The Hundred Years War is conventionally understood as an Anglo-French conflict lasting from the confiscation of the English Duchy of Gascony by the French crown in 1337 to French victory over the English at the Battle of Castillon in 1453. The war brought about fundamental changes in the social and political history of England and France, from the increased centralisation of government bureaucracy in both countries to profound changes to the nature of the English parliament. The impact on literary history is no less revolutionary. Genres as varied as vernacular poetry, historiography and visionary writing adapted to the cultural conditions created by the war while material culture, language use and conceptions of nationhood and politics were similarly impacted by sustained international warfare. At its broadest horizon, historians have argued that the war seems to encompass, or even to cause, the transition from kingdoms to nations.¹ Yet viewing the Hundred Years War through the lens of literary history suspends such teleological narratives because medieval literary culture did not align with modern conceptions of the nation or national literary traditions. It entails inhabiting a more expansive geographic and temporal range than conventional framings of the conflict allow and attending to the contingencies of imaginative writing: the fact that writers work within and against shared cultural traditions to develop new works and borrow, adapt and translate across what may look like enemy lines in unexpected ways.

Literary history is the study of the interrelation between acts of writing and the material, social and political conditions that enabled them. Many of the major writers of the late Middle Ages – Geoffrey Chaucer, William Langland, Thomas Hoccleve and John Lydgate in England; Eustache Deschamps, Christine de Pizan and Alain Chartier in France; Jean Froissart and Jan van Boendale in the Low Countries; Pedro López de Ayala in Castile; Oswald von Wolkenstein in the Holy Roman Empire; and even Bridget of Sweden and Catherine of Siena, to name but a few – lived the majority if not all their lives under the threat of war, and they inhabited or travelled through areas ravaged by it. Placing the work of Chaucer next to Christine, or Chartier next to Bridget, reveals the discrete ways writers respond to the war, as well as what those responses hold in common: the continent-spanning innovations that allow us to appreciate the late medieval period for the compelling work it produced. The chapters in this volume show how literature did more than reflect the realities of the Hundred Years War; it was also a crucial site for contesting the claims of war as literary writers crafted ways to actively intervene in the conflict.

The Hundred Years War stakes a claim to concerns of a continental scale. What began as a feudal territorial struggle became a multilateral conflict with connections across the Continent through alliances and proxy battles. Building on work that explores the relationship between the Hundred Years War and literary history in England and France, this volume seeks to observe the interconnections between war and literature from overlooked quarters, such as the perspective of places like Wales (as shown by Helen Fulton) and Scotland (Daniel Davies), and unexpected literary registers like lyrics of courtly love (Elizaveta Strakhov) and religious treatises (Jennifer N. Brown).² Expanding our notions of the spatial and temporal borders of the Hundred Years War reveals how literary innovation was enabled by multilingual and transnational conversations made possible by, and as a response to, the mechanisms and even the horrors of war.

Reconsidering what the Hundred Years War was and what it did calls for a new conceptualisation of the relationship between war and medieval literary culture. The chapters gathered here reveal a broader array of writing about war than may be expected. As Laura Ashe and Ian Patterson note, the relationship between war and literature is often unpredictable: ‘[W]riting about war, or in war, or because of war, or against war takes as many forms as war itself’.³ Our goal is not to police the boundaries of medieval war literature – to say ‘it must be topically about war’ or ‘it must include a certain set of metaphors’ – but to demonstrate the extent to which literary creation can be produced by the cultural forces that surround it, to remind us that when something new and important happens people search for a variety of novel ways to respond to it. Such an insight might be a commonplace were it not for our capacity as a culture to forget these historical connections. Tracing the literary history of the Hundred Years War allows us to rediscover, for instance, the essential link between tragedy as a mode in vernacular writing and warfare (as Andrew Galloway’s chapter uncovers) or how the survival of certain books in our libraries is the result of networks of exchange that arose amongst antagonistic forces (as J. R. Mattison reminds us). Focusing on alterations to literary genres, innovation spurred by new sites of connection, changing theorisations of war within intellectual culture and individual responses to the catastrophes of geopolitical conflict, the chapters reveal new ways of understanding how war functions as literary history.

Nature of the war

‘The Hundred Years War’ names a series of sprawling conflicts primarily fought between the English and French crowns throughout the late Middle Ages. These conflicts have their origin in the unique intimacies connecting the two nations, forged through centuries of marriage and alliance as well as conquest and conflict. There was an intractable tension in the relationship. The king of England was equal to the king of France, as both were sovereign rulers, but also his vassal, because the English king owed the French king homage for the lands of Gascony (Aquitaine to the English) in south-west France. The already tense situation was further enflamed in 1328 when the French king died without leaving a clear heir. Edward III, whose mother, Isabella of France, was the late king’s sister, asserted his claim to the French throne. When the newly crowned Philip VI asserted his authority in 1337 by confiscating Edward III’s feudal holdings in Gascony, this left the English king with a grievance and an enduring claim to war.

