Friday Reflection: Two Hundred Years' War
Michael Livingston on Battles, Transformations, and Forever Wars
Published on October 31, 2025
Synopsis
In this wide-ranging conversation, historian Michael Livingston reframes one of the most familiar conflicts in European history: the Hundred Years War. In Bloody Crowns: A New History of the Hundred Years War, he argues that the struggle between England and France did not last for one century but two—from 1292 to 1492. This “Two Hundred Years War,” as he calls it, was not a single conflict but a long chain of interlocking wars that redrew the map of Europe and helped create the modern state.
Livingston begins by rethinking the chronology. The traditional dating of 1337–1453, he notes, was invented in the nineteenth century and imposed retroactively. There was no declaration of war, no formal conclusion of peace, and no one in the Middle Ages who thought of themselves as fighting a single century-long conflict. For Livingston, the story begins in 1292, when a minor clash on a small Atlantic island off Brittany—one nameless man killed in a quarrel over fresh water—set off a spiral of reprisals between English and French forces. That spark led to the confiscation of English-held Gascony and, ultimately, two centuries of warfare. The story ends in 1492, when the Treaty of Étaples finally stabilized the borders of France and signaled the close of the medieval struggle for its crown.
Al and Livingston trace how this centuries-long conflict drew in all of Europe. The war’s theaters stretched from Scotland and the Low Countries to the Pyrenees, the Mediterranean, and the Baltic. England’s campaigns in France were bankrolled by Italian merchants; Flemish weavers and Iberian kings found their fortunes bound to the conflict’s outcome. From its earliest battles to the Wars of the Roses, the fighting infected nearly every part of the continent.
Along the way, they explore the evolution of warfare itself. From the tactical revolution of the longbow and the rise of professional armies, to the introduction of artillery and the first gunpowder sieges, the “Two Hundred Years War” forged the military world of early modern Europe. Livingston points to naval battles such as Sluys (1339), often forgotten but as decisive as Crécy or Poitiers, and the brutal chevauchées—raids of fire and terror that sought to destroy the enemy’s economy rather than capture territory.
The conversation ends by considering the war’s cultural and political legacy. The papacy fractured under the strain of prolonged conflict; standing armies and systems of taxation emerged to sustain it; and the experience of total, generational war changed what it meant to rule, to fight, and to be a nation. Livingston and Al note that such long conflicts reshape societies as deeply as they redraw borders. The Hundred Years War, in Livingston’s retelling, was not merely a story of kings and crowns, but the crucible from which modern Europe emerged.
Questions for Reflection and Discussion
Why does Michael Livingston reject the traditional dates of 1337–1453 for the Hundred Years War?
How does redefining it as a “Two Hundred Years War” change our understanding of medieval Europe?
What parallels exist between the war’s origins in 1292 and the outbreak of later global wars?
How did the economic interdependence of Europe—wool, wine, and banking—shape the war’s course?
In what ways did technology, from the longbow to gunpowder, transform the nature of medieval warfare? In what ways did it not?
Why did battles like Sluys or Poitiers fail to bring lasting victory despite their scale?
What impact did the war have on the papacy and the unity of Christendom? Was this ultimately a religious war? Why or why not?
How did Livingston argue that this conflict contribute to the emergence of standing armies and modern states?
How does this story challenge the idea of a “decisive battle”, or the idea/perception/myth that wars are clearly bounded?
Why does Livingston call it a “generational war,” and what lessons does that hold for today? As you think about it, are such wars normal rather than exceptional?
For Further Investigation
Michael Livingston, Bloody Crowns: A New History of the Hundred Years War (St. Martin’s Press, 2024)
—, Agincourt: Battle of the Scarred King (Osprey, 2022)
—, Crécy: Battle of Five Kings (Osprey, 2021)
Christopher Allmand, The Hundred Years War: England and France at War c.1300–c.1450 (Cambridge, 1988)
Anne Curry, The Hundred Years War (Macmillan, 2003)
Justine Firnhaber-Baker, House of Lilies: The Dynasty that Made France (Basic Books, 2024)
—, The Jacquerie of 1358: A French Peasant’s Revolt (OUP, 2022)
Catherine Hanley, Two Houses, Two Kingdoms: A History of France and England, 1100–1300 (Yale, 2022)
Clifford J. Rogers, War Cruel and Sharp: English Strategy under Edward III, 1327–1360 (Boydell, 2000)
Jonathan Sumption, The Hundred Years War (5 vols., University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999–2025)
Tags: Michael Livingston; Bloody Crowns; Hundred Years War; Medieval Warfare; England and France; Longbow; Gunpowder; Historically Thinking