Preface
Ardis Butterfield

The very sobriquet of the Hundred Years War indicates its unreliable but attractive power as a concept. A convenient chronological fiction created by nineteenth-century historians (the two selected defining dates making up 116 years), it has served as a big-picture explanation for a host of emergences in Western societies: the nation state, centralising administrative bureaucracy, systems of taxation, new forms of parliament and of military technology and organisation, English and French as vernacular languages of state, notions of kingship, and even organised piracy. It is yet another explanation for the rise of the individual and of the modern and of the secular.¹ What is worth attention is not just the small matter of sixteen years. The fiction runs both deeper and longer. It is the use of a concept of long war to serve many kinds of explanatory purpose: as a measure of historical time, as a means of defining history itself, of locating the modern, of understanding how collective identities are formed, and of conceiving language as an instrument of the state and as evidence of national identity. In this short set of reflections on the Hundred Years War, I want to suggest that these twin and entangled factors – the tendentiousness of assumed fact and the attractiveness of a grand explanatory concept – are exactly why the Hundred Years War has had such power in shaping ideas of modernity.

It may seem an exaggeration to talk of fiction and unreliability. Historians have worked brilliantly for factual precision, to plot itineraries, track diplomatic exchanges and gather evidence of military tactics.² And at first sight, the establishment of dates and the selection of events might seem straightforward enough. Yet the date in 1337 conventionally ascribed as the opening provocation only makes sense if one assumes the key factor in selecting that date concerns a claim to kingship. Conflict between England and France long pre-dated 1337, and long post-dated 1453. It is not at all clear that Edward III (who made that claim) desired the French crown then or later. On the French side, royal rule was itself a muddled, fluctuating and weakly defined condition of power, under pressure from often more powerful ducal interests, and Edward’s assertions were exactly of that character, spoken as they were by him as Duke of Aquitaine as well as king of England. Kingship was neither straightforwardly claimed, nor asserted, by either side. It is not simply that motives and reasons are harder to identify than signatories on a war treaty, but that what seem to be firm pillars of a descriptive narrative have a quite different aspect viewed from the other side.

Fiction is a misleading term if it implies any desire to be vague or wilfully inaccurate about the war. It is rather that forms of history that dwell on kingly motives and count horses and munitions produce very different narratives from those that attend to the texts of war. The former is what historian Jean-Marie Moeglin calls the classic tradition of historians of the Guerre de cent ans and the latter his own focus on the discourses of war. Taking account of the shifting articulations of claim and counter-claim in diplomatic materials, and recognising that contemporary chroniclers do not simply report the politics of those claims, but are entangled within them, leads to the overturning of hardened assumptions, for example that it was national enmity and desire for domination that drove the strategies of war and peace.³ Moeglin reminds us that the moment of so-called original war-generating tension did not involve a declaration of war, but was the result of Edward’s attempts to resolve what he saw as a personal quarrel between him and Philippe de Valois. Far from leaping into a national state of war, Edward repeatedly offered initiatives towards peace, and even proposed a duel in 1340 in order to avoid the bloodshed, cost and widespread misery of full-scale war.⁴ Moeglin draws attention to this English-oriented construction of events because it has been ignored by post-medieval historiography. The story that he wants to clarify is one based on a re-evaluation of the Treaty of Troyes in 1420. In the classic accounts, especially on the French side, Troyes is a monstruous and inexplicable agreement, in which France willingly submits to a bizarre renunciation of its right to sovereignty to England.⁵ Moeglin argues (more subtly than this brief summary can convey) that the sense of strangeness is a product of modern retrospections which have turned a fifty-year effort to secure peace between two princes first proffered in 1337, and more fully articulated in Brétigny (1360), into a clash between realms.

This attention to the Treaty of Troyes, a public moment towards the end of the span of time conventionally understood as the Hundred Years War, thus undermines the apparently secure footing of a grand narrative about its beginning, and not only through the detail of the event but also its interpretation by contemporary writers. It is often assumed that historians and literary scholars are at odds over this, or at least have different emphases. However, this can be overstated. Moeglin has reshaped modern French historiography through his attention to the discourse employed – and manipulated – by contemporary actors in the scene of war, and to his important recognition that it was ‘un discours qui oblige et qui construit la réalité historique autant qu’il est construit par elle’ [a discourse that compels and constructs historical reality as much as it is constructed by it].⁶ In this regard he comes close to the kind of analysis that literary historians find congenial. It is also not far from the position sketched by the intellectual historian Quentin Skinner, who remarks: ‘There is […] a Nietzschean epigram hovering hereabouts: that if a concept has a history then it cannot have a definition. The task of apprehending the concept then becomes inherently historical. No concepts and definitions are above the battle, because the battle is all there is.’⁷ The Hundred Years War could be said to be one such concept, possessing a history but not a definition.

