The land was taken over by roaming bands of brigands.

The symptoms could be seen in the landscape. There were large tracts of northern France where you couldn’t see any sign of human habitation – just domestic animals left roaming free in areas that had been totally depopulated.

You could also see it in the towns and villages. During the 13th century the towns had expanded beyond their walls and developed large suburbs. Many of these had to be demolished so as not to give cover to an attacking army. This left people crammed inside the walls of towns, in accommodation that was only sufficient for about a third of them, and very large numbers fled these areas for other parts of France.

There were the knock-on effects, too. Often, food could not be moved by river or road, so even in times of plenty some regions starved. When there was a bad harvest, it was much worse. Undernourished people were vulnerable to disease and there were major epidemics in the towns and countryside.

We know from reports of travellers after the English left that France was a picture of desolation. English judge Sir John Fortescue, who was forced into exile during the Wars of the Roses, said that it was depressing travelling through northern France, because here was one of the richest countries in the world and yet peasants were starving in their villages.

This is the final volume in a series you’ve been working on for over 30 years. Taken as a whole, why do you think the Hundred Years’ War is such an important event?

It is important because it separated England and France after four centuries in which their fortunes had been closely intertwined, and set them on divergent paths – France an aggressive absolute monarchy, England a chastened parliamentary state.

Taking a broader view, from the origins of our species until the 19th century, the two principal collective activities of mankind were religion and war. Religion and war have created the state as we know it. In the late Middle Ages the English and French were beginning to have governments that can be recognised as essentially the same in their objectives, and often their methods, as the modern state.

It was the pressure of war – increasingly war, rather than religion – that created the state and built it into the great tax-collecting, money-spending and aggressive institution that it remained until recently. That’s why the Hundred Years’ War is so interesting.

William Pitt once observed that the principal weapon of war is money, and many people have pointed out that war is won at least as much by administrators as it is by soldiers. The Hundred Years’ War exemplifies this. It was a complete war, in the sense that we’re not just looking at armies, but the efforts of entire populations.

Your books are often held up as paragons of narrative history. Is this form of history writing as important today as when you began the series?

There was a period when narrative history was despised by serious academics. That period has ended, and there are now major works of narrative history by professional academic historians. But I’m not suggesting that analytical and thematic history has become less important. I think what people have realised is that to understand a society, the first building block has to be a deep understanding of what actually happened.

What I have tried to do is to mix a narrative of what happened with an explanation of why it happened, based on a study of how people lived, how they thought, how they governed and how they conducted themselves in one of the great crises of the two major countries of western Europe. So it’s not just narrative history – at least that has been my objective.

And will it be the Thirty Years’ War next for you?

I’m not confident enough in my longevity!

You can listen to Jonathan Sumpton talk to Rob Attar on the HistoryExtra podcast here. This article was first published in the October 2023 issue of BBC History Magazine