France and the Hundred Years War

Edward III’s Scottish campaign was arguably already grinding to a stalemate by 1337 when a far more ambitious prospect of war presented itself. Ever since 1328 and the death of King Charles IV of France without an heir, there had been a prospect that Edward III, son of Isabella of France and therefore the eldest living grandson of Philip IV of France, might be regarded as right claimant to the French throne, in preference to Philip of Valois, Charles IV’s cousin, who in 1328 had stepped in as King Philip VI, the first of the Valois kings. Edward’s claims had passed through the female line, but the so-called ‘Salic’ law, forbidding inheritance by women, was not cited in Valois propaganda until 1413, as part of a later attempt to revive defunct early-medieval law codes to justify the exclusion of Isabella and Edward from the French royal line. Even so, the English claim to the throne of France was not nearly so strong as might be supposed. Women claimants, even those themselves the daughters of kings, had been excluded both in 1316, following the death of the six-day-old King Jean I ‘the posthumous’ (the first time that the Capetian bloodline had failed in more than 300 years), and again on at least three occasions, following the deaths of the last of the Capetian kings in 1322 and 1328. Both in 1325 and in 1329 to Philip VI, Edward had performed homage for his lands in France, which by this stage included not only Gascony and the southernmost remnant of the old Angevin empire of Henry II, but the county of Ponthieu, on the mouth of the river Somme, acquired as part of the dower of Edward I’s wife, Eleanor of Castile.

It had been as a result of his landing in Ponthieu, in 1066, that Harold had been taken captive and handed over to the Normans, a scene famously illustrated in the Bayeux Tapestry. It was from the port of St-Valery, within sight of Ponthieu, that the Norman fleet had embarked for England in 1066. Now, in 1337, it was because of Ponthieu and his own connections, by blood to the Capetian throne of France, and by marriage to Philippa, daughter of the Count of Hainault (in modern-day Belgium), that an English king for the first time contemplated a reverse restaging of the Norman Conquest, leading an English army across the Channel for what was intended as a full-scale ‘conquest’ of France. Like William I in 1066, Edward possessed a claim to the French throne that was very far from secure. Like William, he had to rely on propagandists to boost his cause, upon foreign allies to sustain him in hostile territory, and ultimately upon the fortunes of war controlled by God to determine the justice of his claim.