Everyone remembers the Hundred Years’ War for Henry V at Agincourt or the Black Prince cutting a glamorous, chivalric figure. That’s the highlight reel.
But the real architect of the war was Edward III.
He didn’t just inherit a conflict. He launched it, widened it, and sustained it for half a century.
Edward personally led armies in England’s earliest victories, dragged the dispute onto an international stage, and turned English warfare into something recognizably professional.
By the end of his reign, war with France wasn’t a minor episode; it was a system.
Edward III spent nearly 80% of his 50 year reign fighting the French and pillaging their countryside. Brutal, strategic, relentless.
For my money, he’s the most fascinating, and most underestimated, figure of the entire conflict.
What Was the Hundred Years’ War?
At its essence, the Hundred Years’ War is a very thrilling story, featuring longbowmen, princes behaving badly, and lots of knights. It actually lasted 116 years, not 100, from 1337 to 1453.
As well as transforming medieval warfare, the conflict sharpened distinct national identities, empowered the English Parliament, and consolidated the French monarchy. It fueled another few centuries of Anglo-French conflict and made war heroes out of Henry V and Joan of Arc.
At bottom, they were fighting over who had the right to rule France. England’s Edward III claimed the French crown through his mother, Isabella of France. The French, however, rejected inheritance through the female line and backed the Valois dynasty instead.
Layered on top of that dynastic fight were older feudal tensions. England still held lands in France, especially Aquitaine. And neither side could agree on whether the English king was a sovereign ruler there or a vassal owing obedience to the French crown.
The French were the favorites. They were the most powerful country in Europe, with a population and income that far outstripped England’s. France was the country of culture, and England was considered backward.
Before the war began, the throne was held by one of England’s most disastrous kings, Edward II.
His French wife, Isabella the “She-Wolf,” eventually deposed him (with her cohort Roger Mortimer) and seized power under her son Edward III.
England became a bit of a puppet nation. Still, the French Capetian line was unsteady.
After dismissing Edward’s claim through Isabella, the French settled on the last king’s cousin, Philip of Valois, as Philip VI in 1328. For a time, Edward III grudgingly paid homage to his obese and depressed great uncle.
Edward III’s Role in the Hundred Years War
A Young Edward
By 1937, however, Edward III was crowned at age 14. It didn’t take him long to assert himself, first against Isabella and Mortimer.
After participating in a few knightly tournaments where he wowed the crowd with his athleticism, a doughty Edward gathered a group of allies, executed Mortimer, and began to rule on his own.
One of his first acts, and a savvy one at that, was to pay homage to the tomb of King Arthur in Glastonbury. He summoned visions of the legendary king and modeled his friends on the Knights of the Round Table. Very good PR.
In 1337, Philip announced that he was confiscating the English Duchy of Aquitaine in revenge for Scottish defeat against Edward, Edward III issued a public manifesto against the French king. He accused them behaving unlawfully in France and plotting to invade England.
This declaration of war was bold, to say the least since England was by far the lesser power. Everyone in Europe expected Edward and England to lose, and lose badly.
He began not with a battle, but with a successful economic boycott. He banned wool from being exported to Flanders, France’s richest province. The cloth merchants of Ghent and Bruges were appalled and declared themselves neutral in the conflict.
Battles of Sluys & the Longbow
By 1338, the French fleet was being extremely troublesome. They burned Portsmouth to the ground that year.
In 1340, however, an opportunity emerged. Edward got word that the French were anchored off the Flanders port of Sluys. He prompted packed every English ship with infantrymen and longbowmen and sailed across the channel.
The longbow wasn’t new, but its use at scale was still revolutionary. It could be fired faster than the French crossbow, shot farther, and proved devastating when deployed in disciplined volleys.
So, the English rained down fire on the immobile French fleet. They were helped by Flemish allies who attacked the French from the read.
It was a bloodbath, and one of the greatest English naval victories of all time. Edward III’s admirals managed to capture all but 23 of the 213 ships. Between 16,000 and 18,000 French seamen and soldiers lost their lives.
Edward also hung the French admirals instead of issuing the customary ransom request. It was a brutal signal that this war would not be conducted by the old chivalric rules.
Then, he and his retinue went on a long pillaging tour of France.
Battle of Crecy
While his commanders secured parts of France, Edward amassed an invasion force and cannons and landed in Normandy in July 1346.
Claiming to be helping the “wretched fate of the French people,” he then proceeded to burn and loot properties as he went.