The Hundred Years War is conventionally split into four main phases: 1337–60, 1360–96, 1396–1422 and 1422–53.⁴ Each stage describes a distinct set of circumstances in which either England or France was in the ascendancy. The first stage of the war was driven by Edward III’s ambitious campaigns of destruction and occupation in France. A devastating series of campaigns led to English victories of Sluys (1340) and Crécy (1346) before English forces established a brutal siege at Calais. After a year, the French town capitulated, giving the English control of a strategic port in north-west France. At the Battle of Poitiers (1356) the French endured the blow of having their king captured, leaving the realm profoundly diminished. The first phase of the war reached its climax with the Treaty of Brétigny in 1360, which granted one-third of French territory to the English king but at the cost of Edward III renouncing his claim to the throne.

The fallout of this treaty defines the second phase of the war, as England reckoned with the economic toll of the conflict and rising domestic discontent. Prince Edward the Black Prince, fêted as the ‘flower of chivalry’ across Europe and responsible for some of England’s famous victories, died in 1376. A year later his father Edward III died too. The Black Prince’s son, Richard II, proved to be a very different kind of ruler and sought an enduring peace with France. Peace was achieved, during his life at least, but at huge cost to Richard: he was usurped in 1399 and the Lancastrian regime reignited the war with France. The pendulum swung back to England’s favour during the third phase, as France was riven by its own domestic turmoil – in what amounted to a civil war between two branches of the French royal family, the Armagnacs and Burgundians, made possible in part by the infamous mental illness of the French king, Charles VI – and Henry V seized control of much of northern France through sieges at Rouen (1418–19) and the battles of Harfleur and Agincourt (both 1415).⁵ In 1420, the French signed the Treaty of Troyes, which declared Henry V’s future son king of France. Yet the English victory was short-lived. Henry V died two years later, leaving his one-year-old son to be the only English King to be crowned King of England and France. The final phase of the Hundred Years War thus saw a resurgent France exploit the weakness of England’s domestic situation and eventually recapture their lost lands. The Battle of Castillon in 1453 signalled the definitive loss of England’s territories in south-west France.

But summaries give only a bird’s-eye view of the conflict. As the separation of the war into phases may suggest, the Hundred Years War challenges our conception of what exactly a ‘war’ is. The claims pursued by Edward III and Henry V were fundamentally different, and there is a compelling case to be made that these should be seen as separate conflicts. At the same time, this Anglo-French perspective occludes the importance of proxy battles, like the Black Prince and Bertrand du Guesclin’s participation in the campaigns of the Trastámara succession in Castile and the fundamental connections between Anglo-French and Anglo-Scottish antagonism, as well as the numerous civil disputes that broke out in England and France. Furthermore, there were long periods of peace throughout this time-span, and even in the war’s hottest phases conflict was concentrated in only a small number of places.⁶ The famous battles capture the imagination but are exceptional moments and interruptions in a war defined by prolonged sieges, devastating raids and shifting alliances.

War is not solely grand strategy and statecraft. This is especially true of the Hundred Years War because of the nature of the protagonists’ military forces. Although we have been using the shorthand names of ‘England’ and ‘France’ to describe the antagonists of the conflict, it is important to note that we are only speaking of a small segment of these populations, specifically the gentry and royal families. What is more, these aristocrats did not meet our modern expectations for national identity. For one thing, they shared an elite Francophone culture and spoke French. English and French aristocrats had more in common with each other than they did with the general populations of their respective countries: Edward III and Philip VI were cousins, after all. The only reason the Hundred Years War was instigated is because of the curious circumstances that meant the king of England had a stronger claim to the throne of France than the leading ‘French’ contenders. Furthermore, we should not presume that military alliances were harmonious. The chronicler Jean le Bel relays a story from the early Hundred Years War in which soldiers from Hainault in the Low Countries in service to the English king were more afraid of their English allies than they were of their Scottish foes.⁷ As Matthew Giancarlo’s chapter demonstrates, class solidarity is a distinguishing part of the war’s culture and puts pressure on political theorists to carve out new ways to atomise elite Francophone culture.

