Hundred Years War in AP World History: Modern

1337: A throne claim tangled up in feudal loyalties

The disputed French succession was a major cause, but fighting began in 1337 after Philip VI confiscated Edward III's lands in Aquitaine. Edward formally claimed the French crown in 1340.

The succession dispute went back to 1328, when the main line of French kings died out. Edward III of England claimed the crown through his mother, Isabella, a French princess. The French nobility backed a different candidate, Philip VI of the Valois family.

The land dispute was feudal at its core. English kings held lands in France, especially Gascony in the southwest, and for those lands they were technically vassals of the French king. One ruler being both a king and another king's vassal is exactly the kind of overlapping, decentralized authority that defined medieval Europe.

That's why the war sits in Unit 1 (1200-1450), Topic 1.6: Europe from 1200 to 1450. The course asks you to explain why political power in Europe was fragmented and what followed from that. This war shows the fragmentation itself, and it also shows the forces that started pulling power back toward kings.

Longbows, the Black Death, and peasant revolts (1340s-1380s)

Early on, England won big at Crécy (1346) and Poitiers (1356). English longbowmen, many of them commoners, cut down mounted French knights. That was a blow to the feudal idea that war belonged to an armored noble class serving their lord.

The Black Death hit Europe in the middle of these campaigns, starting in 1347. With so many people dead, surviving workers could demand better terms, and that put pressure on the manorial system and serfdom. War taxes added to the strain. France saw the Jacquerie revolt in 1358, and England's Peasants' Revolt of 1381 was triggered by a poll tax.

This stretch gives you material for the Topic 1.6 objective on farming societies built on free and coerced labor. If a short-answer question gives you a chronicle passage about peasants rising up, the war's tax burden and the plague's labor shortage are your context.

From Agincourt to Orléans: the French recovery

After a quieter period, Henry V of England renewed the fighting and won at Agincourt in 1415. For a while, England controlled much of northern France.

The turn came in 1429, when Joan of Arc, a peasant girl who said she was guided by saints, helped lift the English siege of Orléans. Charles VII was then crowned king at Reims. Joan was captured and burned at Rouen in 1431, but French momentum continued. By 1453, England had lost all its French lands except the port of Calais.

Joan connects to the Topic 1.6 objective on how Christianity shaped European society. Her authority came from religious conviction, and her trial was run by churchmen. She's also useful evidence when a prompt asks about women's roles in this period.

What 1453 left behind: taxes, paid armies, national loyalty

The war's lasting effects are the most useful part for explaining political change in Europe. Kings needed steady money to fight for decades, so they leaned on repeated taxation and on assemblies like England's Parliament and France's Estates-General to approve it. In the 1440s, Charles VII built a permanent, paid royal army in France, so the king no longer had to rely on nobles bringing their own vassals. Gunpowder weapons also became more important in the later campaigns, another advantage for whoever could pay for them.

People in both kingdoms increasingly saw the enemy as a foreign nation rather than a rival lord. Shifting loyalty from local lords to a crown and a country is an early step toward the stronger monarchies that later fund exploration and empire after 1450.

On a Long essay about continuity and change in European governance, this is strong specific evidence. A thesis that earns the point might read: "Although Europe remained politically fragmented through 1450, the Hundred Years War pushed England and France toward centralization because monarchs replaced feudal levies with tax-funded professional armies." In a Document-based essay on state power, the war can serve as outside evidence beyond the seven documents. If the war appears in a multiple-choice question, use the source and question to identify the relevant historical process; causation and continuity and change are possible connections. Avoid answer choices that treat it as purely a religious war.

Mix-ups: the Thirty Years' War, and fragmentation vs. centralization

The names sound alike, but the Thirty Years' War (1618-1648) came almost two centuries later. It was fought mainly in the Holy Roman Empire and was rooted in Catholic-Protestant conflict after the Reformation. A dispute between England and France over land and the French throne, with knights and longbows, means the Hundred Years War.

The second trap is more subtle. Some answers say the war "ended feudalism" or instantly created nation-states. That overshoots. Feudal ties, serfdom in many regions, and Europe's patchwork of states all continued past 1453. Use the war as evidence that centralization was speeding up in two kingdoms, while Europe as a whole stayed divided.