He paused at the forest of Crecy. By this point, the French king had to do something or lose face. So, he summoned up 25,000 men, outnumbering the English 3 to 1.
However, Edward relied on his longbowmen again, and they proved a superior force. The arrows were cleverly coupled with cannons, which marked the first use of artillery in a European military history.
A brilliant tactician, Edward hid them away, strapped under wagons, so the French never saw them. But this technology made the difference in the result.
The French kings mercenaries were killed and the king left with a bow in his face. Calais now belonged to the English, and its French citizens were expelled.
Edward’s 16 year old son had bravely commanded the front line. And, in fact, when the prince’s knights called for reinforcements, Edward III said “Let the boy win his spurs.” He was knighted right there and nicknamed the “Black Prince” for his black armor (or perhaps because of his reputation in France).
New Chivalric Order
After this victory, Edward III leaned even harder into his King Arthur obsession. At the height of the Black Death — and against his physicians’ advice — he staged a grand tournament at Windsor Castle.
The castle itself was reimagined as a kind of Camelot. Queen Philippa was presented as a Guinevere figure, and Edward formally launched the Order of the Garter.
The Order of the Garter was conceived as an elite chivalric brotherhood, modeled loosely on Arthur’s Round Table. Membership was strictly limited and reserved for the king’s closest companions and most trusted warriors, binding loyalty, honor, and military service directly to the crown.
It remains Britain’s highest order of chivalry and is still awarded today, with banners hanging in St. George’s Chapel.
In 1349, Edward bestowed the honor on his son, the Black Knight, the most famous knight in Christendom. This cemented both the order’s prestige and its dynastic symbolism.
Due to the spread of the Black Death across Europe in the late 1340s and early 1350s, Edward III put a temporary stop to his wars in both France and Scotland.
Edward III’s Greatest Victory: Poitiers
The next great battle came in 1356 at Poitiers, and it proved decisive. It was one of the most famous English victories of the war and shifted the balance firmly in England’s favor.
Once again, it was the Black Prince who prevailed. Outnumbered and cut off, his forces took up a strong defensive position, forcing the French to attack uphill through narrow lanes.
When the assault stalled, English longbowmen shredded the advancing knights, and a sudden counterattack finished the job.
The spoils were extraordinary. The English captured around 2,000 French noblemen, including King John II himself and his son Philip.
Even the French Crown Jewels fell into English hands. The prisoners were hauled back to England and paraded through London in a carefully choreographed display of humiliation.
As ransom negotiations dragged on, Edward III turned victory into spectacle. There were dances, hunts, hawking parties, lavish banquets, and tournaments. A rolling performance of dominance meant to impress both subjects and rivals.
In 1360, the Treaty of Brétigny sealed the outcome. Edward received a ransom worth roughly twenty times his annual revenue.
In return, he formally renounced his claim to the French throne. But still walked away with control of nearly a quarter of France.
The Aftermath
Meanwhile, with their king in captivity, authority in France unraveled. Uprisings flared among the bourgeoisie and peasantry, spreading from Paris across much of the kingdom.
When the French balked at honoring the ransom terms, the Black Prince launched one final chevauchée, pillaging the countryside between Calais and Paris in a last show of force.
Order returned only after King John’s death, when his son ascended the throne and began restoring royal authority. The tide slowly turned.
The Black Prince died of dysentery in 1376, having already ceded his authority in Aquitaine. Edward III followed a year later, his final months clouded by dementia.
By then, England had lost nearly all its French holdings. Only Calais remained. Was it all in vain?
The war dragged on for another 76 years and claimed tens of thousands more lives. Henry V briefly revived his great-grandfather’s glory at Agincourt in 1415. But when the conflict finally ended in 1453, Calais was all England had to show for it.
And yet, for a time, Edward III had done something remarkable. He transformed England from a defensive island kingdom into an aggressive European power.
He reshaped medieval warfare, and forged a model of kingship built on ambition, spectacle, and military success. Even when the gains proved temporary, the legend — and the standard he set — endured.
I hope you’ve enjoyed my guide to Edward III and the Hundred Years’ War. You may find these other English histories useful:
- The Battle of Hastings
- History of the War of the Roses
- History of Medieval and Tudor England
- Life of Mary Queen of Scots
- Life of Anne Boleyn
- Tudor queens of England
- Power Women of Medieval & Tudor England
- Meet the Plantagenets
- Historical Mistresses and Favorites
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