But the brunt of the war’s devastation was still borne by the people inhabiting the spaces of the conflict.⁸ Speaking of campaigns in 1380, St Albans chronicler Thomas Walsingham writes, ‘puto, nullus aut rarus angulus in tota terra uacauit a luctu; ubi non mater filium, uel uxor maritum, aut quis affinem uel cognatum in ipso naufragio se doluit amisisse’ [there was no remote region, or hardly any, I believe, in the whole of the land which was free of grief, where a mother did not lament the loss of a son, a wife of a husband, or anyone the loss of a close friend or relative].⁹ In France, where most battles and sieges were fought, the cost paid by non-combatants was even higher. The fourteenth-century chronicler Jean de Venette, for example, describes the impact of brutal English raids on the French peasantry: ‘Nam villae cremabantur, populares depraedabantur, et ad civitates, cum bigis et cum bonis suis, uxoribus et liberis, lamentabiliter accurrebant’ [villages were burned and their population plundered. Men hastened to the cities with their carts and their goods, their wives and their children, in lamentable fashion].¹⁰ The war displaced populations, destroyed villages and livelihoods and disrupted countless lives. The French poet Eustache Deschamps provides a moving example of the personal devastation wreaked by the war. Born Eustache Morel, the poet tells in a ballade how, after his home was destroyed by English forces, he was forced to change his name to ‘burned-out of the fields’: ‘J’aray desor a nom Brulé des Champs’.¹¹ In a literal way Deschamps inscribes the wound of the war onto his own writerly identity. Our goal in centring literary history is to attend at a more granular level to the voices of those who lived through war and to contribute to the ongoing project of reckoning with the relationship between war and culture.

The expansive Hundred Years War

As the challenge to create a coherent narrative from the events of late medieval war in the previous section may have suggested, and as Ardis Butterfield’s preface to this volume illuminates, ‘The Hundred Years War’ is a misnomer and an invention of modern historiography, not medieval sources. First coined by French historians in the nineteenth century, La guerre de Cent Ans promises a cohesive framework that the messy reality of late medieval territorial disputes never delivers.¹² Given that the sprawling series of conflicts already exceed even the expansive bounds of its name, the potential to extend the designation over even longer periods of history is easy to see. England and France remained formally at war until the Treaty of Picquigny in 1475, Calais – a central point of contention since its capture by siege in 1347 – remained an English possession until retaken by the French in 1558, and English monarchs retained the title and claim to the French throne until George III’s reign in 1800. This is to say nothing of the war’s beginnings: it is no stretch to see the seeds of the conflict in the dissolution of the Angevin empire in the twelfth century, or in the terms of debate established by the Second Barons’ War in the thirteenth century.¹³ If we use a wider lens it is just possible to see the Norman Conquest come into view at the edge of this temporal frame as the event setting this tectonic struggle in motion.¹⁴ In this way, Anglo-French territorial conflict and the stories told about it expand to dominate not just the histories of those two nations but come to define much of the European Middle Ages. ‘The Hundred Years War’ is a post-facto construction that seeks to cordon off such temporal ranging, yet the contingency of this historiographical fiction invites us to see the war stretch even further than the horizon of 1453. Whereas traditional histories, attending to nations or conflicts, would need to relegate these extended vistas into the periphery of the war’s ‘background’, literary history’s capacity to attend to the changing nature of forms and genres means that the historically distant and the contemporary must exist side by side. In the present volume this approach is seen in Lynn Staley’s chapter countering the reflexive association of peace and economic wealth, and, in a different register, J. R. Mattison’s inquiry into the wartime origins of English manuscript collections.

Geographically, too, the conflicts of the Hundred Years War ranged across the British Isles and the European continent, well beyond the realms of the primary antagonists. A full consideration of the conflict must account for the war’s tendency to expand beyond its Anglo-French core. Many nations were dragged into the conflict at different times. Before the confiscation of Gascony turned attention to France, Edward III tested the expansionist desires of the English in Scotland. According to some contemporary accounts, as the chapter by Daniel Davies explores, Philip VI was persuaded to fight only because of the English aggression against the Scots; this triangulation, France and Scotland allied in what is known as the ‘Auld Alliance’ against the English, would become an important thread throughout the conflict. In Wales, subjugated by Edward I in 1283, soldiers and elites rebelled against the privations of English vassalage to reignite their own claims to independence, while Welsh soldiers and mercenaries fought alongside both English and French forces. The Kingdom of Castile, the Low Countries and the Holy Roman Empire were all allied with either England or France at different times during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. They too were drawn into combat by the opposing parties. In addition, the major theological crisis of the late Middle Ages was grafted onto the fault lines of the Hundred Years War. The Papal Schism (1378–1418) divided Western Europe into two camps, those who supported the Avignonese papacy and those who desired to see the curacy return to Rome.¹⁵ Often, the Hundred Years War is seen as an important context for the schism; but, as Jennifer N. Brown’s chapter shows, the two are more closely bound together: the schism itself must be seen as part of the broader Hundred Years War.

