Best Books on the Hundred Years War

The Hundred Years War is one of history's great misnomers. It lasted 116 years, from 1337 to 1453, and it was not a continuous war but a series of campaigns, truces, dynastic crises, and atrocities separated by years of uneasy peace. It produced two of the most famous figures of the medieval world, Henry V and Joan of Arc, and it ended with England driven almost entirely off the continent and France emerging as a centralized kingdom for the first time. The books below cover this conflict from different angles. Some focus on battles. Others on the political machinery behind them. One gives you the feel of what ordinary people in France and England actually lived through. ## A Distant Mirror by Barbara Tuchman This is where most readers should start. Tuchman follows the life of a fourteenth-century French nobleman, Enguerrand de Coucy VII, as a way of pulling the reader through the entire catastrophic century. The Black Death, the Hundred Years War, the Peasants' Revolt, and the corruption of the church all pass through this single life, and Tuchman makes each episode feel immediate rather than academic. The book is long and dense, but it earns every page. Tuchman had a gift for making medieval warfare, politics, and social life feel accessible without dumbing anything down. She also refuses to romanticize the period. The fourteenth century was brutal in ways that are hard to fully absorb, and she does not look away from any of it. What makes *A Distant Mirror* essential for understanding the Hundred Years War specifically is the French perspective. Most English-language histories of this conflict default to the English view. Tuchman corrects that imbalance. ## Henry V by Christopher Allmand For readers who want to understand the war's most famous moment, the Battle of Agincourt in 1415 and the extraordinary decade of English dominance that followed it, Allmand's biography of Henry V is the most thorough and reliable account available. Henry V is often reduced to the Shakespeare version: charismatic, heroic, a little ruthless but ultimately just. Allmand's Henry is more complicated. He was a genuinely skilled military commander and a canny political operator, but also capable of ordering the massacre of French prisoners, an act that still generates historical debate about whether it was militarily justified or simply a war crime. The book also covers the Treaty of Troyes in 1420, by which Henry was named heir to the French throne, the high-water mark of English ambition in France. Within two years, Henry was dead of dysentery at age 35. The entire edifice he built collapsed within a generation. ## Joan of Arc: A History by Helen Castor Joan of Arc has accumulated so many layers of myth, Catholic martyrdom, French nationalism, feminist symbolism, that getting to the actual historical person requires real effort. Castor makes that effort. Her account focuses on the political and military context that made Joan's rise possible. By 1429, France was losing. Charles VII, the Dauphin, had retreated to the south and was widely seen as a lost cause. Joan's appearance at this moment, her claim of divine mission, and her insistence on accompanying the army to relieve the siege of Orleans, was not just a religious event. It was a political one. She gave a demoralized faction something it desperately needed: a story about itself that made victory feel possible. Castor is clear-eyed about what we do not know. Joan's trial records are detailed, but they were produced by her enemies. Her inner life remains largely inaccessible. What Castor gives you is the sharpest possible picture of the world Joan moved through, which is the next best thing. ## The Shape of the Conflict A few things are worth understanding before you start any of these books: - **The dynastic claim.** England's claim to the French throne was legally complex and genuinely contested, not simply English aggression. Edward III believed he had a valid claim through his mother. - **Chevauchees.** Much of the fighting took the form of large-scale raids designed to devastate the French countryside and humiliate the French king by demonstrating he could not protect his subjects. These were not skirmishes. They were deliberate campaigns of destruction. - **The long aftermath.** The war ended in 1453, but it did not really end. It transformed into a period of intense rivalry and occasional conflict that shaped European politics for two more centuries. The books above give you all of that, and more. Each one is worth reading on its own, but read together they produce a picture of the medieval world that is hard to get anywhere else. **Further reading:** [Browse medieval history books on Skriuwer](/category/history)