FREE JOAN OF ARC AND THE HUNDRED YEARS WAR,

JOAN OF ARC AND THE HUNDRED YEARS WAR,
by Deborah A. Fraioli

The Hundred Years War is the invention of historians living long after the time of the war itself. There is no truly compelling reason for lumping the conflicts that afflicted France and England between 1337 and 1453 together and then acting as if they constituted a single war, with an exact beginning and end, and a single character. It is a term of convenience, invented in the nineteenth century, and inaccurate at that, since the war lasted 116 years. One might even ask how many hundredyear wars there were and why only one is distinguished by giving it a
name. Should the real starting point be considered the Norman invasion of 1066, when the contradictory roles of being simultaneously French duke and English king first arose? Or did the war begin in 1152 when Eleanor of Aquitaine retrieved her rich estates from her first husband, the king of France, and brought her inheritance to her second husband, Henry II, king of England? Could the initial salvo have been the Treaty of Paris in 1259 whereby the king of England became the liegeman of the king of France for Aquitaine? The event that in fact sparked the Hundred Years War in 1337 was the seizure of Aquitaine by the king of France, but it was already the third such seizure in recent years.

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