The concerns of the Hundred Years War bled into other forms of conflict in medieval Europe. Simultaneous with the beginnings of the war, the rise of the Ottoman Empire and the emergence of various heretical sects caused the Catholic Church to call for crusades to answer the perceived threat from Muslims and heretics alike. These crusades – to places like Nicopolis, Varna or the Barbary Coast, and against such groups as the Hussites – included belligerents from the Hundred Years War, such as John the Fearless, duke of Burgundy, and some crusades could even be counted as part of the war conducted under ostensibly different justifications.¹⁶ Figures such as the French intellectual and diplomat Philippe de Mézières (discussed in this volume by Stefan Vander Elst) imagined the call to crusade as a salve to heal the wounds of Christian Europe, a call that was repeated throughout the conflict.¹⁷ Attempts to legitimise conflict through spiritual benediction reached a nadir in the Despenser Crusade of 1383, when the papacy granted dispensation to the Bishop of Norwich to undertake crusade against Flemish Schismatics. The campaign was a humiliating farce and, in any case, led to no discernible gains for the English. Campaigning against ‘pagans’ in Prussia and Lithuania was seen as a worthy, chivalric endeavour pursued by figures from Chaucer’s Knight to the future Henry IV of England, and such deeds were memorialised by heralds through the genre of the Ehrenrede. The limits of Europe-wide national conflict, therefore, are found at the frontiers of ‘Christendom’ and the racialised violence of crusade.¹⁸

The Hundred Years War is a historiographical fiction, but it is a fiction that scholars have created to make sense of larger historical movements. A discrete unit – like the Wars of Religion and Thirty Years War that follow it – the Hundred Years War tells a periodising story about Western Europe moving from the medieval to early modern epochs. Such periodisation is not necessarily a bad thing, even as we must remember that it is an invention of modernity, not that of the medieval authors we study. As such, while we are challenging the way that the ‘Hundred Years War’ has been conceptualised, we are not suggesting that we get rid of the name itself. Allowing medieval writers to tell their own story about the conflicts that we call the Hundred Years War reinforces the utility of treating the war as a single event.

Inquiring how war and literature were secret-sharers risks reifying the terms of analysis. But as the chapters in this volume argue, this is a risk worth taking. It is precisely because of the challenges the Hundred Years War presents as a singular war and series of historical coordinates for literary history that the conflict is such a compelling object of study. Our aim is not to be totalising, but instead sympathetic to the various forms of expression that war can produce. Even without direct experience of the war, writers can still recognise its disastrous consequences and be deeply invested in reckoning its impact on society. This is true of any conflict but holds particularly true for a conflict as long-lasting and multifaceted as the Hundred Years War. As Chaucer reminds us in the Tale of Melibee, ‘ther is ful many a man that … woot [knows] ful litel what werre amounteth’.¹⁹ Ignorance of war can lead to its own kind of belligerence. As part of our interest in the broad sweep of war’s effects, therefore, we are interested in the way individuals moved within and against the currents of war. In so doing, we offer the Hundred Years War as a case study for how culture becomes reconfigured around war. It offers a way to observe the atomisation and reconfiguration of cultural communities, the creation and stoking of enmity, and the legal regimes that emerged to support the war effort.

A new literary history

When, in The Familiar Enemy, Ardis Butterfield wrote, ‘the Hundred Years War has remained very much on the margins of literary history’, she was describing the curious lack of engagement shown by scholars of late medieval literature to the war.²⁰ This is not to say that earlier scholarship did not recognise the importance of the Hundred Years War, but that its theoretical presuppositions made the war difficult to handle. The formalism of the mid-twentieth century eschewed historical contexts, placing the war out of bounds. The historicism that followed in the last couple of decades of that century was usually invested in national political controversies, not international disputes. Through the work of Butterfield, and those other scholars exploring the connections of English and French literary cultures, the Hundred Years War is now a much more visible concern for criticism, even as there is a great deal to still be done.²¹ For instance, a response to the true geographic extent of the war encompassing the experience of the Low Countries, Iberia and Holy Roman Empire has not yet been fully articulated, though such a project would require further collaboration.²²

Renewed interest in the Hundred Years War forms part of a broader turn in literary studies towards war.²³ Scholarship in this field seeks to understand the relationship between war and culture and coalesces around two distinct critical tendencies. Concentrating on reading national literary traditions against the historical context of discrete conflicts, scholars including Mary A. Favret and Anders Engberg-Pedersen have revealed the deep and sometimes surprising connections between war and literary culture.²⁴ In many respects, scholars of modernism have led the way here, pressured by the ethical duty to bear witness to the brutality of the First and Second World Wars. The beginnings and ends of these wars – with a period ‘between the acts’, as Virginia Woolf has it – allow scholars to pinpoint precise formal changes in literary culture, as when Vincent Sherry argues that ‘the rhythm of linear thinking … disintegrat[es]’ between T. S. Eliot’s poetry of 1910 and of 1919.²⁵ Moreover, while the experience of war today has fundamentally changed from the wars of the twentieth century, these conflicts still form the paradigm for war in the contemporary imagination.²⁶ Scholars of medieval literature have made valuable contributions to this field by, for example, indexing the responses of medieval writers to war, closely examining the intimacy between reading and war in fifteenth-century England and revealing the importance of treason to the literature of the Wars of the Roses.²⁷ The loose conflicts of the Hundred Years War, though, would allow us to think further about the tendency to put a definitive end on the experience of war, perhaps providing a paradigm for the contemporary encounter of war in long disjointed contexts like the War on Terror.

