Hundred Years' War: Salic Law, the Mad King and Castillon's Cannons

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English kings were sovereign at home but, as holders of the Duchy of Aquitaine, vassals who had to kneel to the French crown. When Charles IV died without a male heir in 1328, Edward III was his closest male relative through his mother, but French nobles and University of Paris lawyers revived Salic law to bar inheritance through a woman and crowned Philip VI of Valois. Edward paid homage, then claimed the French throne after Philip confiscated Gascony in 1337. At Sluys in 1340 the French chained their ships into a fixed wall, and the English waited for the tide and the sun at their backs before boarding them one by one. Crécy in 1346 and the capture of Calais followed.

The Black Death killed up to 60 percent of the French population, and English chevauchées targeted the tax base until John II was captured at Poitiers in 1356, which plunged France into the Jacquerie. Charles V and Bertrand du Guesclin refused pitched battles, and Charles V used Gascon appeals against the Black Prince's hearth tax. Under the mad Charles VI, civil war between Armagnacs and Burgundians opened the way for Henry V's Agincourt in 1415 and the Treaty of Troyes in 1420. Joan of Arc had Charles VII crowned at Reims, and Burgundy changed sides at Arras in 1435.

• English longbowmen at Sluys fired into a French fleet that could not move and whose crossbowmen were blinded by the sun.
• At Crécy, French knights charged uphill over their own retreating Genoese crossbowmen.
• Charles VI attacked his own knights and believed he was made of glass.
• Henry V died of dysentery at 35, leaving the dual monarchy to the nine-month-old Henry VI.
• At Castillon in 1453, Jean Bureau's artillery broke John Talbot's charge, and Charles VII went on to build a permanent paid army.