Did the english profit from the 100 years war?

[Mooks]

Iv been wondering if the english profited from the 100 years war with france. Both long term and short term. Was the amount of plunder from france make up for all the resources it expended in fighting in france? Would they have done better if they didnt cross the channel at all?

[Rodion Romanovich]

Pillaged stuff would typically not go 100% to the king, but also be distributed among nobles and soldiers. Moreover, a one-time income source like pillage isn't really as good as a continuous income source, and often tends to get spent fairly quickly on one-time expenses. In total, the war led to English loss of a lot of land in modern France, so hardly a success in the end. In the short term, while the English were advancing, it was clearly beneficial because they held the land they held before the war + some more land + some pillage, which is obviously more money than simply holding the land they held before the war, on the other hand one must subtract for costs in logistics etc. that come with running a war, but there was probably still some short term benefit.

I'm not sure how many years of controlling the English pre-war possessions in France it would take the earn the same amount of money as the total amount of pillage that went to the king was worth, but I guess it was probably not too many decades...

[Innocentius]

Well, the English lost almost all of their possessions in continental Europe, and were thrown into a on-and-off civil war lasting for some thirty years, so No.

There's a lot more to it than that of course, but from the basic outlines of the events after the war, it doesn't seem like the English profited very much from the Hundred Years' War.

[Incongruous]

No, but the French king did. rather funny in a nerdy history way:laugh4: :sweatdrop:

(I actually did laugh when I thought about it.)

[Geoffrey S]

Long run? Yes. The war made it necessary for successive kings to listen to his subjects and if he wanted the increasing amounts of money necessary to sustain the war effort. As this dependence grew, so did the influence of the cities and nobles. So yes, I do think the English profited in the end.

[Rodion Romanovich]

Dependency on nobles is hardly a beneficial thing for a king... in what sense did you mean?

[Mooks]

Dependency on nobles is hardly a beneficial thing for a king... in what sense did you mean?

Maybe its beneficial for the people? Being a ignorant american myself, I dont know much british history myself, but is he reffering to the british having more freedom due to the weakening of the monarchy?

[Rodion Romanovich]

Hm, maybe, but the nobles would usually not represent the will of the majority of the people, and in many cases argue for much worse treatment of peasants than the kings would. Additionally, the nobles would often in history have wars started for their own interests but against the interests of the king, the people and the nation, thus creating bad diplomatical situations, or oppositely withdraw their support for an important, defensive war at the most inopportune times.

However, the first writing down of constitutions bearing some resemblance to democracy were often made by various noble councils and similar in many countries, but it's questionable if this mattered much to later democracy. Democracy seems to have its roots more in the rise of a more powerful middle class of traders and goods manufacturers and their workers. In England's case, among important documents and legislations, the Magna Carta already and Parliament (or predecessors thereof) existed long before the 100 years' war so the war can't really be given credit for that. However, one thing which could be attributed to the war is the following:


The authority of Parliament grew under Edward III; it was established that no law could be made, nor any tax levied, without the consent of both Houses and the Sovereign. This was a development during the reign of Edward III; he was involved in the Hundred Years' War and needed finances. Edward tried to circumvent Parliament as much as possible, which caused this edict to be passed.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_parliament#The_emergence_of_Parliament_as_an_institution:_1272-1485

[Ironside]

Maybe its beneficial for the people? Being a ignorant american myself, I dont know much british history myself, but is he reffering to the british having more freedom due to the weakening of the monarchy?
Usually the peasantry complained about the nobles to the king... At least in old Scandinavia.

[CrazyGuy]

I think there could be an argument that the english did profit financially from the 100 years war, at least initially.

The question is what happens during ceasefires/truces etc? One things for certain, these armed, trained men didn't just pack up and go home. 'Hawkwood' by Frances Stonor Saunders tells us that they went to Italy and Southern France, becoming the best mercenaries in Europe.

Records show that these mercenaries often sent money home and built country manors, founded primitive banks etc. In essence they became the 'new rich'. The social change brought on by a new 'upper middle class' and an increase in capital in England cannot be anything but beneificial.

[Geoffrey S]

Dependency on nobles is hardly a beneficial thing for a king... in what sense did you mean?
Though by that time, not just nobles but cities too. There the basis for future power of cities and the people within was laid. And no, arguably the lower nobility wasn't that good to their people - but no worse than the king, although that may appear to be the case because of more personal interactions. Certainly the increase of power made the king search for alternative sources of income, among others in commercial interest. Maybe not immediately and indirectly, but in the longer run I think the English in general did indeed profit from the developments resulting from the Hundred Years War.

[Furious Mental]

I don't think so. Some individuals profited immensely and you can still see the evidence in churches and manor houses erected by them all over England. However other nobles and of course kings were bankrupted by it, and ultimately it resulted in the loss of Gascony to France i.e. a net loss of territory for the English kings. And of course it occupied so much attention and resources that it did contribute to the Wars of the Roses; having a factionalised nobility, a foreign war, and a pathetic weak king in the mid 15th century was a pretty awful concatenation. In the longer term it provided a point of contention for Henry VIII, thereby contributing to another three short but pointless wars in France which achieved nothing. It also did make the English kings much more reliant on Parliament; personally I think this would have happened anyway but it certainly accelerated the process.

[Gaius Scribonius Curio]

Initially there were plenty of benefits. Not least that the English had the run of most of France, and (in the beginning) there was a sizeable amount of plunder to be had.