A second strand of war studies treats war writing within the longue durée.²⁸ The history of emotions in war has been a particularly productive area of inquiry, and its medieval representation has been more robust.²⁹ But generally, works addressing the long history of war writing often eschew medieval material.³⁰ Writing about the Hundred Years War allows our contributors to participate in all of these concerns, with the length of the war – almost ipso facto – requiring a view over a longue durée, even as one can also choose to focus on discrete moments during the war. Both strategies allow for a rich exploration of the affective qualities of the literary works they cover. By tracking how over a century of literary history was impacted by the exigencies of Anglo-French conflict and including material from many of the war’s participant nations and theatres of war, we hope to provide a transnational and multilingual methodology relevant for later and earlier periods of literary history.

Given the sheer scope and scale of the complexities involved, a complete picture of the Hundred Years War’s influence on literature, or its conduct through literature, is outside the purview of a single volume. Rather, we aim to illuminate new pathways through the battlefields and besieged cities of Europe, and in so doing expand our frames of understanding for the war. As such, this volume is not the last word on the Hundred Years War and European literary history but more an argument for further study. Inspired by recent literary studies and aided by significant advances in medieval history, the contributors to this volume strive to rethink the relationship between war and literature by developing innovative approaches to medieval texts as varied as Chaucer’s House of Fame, anonymous Francophone lyrics, religious treatises and fourteenth-century mercantile narratives. Taken together, they suggest a fundamental connection between the historical conditions created by the Hundred Years War and modes of literary culture, including, but not limited to, generic creation, classical reception, historical writing, material culture and religious writing. Furthermore, the chapters show how war and literature were bound up together in larger processes of linguistic, legal, institutional and social change. While the level of engagement in the war shown by the writers discussed in this volume varies, from those who fought in it, like Geoffrey Chaucer, to those who experienced the war at a distance such as Bridget of Sweden – who only got as close to the field of battle as the city of Rome – the contributors adopt an expansive conception of war writing that compasses the boundaries of literary production within medieval wartime.

What arises from these chapters is a vision of war as a driver of literary innovation. To some extent, this should not come as a surprise: war places people in new situations and gives them new experiences, so it is only natural that they would want to find new ways of writing about things. War, after all, creates movement; it organises people, and reorganises them, in new configurations. Chaucer, as a young man of what we might assume to be literary sensibilities, no doubt already had a sense of French literature and his relationship to it when he entered Lionel of Clarence’s retinue in 1357, but his war service in 1359 would put that sensibility into sharp relief. One of Guillaume de Machaut’s complaintes describes the French poet, resentful and frustrated, standing guard on the walls of Reims while the city was besieged by the English in 1360; an event that Eustache Deschamps also claims to have witnessed.³¹ Not far from the siege at Réthel, Chaucer – much influenced by the poetry of both Machaut and Deschamps – was captured and later ransomed; years later he would be forced to recall what he witnessed there as evidence in a lawsuit brought to settle a dispute over armorial bearings.³² Machaut and Deschamps besieged by the English; Chaucer, part of the invading force, captured by the French then given back to the English. It would be too much to say that such an event influenced Chaucer’s decision to write in English rather than French. But the irony of the situation must have struck him when, in later life, he would incorporate some of Deschamps’s and Machaut’s poetry in his own radical experimentation with the French dit form in his Legend of Good Women.³³ As this instance suggests, much Anglo-French literary development is predicated upon the exchange between peoples at war, and it speaks to the need for a nuanced understanding of the dynamics of conflict that avoids reifying lines of division. The Hundred Years War was, at root, a conflict over a shared culture, all the more vicious for the proximity of its antagonists, antagonists brought together in new destructive ways, searching to make something productive out of their experiences.