Chronology and language offer deep insights into the relationship between the elusive detail and the urge to write large. The chronologies attached to the Hundred Years War, as I have been suggesting, have a fascinating multiplicity. These are not only attached to questions of bellicose assertion or counter-assertion. As Jennifer Brown (in this volume) and others note, ecclesiastical interests obeyed different chronologies. Papal durées of power were set within a temporal framework that engaged with Anglo-French conflict only as part of other, broader polities concerning Rome, holy empire and the crusades. What could serve however approximately as a hundred years’ war for England and France was, varyingly (looking back from the Treaty of Troyes in 1420), a war asserting Western Christian authority in different degrees of scale for 1,000 years (to Constantine), 800 (to Charlemagne), 366 (to 1054, the schism with the Eastern Church) or 40 (the Papal Schism from 1378). But from a literary point of view, as Andrew Galloway discusses below, yet other notions of history’s extensiveness pertain. Tragedy, and epic, for example, require an ‘immensely long span’ in which to assert coherence or indeed authority, but their version of time does not track the same path as that of recorded human events.⁸ This might not need saying were it not that the question of how a vast ‘world-historical principle’ gains explanatory force is exactly the issue under investigation.⁹

For it is not as if tragedy ignores recorded history. Thomas Walsingham, Geoffrey Chaucer and especially John Lydgate saw tragedy as history, in Galloway’s insightful commentary. What remains puzzling, as he astutely explores, is the chronological wrinkle, not in the concept of tragedy so much as its articulation, that is, why tragedy in that ‘middle’ period before Chaucer seems so absent. I will not pre-empt his argument but want to point to the extraordinary potential of a literary genre to provoke reflection in its authors and audiences on these very moments where a concept grows in stature. The ‘complex downfalls’ traced by Chaucer in his Monk’s Tale or Troilus and Criseyde are, in Walsingham and Lydgate, explorations of the vastness of catastrophe and the complicity of those who interpret tragedy in their perhaps foolish attempts to contain it through narrative. In both tragedy and political discourse these authors are wrestling with the ‘unwar stroke’, the contingent blow of an event that changes the trajectory of the large explanatory arc both in the moment, and afterwards, and even before (since it becomes retrospectively coherent as the narrative is formed). A literary genre, in short, provides insight into the shaping of the grand récit, not just into the intersection of detail and interpretation.

Language brings us even more closely to the stuff of war. It is valuable to recall (as I have argued elsewhere) Clifford Geertz’s bold yoking of war and text in his efforts to find through analogy ‘the expressive devices that make collective life seem anything at all’.¹⁰ To think with Geertz, in his 1983 essay ‘Blurred Genres’, is to understand text through a social scientist’s eyes as a possible and powerful example of the kind of metaphor that is revelatory of the relationship between life and meaning. It is Geertz who comes closest to explaining why the grand récit, in its very dubiousness, has such power, since Geertz never lets go of the element of performance. ‘Text’ is the third in the sequence ‘game’ and ‘drama’; meaning is ‘performed’, not simply given or waiting to be unearthed. The text of war cannot be accurate, since it is searching, reaching for an interpretation that has to serve fluctuating interests. The narrative must be grand since it has to encompass the fluid uncertainties of complex downfalls.

Is the Hundred Years War a distinctive narrative? This question brings us, finally, to the doubleness of its complex manifestations. Parity of perspective between England and France can rarely be assumed, ironically because so much of their history was mutual yet across very different landscapes, political scales and vectors, with a narrow strip of water that marked both adjacency and separation.¹¹ A crucial element is language: the central catastrophe of the Hundred Years War was familial enmity (or hostile amity) and its basis in a linguistically shared, but politically fracturing vernacular. To keep with Geertz for a little longer, there is a productive ‘blur’ at the heart of the Anglo-French relationship. To me the notion of ‘blur’ is helpful as a way of thinking about the strangenesses of bilingualism and thence of the kind of literary history that the Hundred Years War has generated. It provides a means of demonstrating the complexity of boundaries, especially those that were being newly created. As I have said elsewhere, ‘the experience of living through the aggressions and intimate recursions of this bilingual war was a matter of living through borderline cases, even of being a borderline case. To be “English” or “French” was entirely at issue: to define oneself, one’s family, one’s language, one’s personal and public allegiances was to be caught up in resistant inquiries.’¹²

In short, perceptions of fact, and fiction, depend on perceptions of difference, and these perceptions can overlap, contradict and, most subtly, be mutually oblivious when aggression is activated. This can be easily shown in the so-called faux amis, examples of lexis that are shared yet divergent in meaning such as avoidance, or topically enough taster, which has re-emerged in modern French as tester.¹³ Or in the fascinating case of words where it is not clear whether they belong in one category or several, nor which categories these might be (in modern dictionaries French, English or Latin), such as franc, vengeance, governance, penance, discorde, forein and strange (the potential list is of course huge).¹⁴ More broadly, as has been widely shown, the period of war threw up a way of experiencing identity that among the higher classes and their retainers, lawyers, officials, diplomats and other related professionals, not to mention the clerical class and the occasional writer of poetry, involved negotiating languages in all their entangled histories and family relationships, and hence reshaping language itself.

If we allow the cloak of the Guerre de cent ans to be cast even more widely, then it becomes more than an Anglo-French struggle, as several chapters in this volume point out. As a period of time (however we construe its length), and a period in which key political actors across Europe were having to deal with constant diplomatic rumbling between English and French interests and their interests, many cultures and language relationships were engaged. An advantage of focusing on language and literature is that language reveals history in its own structures and lexis. If we want to understand the war in both its granular smallness and conceptual enormity, then language is a crucial medium in which to do ‘proper accounting’.¹⁵ The strategies with which writers embrace and repudiate one another, through careful or indeed not-so-careful linguistic choices, offer their readers the spectacle of their performative linguistic gestures. This in turn offers insight into the double-sidedness of locally verifiable, and largely fictional narratives of nation. The notion of the Hundred Years War in its very looseness and easy generality has served, and continues to serve, as a convenient cover for the convoluted tactics of nation-building.