ciekawa odpowiedź historyka Stuarta Gormana (chyba on napisał książkę o średniowiecznej kuszy):
cała dyskusja pod linkiem (jest tam też wyliczanka traktatów i rozejmów wojny stuletniej)I am a medieval historian who specializes in the Hundred Years War and is nearly finished a book on the Battle of Castillon and the end of the Hundred Years War. I mention this not to brag or show off my fancy credentials, but to say that how we discuss the scope and ending of the Hundred Years War is something I have spent a lot of time reading and thinking about. I think there is a fundamental misunderstanding here about what exactly the Hundred Years War is/was and that is where the disagreement has arisen from.
You mention that we are seeing this conflict with modern eyes and not the eyes of people living at the time, and you are correct but I'm not sure in the way you mean. The Hundred Years War is an entirely modern concept. The name Hundred Years War (or, to be more precise, Guerre de cent ans) was coined in the 19th century by French historians writing about this period of history, and then was adopted by historians more widely. Nobody living in the 14th or 15th centuries ever said Hundred Years War or even thought about the conflict in those terms. The notion of a single war that spans a hundred years is an entirely modern concept.
More recently, within the past 50 years, many historians have interrogated this framing and debated how useful the notion of the Hundred Years War is as a historical framework. A key aspect of this discussion has been trying to determine what separates this century (or so, because as we all know the war is more than a hundred years long) of Anglo-French conflict from what came before and after. After all, the kings of England and France had been in conflict basically ever since William the Conqueror became King William, and the two monarchies would continue to be in opposition until the end of the French monarchy. So what separates the war between 1337 and 1453 from other Anglo-French conflicts? Many historians have put forward alternative framings, sometimes splitting the Hundred Years War up into distinct sections - usually splitting the earlier Edwardian phase from the later Lancastrian phase - while others have instead emphasized a continuity in the war following on from previous conflicts. My book, in tracing some of the war's origins, goes back to the marriage of Eleanor of Aquitaine to Henry II and how the rise of Angevin power in England was a defining element of conflict between the two monarchies.
However, while these discussions have been very fruitful in spurring excellent historical analysis of how we view this period of history, many historians have also advanced very strong defenses of the framework of the Hundred Years War. A key aspect of this analysis has been to emphasize the way in which the Hundred Years War is almost an existential war - a war for the very idea of what France and England are. The Capetians were France's longest reigning dynasty and with their death in the early 14th century there was something of a crisis which opened the door for Edward III to claim the title of King of France as a direct descendant of the Capetians - we will leave aside the separate debate on how genuinely he felt about becoming king for the moment, because it is enough that he claimed that he was king. This is generally seen as the defining element of the Hundred Years War, the aspect of this conflict that separates it from the wars of Philip IV (for example).
I'm going to skip over a whole books worth of historiographical debate and move to the next problem that arose. If we accept that the HYW is defined by the English monarchies claim to be the Kings of France, then when does the war end? The claim was only given up in 1803, at a time when both the notion of King of England and King of France had ceased to exist. But no one would seriously argue that the Hundred Years War ended with Napoleon, so if this is what separates the start of the HYW apart how do we define the ending?
The core tension between the French and English monarchies since the Norman invasion was the problem of how the King of England was simultaneously a monarch and a vassal of the French king because of his title of Duke of Normandy (and then other titles later). William himself tried to solve this by splitting his reign, but Henry I ultimately took back control of Normandy and the problem persisted. The HYW is a continuation and escalation of this conflict, with the English monarchs deciding that they did not owe fealty to the French king because they themselves were the French king. Given that this is the long thread of the conflict, many historians have considered the moment when England lost its French titles forever to be the moment this thread snapped. Essentially, when Charles VII drove the English from all of France except Calais - an isolated fortress that was effectively an English enclave on the continent - they had ended a long history of the English monarchy as both kings and lords in France.
This does not mean that England gave up on their titles - as I already said they kept claiming them even after the merging of England and Scotland in 1707 and after the death of Louis XVI in the French Revolution - but they would never pose the same kind of threat to France nor would there ever be a serious effort to entertain the idea of restoring the English monarch to any of their old titles. The old arguments would persist, essentially as propaganda, but the nature of Anglo-French war had changed. This is why historians don't see treaties in 1475, 1492, or 1514 as being part of the Hundred Years War. Edward IV's invasion in 1475 was much more about how Louis XI had backed Henry VI's return to England, which had gone disastrously, and pressure on Edward to show strength against the French than it was about an actual attempt to reassert English rule over France. English monarchs would revive the claim as a sign of prestige and to bask in the nostalgia of past victories but no one expected them to ever be restored to the title of Duke of Gascony, let alone acquiring the French throne.
But to really boil things down to their core, while there is a lot of very interesting discussion to be had around how we view the history of Anglo-French conflict, we are as historians necessarily applying modern frameworks to past events where they did not naturally exist. This is done for may practical as well as academic reasons, books can only be so long, and grouping events together can provide very valuable insight. When we talk about the Hundred Years War, we are talking about a historiographical construct, and that construct is the conflict between 1337 and 1453. We can pull at threads that extend before or after that war, but at that point we are creating a new (as yet nameless) paradigm. The Hundred Years War was that period of history, and to abandon that framework completely is to render the name and concept meaningless. If we cannot agree on the dates of the HYW how can we have a meaningful conversation about it? There are historians who prefer to cast aside the framework entirely (even if they sometimes still use the name in book titles, because the HYW has a stronger brand than "The Edwardian-Valois War") but it is far too late to undertake a radical redefinition of the war's name. Maybe we could have done it in 1850, but by now it is too late. The Hundred Years War is the conflict from 1337-1453, a different framework necessitates a different name. The Hundred Years War was already over a hundred years long, extending it to be 150 years is really pushing the limits of that name past the breaking point.
https://boardgamegeek.com/thread/325643 ... o-much-fun