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he could be stopped.

      His bouts of odd behavior came and went, but they became progressively longer and worse as he got older. He alternated between a listless stupor and frantic gaiety. Once he accidentally set fire to himself and several friends while playing a shaggy wild man at a masked ball, and his life was saved by a quick-thinking duchess who smothered him under her skirts. On his bad days, he urinated in his clothes, smashed furniture, and allowed his children to go ragged with neglect. For a while he believed he was made out of glass and would break if jostled.³

      Charles was too crazy to lead France at war, so peace broke out. Instead, the French royal family spent the next few decades killing each other in court intrigues as various relatives of the king fought over who was really in charge. Although Isabella, the German-born French queen, had been passionately in love with Charles at first, and continued trying to make an heir with him despite his dangerous behavior, she eventually started an affair with the king’s brother, the duke of Orleans. It continued until agents of the king’s uncle, Philip the Proud, duke of Burgundy, cut the king’s brother down in the streets of Paris.

       Hank Cinq

      After almost a full generation of peace, the new king of England, Henry V, decided to press the issue yet again. Hoping to take advantage of the chaos at the French court, Henry invaded France in 1415. After taking the port of Harfleur in a bloody assault (Shakespeare: “Once more into the breach . . .”), he hunted the French army on a long march through mud, rain, and clammy autumn weather. Disease and malnutrition slowed and weakened his army, and then the French army stood in his way, ready to fight, at Agincourt.

      Although outnumbered two to one (at least), the English took up a strong defensive position on a narrow field, with both flanks anchored in the woods. There they waited and tormented the French with clouds of arrows from English longbows. Angered beyond reason, the main line of dismounted French knights attacked while still under a deadly hail of arrows. When the two opposing lines of heavy infantry finally closed, the French were already tired, frustrated, and fewer. They were slaughtered.

      Meanwhile, behind the English line, a mob of French peasants raided Henry’s camp to loot and steal. With chaos unfolding behind him, Henry worried that the French prisoners of war under loose guard in his camp might rearm and attack his rear, so he ordered them killed. The English nobility refused to commit such a dastardly deed, so Henry told his archers—who were peasants and less squeamish about violating the rules of chivalry—to kill the prisoners. About the same time, the French army fled the field from Henry’s front and gave the English their victory.⁴

      With yet another slaughter of the French nobility complete, Henry was able to dictate the terms of peace. King Charles VI (the Mad) of France agreed that Henry should get the throne next, and to seal the deal, Henry married Charles’s daughter, Catherine.

      Here ends Shakespeare’s patriotic drama of Henry V’s glorious crusade—on a high note with England triumphant. Unfortunately, King Henry died before King Charles did, which left his baby son as the new king, Henry VI, of England. The treaty’s status was uncertain.

       Burgundy Breaks with France

      John the Fearless, the latest duke of Burgundy, had stayed out of the Agincourt campaign because his house was still feuding with the rest of the French royal family over who should get France after Charles the Mad died. In 1418, Burgundian forces seized Paris from King Charles’s garrison to show he was serious.

      The next year, the king’s teenage son, the dauphin (crown prince), met John the Fearless on the bridge at Montereau to negotiate a settlement, but the prince sprung a trap and killed him instead. Annoyed by the betrayal, the next duke of Burgundy switched to the English side of the war, bringing Paris with him. The dauphin fled to the countryside, so when Charles the Mad died in 1422, the dauphin was not able to upgrade his title to king. The English held Paris for their claimant to the French throne, the baby King Henry.

       Joan of Arc

      About this time (1429), a teenage peasant girl heard the disembodied voices of saints commanding her to arm herself, saddle up, and save France. This being the Middle Ages, Joan of Arc was not sedated and wheeled into a hospital room by worried relatives. Instead, she obeyed the voices and sought out the fugitive French court. After convincing the dauphin that she really did have saints whispering in her ear, Joan led an army against the English forces besieging Orleans, a vital crossing of the Loire River that (you will recall) had stopped Attila the Hun’s rampage a thousand years earlier (see “Fall of the Western Roman Empire”).

      Actually, the French situation at Orleans was not all that bad, nor did the English have an overwhelming advantage. The siege probably could have been broken if anyone had bothered to try; however, the French had all but given up. Morale was shot, and they had passively accepted that the city would fall. Joan’s arrival revived the French spirits. The French attacked and drove away the English.

      After the war moved into open country, Joan hounded the English army, waiting for a weakness to appear. Finally, at Patay, she caught the English before they had completely staked out their defensive line. The French attack slaughtered the English and captured most of their leaders. This opened the path to the city of Rheims, where new kings were traditionally crowned, so the dauphin became King Charles VII of France.^a

      In 1430, the Burgundians captured Joan and sold her to the English, who then rounded up compliant churchmen from Paris to put her on trial. Joan was found guilty of wearing men’s clothes and burned alive as a witch.

      Joan’s major contribution to the war had been to figure out that the French knights could beat the English hedgehog formation if they would stop being such idiots. The French code of chivalry demanded that they not back down from a fight, no matter how unfavorable their situation. The common theme running through the French defeats at Crecy, Poitiers, and Agincourt was a French charge against a strong English defensive position. It never occurred to the French to wait until they caught the English at a disadvantage. Joan had the moral authority to convince the knights to modify their rigid rules and to put more thought into their attacks. With divinely inspired encouragement, the French began to apply actual tactics to their war effort.⁵

       Endgame

      In 1435, Burgundy dropped its alliance with England. The war continued for almost twenty more years, but as the English territory on the continent eroded, the battleground shrunk as well. These smaller English holdings resulted in lower tax payments, which supported smaller armies that avoided taking any risks. When taxes were raised in England, the peasants rose up in anger. When taxes were lowered, the foreign mercenaries in the English army went home.

      Battles became fewer until the last battle was fought at Castillon in 1451, which also made history as the first battle in western Europe where guns made a difference. French cannon and muskets outfired the English longbows, opening a new era of warfare. Meanwhile, England got distracted by its own dynastic dispute (War of the Roses, 1455–85; death toll, 100,000), which kept the English too busy to invade France anymore.

       Legacy

      The Hundred Years War split France and England into two distinct countries, something that wasn’t always apparent before. On a map, the big change was that there were no longer huge bits of England in France.

      The main cultural legacy was that the English people started to abandon the Frenchness that had been hanging around since the Norman Conquest. As the wars dragged on, the English kings learned to stir up the bloodlust of their people by appealing to their patriotism and exhalting English culture over French. In 1362, Parliament was opened in English for the first time. Court proceedings were conducted in English after this as well. In 1404, out of a growing sense of nationalism, England decreed that negotiations with the French would be in neutral Latin instead of the enemy’s French.

      On the French side, the main result was political. The war had bled the French nobility white, and few were left alive to contest the power of the king. The final phase of the war had concentrated power in the Crown and made France about as close to a centralized

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