Furthermore, literary exchange between the languages of Europe was not restricted to English and French. Perhaps the largest gains for the literary historian of the Hundred Years War lie here, in the literatures beyond the Francosphere (and, to a lesser-degree Anglosphere) of the conflict’s central arena. We hope that a reconsideration of the war’s cascading effects beyond the Anglo-French centre will inspire work on two contexts lacking here: the Holy Roman Empire and the Iberian peninsula. That the Hundred Years War extended its reach into these spaces is beyond question and much is still to be gained from their consideration. Take Castile, for instance, which was the site of one of the Hundred Years War’s most significant proxy battles, as Prince Edward the Black Prince and the French knight Bertrand du Guesclin were conscripted to support opposing sides of the Trastámara succession crisis. These events are memorialised in Francophone literature: the events of the Nájera campaign take up fully half of Chandos Herald’s chivalric biography La Vie du Prince Noir and are treated with similar attention in the works memorialising Bertrand du Guesclin. A consideration of the events that places the Chandos Herald in conversation with local Castilian reactions would be salutary. One might also consider a less explicitly martial case. Much later in the course of the war, John Gower’s Confessio Amantis was translated into Castilian and Portuguese, the first English-language poem to receive such treatment.³⁴ While a good deal of work has been done on the manuscripts of these translations especially, some consideration of how the war made them possible in the first place would give us much needed insight into the way that cultural connections across the Continent developed in relation to various moments of antagonism or amnesty.³⁵ These are but two examples, both concerned with the connections forged by the war of medieval Iberian literature with other literary traditions. Not mentioned here is the literature inspired by the war that was inwardly focused, that work concerned with the literary and social conditions internal to the kingdoms that would become Portugal and Spain. As with the other literary traditions dealt with in this volume, we encourage further scholarship on the matter.

Another dramatic case may be that of Oswald von Wolkenstein, mentioned briefly in David Wallace’s chapter. Sometimes called the last of Germany’s courtly poets [der letzten Minnesänger], Oswald revived and altered the love song [Minnesang] tradition by incorporating elements from other cultural traditions he encountered through diplomacy and extensive travels with Emperor Sigismund during the conflict, for example, by setting his complaint ‘Wer die ougen vil verschüren’ to a French tune. The connections here likewise provide a note of caution. More than Oswald’s travel agent, of course, Sigismund’s other activities – the Hussite wars and the founding of the Order of the Dragon to engage in crusades against the Ottoman Empire – remind us that wartime innovations can exact a terrible price. While the Hundred Years War allowed for beautiful innovation in the sentiments of courtly literature, it also gave birth to new ways to hate, and new forms of racist, sexist and religiously bigoted expressions, as Alani Hicks-Bartlett’s chapter, among others, shows. Literatures of the Hundred Years War is not an apologetic for the horrors that wars produce. The chapters face up to the destruction that has produced the literary innovation that concerns us, from the militarised culture of Calais (in Helen Fulton’s account) to those inflicted upon the population of the French countryside, especially those most vulnerable in it (in Elizaveta Strakhov’s telling).

It is precisely because the conflict is so difficult to define in a coherent way that studying its literary instantiations can be so productive. Studying the war is not just about adjudicating winners and losers (indeed, the question of who ‘won’ the Hundred Years War is something of an absurdity) or about tracing the emergence of the nation state. Rather, it attunes us to a world of perpetual conflict, in which shifting alliances, personal feelings and investments, and the contingent matter of taste all inflect the creation of new modes of expression as articulated in discrete literary works. The Hundred Years War thus gives us a new sense of what it means to write medieval war literature.

Redefining wartime interiority

To close out this introduction, we would like to provide a short case study illustrating how the Hundred Years War can inform new accounts of the relationship between war and medieval literature. While our example remains within the conflict’s Anglo-French core, due to the focus of our individual specialisations, the method is widely applicable. Indeed, our own limitations here again reinforce the need for volumes like this, which are collaborative efforts making use of a variety of research areas. The moment on which we will focus comes from a man whose life, in some ways, is itself a case study for the impact of the Hundred Years War on literary culture, Charles d’Orléans.³⁶ Charles was captured at Agincourt and spent the next twenty-five years as a prisoner of war in England, where he wrote poems in English and French. When he returned to France, he left the English poetry behind him and continued to write French poetry with a coterie of other authors, mostly French, but occasionally English. The moment in question involves Charles’s engagement with an author who writes prolifically about the war, Christine de Pizan. As mentioned in Wood’s chapter and discussed more thoroughly by Hicks-Bartlett in this volume, Christine’s war writings are usually direct engagements with the events that constitute it, giving idealised advice to those waging it – as with her Livre des faits d’armes et de chevalrie – or lamenting the latest French defeats caused by civil strife – her Livre de paix. Charles’s engagement with the war in his poetry tends to be more indirect, as befitting someone writing lyrics as opposed to political treatises. Nevertheless, there are some well-known moments that allude to the war and his imprisonment, as when Charles writes a ballad that, in French, mentions a wind blowing ‘de France’ [from France] where his mistress resides; in English, the wind blows ‘into France’, that is, from England, where Charles is imprisoned.³⁷