Overall, not so much. From the initial success, we lost the whole of France apart from Calais (which the good Queen Mary managed to lose :laugh4: ). Also as has been mentioned, Parliament was subtlely gaining more power at the expense of the King, who wouldn't have been happy! The cost in men and materials for an ultimately futile enterprise would say no.

However the plunder gathered by some soldiers was enough to push them up the social ladder forming a new middle class, which I'm sure (help me economists/ proper historians:help: ) would have been beneficial. Also
Henry V had a real chance of winning the war and inheriting the French throne for his son, before his sudden death at the age of 34. Had he lived things could have been very different.:charge:

So the English did profit in some ways from the Hundred Years War, just no in the way they wanted to.

[Furious Mental]

Some very poor soldiers became incredibly rich, or just well off, thanks to the Hundred Years War, that's true. Robert Knolles may have been a serf when he was born, he certainly wasn't when he died. But the English middle class was not really a creation of the Hundred Years War. Most of them were beneficiaries of the changing economy, in particular as a result of the Black Death, chiefly because they took advantage of the many vacancies left by dead landholders, free or unfree, to enlarge their own.

"Henry V had a real chance of winning the war"
A chance maybe but I would hardly have bet on it. He never conquered the Armagnac south and as a result of the earlier stages of the war that was by far the best fortified and organised part of France, and of course the furthest from England. He was reliant on a partnership with the Duke of Burgundy which was little more than an alliance of convenience for the latter to counter the power of Charles VI; if it looked like Henry V was going to conquer the whole of France that would have been the end of it because of course a king that controlled England and France and would dominate the Low Countries was not in the Duchy's interests at all. Henry V was smart enough to understand that he couldn't leave policing of his territory to robber barons like Edward III had, but by the time he died it had also become clear that the conquered French were not going to do it except at mercenary rates, and the English nobility was more interested in its factional conflicts than in taking a stake in and protecting Henry V's conquests, forcing him to spend huge sums wages for garrisons. Henry V was an excellent military leader leading excellent armies, but the same was true of Bedford, Fastolf and Talbot, and the English still lost.

[Watchman]

There's middle class and there's middle class. The Medieval English kind would almost entirely have been just that - medieval. As in, rural landowners. Real estate was what measured wealth, after all, and still later on when Renaissance proto-capitalism was in full swing savvy people invested in land - if nothing else its value could not collapse overnight as sometimes happened with the more "virtual" finance-side property.

The kind of middle class people normally mean when they talk of developement was the urban kind - merchants, craftsmen etc. Different bunch.

Incidentally, AFAIK lower feudal nobility were usually actually fairly decent overlords. There were perfectly practical reasons for this. For one, the smaller nobles usually only had rather small estates and spent most of their time on then, so they tended to be relatively closely aquainted with their subjects. For another, it just plain wasn't very smart for them to alienate their tenants and whatnots; such were in limited enough supply, a rather major source of their income, and wont to go complain to someone higher up in the social pyramid if you mistreated them.
Depended a bit on the exact legal and social arrangements of the matter of course. Manoral lords with virtually despotic powers of life and death over their serfs (as found in much of Eastern and Central Europe until around the 1800s for example) naturally tended to be rather more unpleasant than the kind who were more of a resident magistrate and rent-master.

Major nobles were a different story. They tended to be more of large-scale absentee landlords, with property in weird clumps scattered far and wide. They simply didn't have much personal connection to their subjects, any more than a major shareholder does to the employees of some distant facilities, and had enough clout and status it was difficult for most anyone (sometimes monarchs included) to press charges on any excesses and misdeeds they might commit.

[Furious Mental]

Actually the dominant landowning class in eastern Europe was the petty nobility and they were notorious for being despotic precisely because their small and inefficient holdings were only profitable if they had serfs to ruthlessly exploit. In return for guaranteeing the maintenance of serfdom the petty nobility supported absolutist rulers like the Russian tsars by filling their armies and bureaucracies; meanwhile the seniour nobility were left with little independent power and were essentially dependent on the personal patronage of the monarch. Larger landowners could be just as well off simply by leasing their land to free farmers, which is what the English feudal landowning class ended up doing, which is part of the reason why, for all intents and purposes, serfdom ceased to exist in England by the mid 15th century whereas it persisted in Russia until the mid 19th century.

[Watchman]

The East European "new feudalism" largely operated around the major magnates, AFAIK. The lower nobility may have been numerous (Poland being a particularly curious case in this regard, with a good tenth of the populace ranking as minor warrior aristocracy - but of course as a result most of them amounted to little more than a freeholder peasant with a sword, horse and certain privileges), but most of the land was owned by a small upper crust of very wealthy families. These duly used their wealth and power to amass even more real estate opportunities permitting, and generally tended to block anything that even looked like reforms that might compromise their privileges (the major Russian reformer-czars were usually that through brutally crushing any opposition to their policies, eg. Peter the Great).

The magnates then their lands much in the pattern of the old Roman latifundia, growing crops with (essentialy) unfree labour for export. The typical method of improving production, as usual with unfree labour, was tightening the screws...
The low-end guys doubtless were no better masters, since their methods were much the same and economic situation more precarious, just on a smaller scale.

Around the Mediterranean this sort of "new serfdom" was instead replaced by the virtual proletarisation of the peasantry in the Marxian sense - most of the land was gobbled up by wealthy investors, leaving the common poor to sell their labour power as farmhands, tenants etc. to support themselves.