Relying on overt discussion of the war, however, misses how thoroughly Charles’s poetry is shaped by it. In Charles’s Ballad 59, ‘Alone am y and wille to be alone’, the French poet adapts a ballad from Christine de Pizan’s Cent ballades, sometimes known by the shorthand ‘Seulete suy’, though the whole first line is ‘Seulete suy et seulete vueil estre’ [Alone I am and alone I wish to be].³⁸ Charles takes from Christine the idea to use anaphora extensively in the poem; all but one of Christine’s lines begins with ‘Seulete suy’ while all of Charles’s lines begin ‘Alone’.³⁹ But a key moment of difference comes in the second stanza. Christine’s version is as follows:

While Charles writes:

Apart from the refrain, which cleverly and vividly expresses the sentiment of the French, the stanzas are quite distinct. Christine gives us the solitude of confinement, the sorrow of locking oneself away in one’s grief. She may look out of a door or window, but she remains in a corner of her room, lamenting. Charles gives us the solitude of exile, the sorrow of being a stranger in a strange land. He may be on an ‘aventure’ – the keyword familiar from romances describing the quest through which male knights and aristocrats could prove themselves – but he is essentially lost and wandering in a wilderness, moaning. And it is not only the content that is distinct. Christine uses a seven-line stanza rhyming ABABBCC, what we know in English as rhyme royal. Charles uses an eight-line stanza rhyming ABABCDCD, a much more unusual form in English, even if Charles sometimes uses it in his ballads, most notably in a sequence of mourning lyrics.⁴¹

In terms of content as well as form, we can see how the Hundred Years War inflects these changes. Christine’s confinement and Charles’s wandering are gendered modes of suffering, certainly, and they produce distinct potentials for ownership: Christine remains in her room, ‘ma chambre’, whereas Charles, through the conditions of warfare, has lost the capacity to own his own space, leaving him possessing only his experience, ‘myn aventure’. Moreover, Christine’s use of anaphora intensifies the claustrophobia of this passage, whereas for Charles it introduces syntactic difficulties here and elsewhere in his poem, echoing the confusion of his wandering.⁴² But perhaps the most telling difference is in their stanza forms. In French, the seven-line stanza that Christine uses is one of many that the ballad can come in, with little meaning on its own, apart from the fact that the shorter stanza length is a somewhat conservative choice by the time Christine is writing. In the English context, though, that kind of stanza is emphatically associated with the Chaucerian tradition, the dominant stanza form in the English context. If Charles were simply to adopt it, the structure of the lyric would work against the confusion of its syntax and the exilic lament of its content; the expression of the lyric in rhyme royal could perhaps seem too at home in the English context, precisely contradicting what Charles wants to express here. Facing a similar decision, James I of Scotland – the royal after whom rhyme royal is named and another figure imprisoned in England – uses this verse form in the Kingis Quair to draw on its affiliation with the Chaucerian tradition, bringing this tradition to Scottish literature and signalling the end of his eighteen years’ imprisonment.

Further, for Charles the use of rhyme royal could be seen as an insult to the work of mourning in which the lyric engages.⁴³ Christine is lamenting the loss of her husband to the plague in 1389.⁴⁴ Charles is lamenting, in some sense, the loss of his wife Bonne, who died some time between 1430 and 1435.⁴⁵ While Bonne’s death does not seem to be the direct result of the war, the fact that Charles was not with her, the fact that he is now emphatically alone, is due to his being an English prisoner of war. Expressing his new-found isolation in a stanza form that is ubiquitously English could suggest that, while he misses Bonne, at least he is comfortable in his current circumstances. And this is the difference the war has made: even an extremely personal feeling, like grief, is wrapped up in histories and modes of expression whose meaning are undergoing rapid change because of the conflict, and so new ways of expressing oneself, both in content and form, are needed.

Chapter summaries

This volume is divided into four sections. The first, ‘Genres of war’, contains chapters that concern the formal alterations that the Hundred Years War occasions in a variety of medieval genres, some very much with us (tragedy) and some now much less common (the pastourelle). The second section then considers ‘Figures and sites of mobility’, those places of exchange, and the people doing the exchanging, that makes literary innovation possible during wartime. The third section, ‘Theorising war’, addresses modes of writing that reflect on the practice of war, the political theory that undergirds the exercises of conflict and polity. Finally, the fourth section, ‘Lives during wartime’, offers a series of case studies illustrating the variegated modes of spiritual crisis, exploitation and suffering experienced by individuals because of the geopolitical conditions of the war.

In the first chapter of ‘Genres of war’, Andrew Galloway posits that tragedy in English literary history comes into its own not during Chaucer’s early experiments with it, but in the age of John Lydgate. Along with the chronicler Thomas Walsingham, Lydgate turned to Lucan in order to understand the relationship between war as a historical catastrophe and its literary representation. These authors applied this understanding to the changing circumstances they were facing, especially war with France, but also the concomitant processes of bureaucratisation and contractualisation that were radically transforming the relationship between the ruling classes and their subjects. These changes can be found in the relationship that Lydgate and Walsingham establish with their patrons, figures responsible for carrying out the English war.

While Galloway provides us with an origin for a still popular genre, Elizaveta Strakhov gives us a glimpse into the formal logic of a genre that, although it still persists in some ways, has lost a great deal of its medieval popularity: the pastourelle, a genre that tends to show violence against women as related through a conversation between a knight and a lady, two shepherds, or a knight with some shepherds. These depictions of pastoral life – as found in the work of Eustache Deschamps and in a series of pastourelles in Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania MS Codex 902 – figure violence against the rural poor, violence against women and violence against animals as related by the same strategy of representation. The goal is to strip vulnerable populations of their humanity, a way of rendering the atrocities of war comprehensible, both as justification in their medieval instantiations and as object of critique for us.

Daniel Davies turns to consider two related but opposed logics in war: enmity and alliance. Focusing on the role of Scotland in the conflict, poised between both long-standing antagonism with England and amity with France, Davies reveals the way that chronicle writers – such as John of Fordun, Geoffrey le Baker, Henry Knighton and Walter Bower – understood that movement against one political body necessarily created a shared interested and therefore potential harmony with another, and vice versa. These relations between political entities, then, transcend ideas of nationalism, as partisan self-understanding is always enmeshed in a broader web of relations. The text known as the ‘Metrical Prophecy’ serves as an object lesson in the complexity of these international relations, as it travels through different chronicle accounts and linguistic registers, from John of Fordun to Walter Bower’s Scotichronicon and its descendants. Such prophecies could be mobilised differently in different historical contexts, registering the shifting dynamics of aggression and peace-making with different kingdoms.

Moving from generic innovations to the movement that undergirds many of those changes in Part II of this volume, ‘Figures and sites of mobility’, David Wallace demonstrates how Geoffrey Chaucer’s encounter with Italian poetry was enabled by the Hundred Years War. Although we do not think of Italy as one of the war’s locales, Wallace argues that it must be included in any broad account of the conflict, as diplomatic – and financial – interests tied together the Italian city states with England and France. As Wallace shows, this involvement had a revolutionary effect on English literary history: it was through his diplomatic work in the Hundred Years War that Chaucer encountered the writings of Petrarch, Boccaccio and Dante. To think of Chaucer and Italy is to think of the networks of trade, diplomacy and mercenary fighters furnished by late medieval war.

Lynn Staley develops the themes of financialisation touched upon in Wallace’s chapter to uncover how the rising mercantile classes used the crisis of the war as an opportunity for their own advancement. Staley surveys representations of merchants across a wide swath of late medieval English writing, from the popular romance of the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries – such as Richard Coer de Lyon, Octavian, Havelok the Dane and Bevis of Hampton, along with The Travels of John Mandeville – to the fifteenth century – with John Lydgate and The Libelle of Englyshe Polycye. The merchant classes assign themselves a role, as providers of prosperity and peace, that stands in opposition to the war that the chivalric classes unleash upon the world. These merchants of peace advertise themselves as the sole champions of the general welfare, or the common good.

As Davies provides a look at the Scottish role in the war, Helen Fulton does the same for Wales, while also providing a contextualisation of the war within the longer history of Welsh and English conflicts, and English colonisation. Fulton collects representations of Calais in Welsh poetry – including, most notably, Dafydd ap Gwilym – provided by authors who travelled to that contested town as a part of the English war effort into which they were conscripted. The Welsh colonised become colonisers of Calaisiens in a town that is in English hands, but is at the same time thoroughly international, as the English, Scottish, Irish, Flemish and French, among others, lived side by side in the colonial holding. Wales itself changes due to this contact with Calais, as Welsh poets attest. Over the course of the war, it becomes a more diverse space with numerous contacts to, and residents from, the rest of continental Europe.

Contending with the shifting relationship between centre and periphery in wartime leads us into the first chapter in ‘Theorising war’, in which Stefan Vander Elst considers the war’s origins as they are characterised in the writings of Philippe de Mézières. Philippe is one of the war’s most consistent and vocal critics, though that does not mean he is a pacifist. Far from it: Philippe advocated for the cessation of hostilities within Europe in order to restart the crusades into the Holy Land. The crusades were essential to Philippe’s thinking about his own moment because they provided the historical background to what ailed Europe and manifested as war and schism. Philippe differentiates between the successes of the early crusades and the failures of the latter ones by stressing the sins committed by the latter crusaders. These same sins, so says Philippe, lie at the root of the antagonism rending the Western European nations apart, sins that must be addressed to end the war and begin a crusade.

While the Hundred Years War gave rise to new accounts of enmity, as Matthew Giancarlo argues, the conflict was also defined by a dynamic of exchange between its elite protagonists that exacerbated class conflict. For peasants living in England and France, hardship often came from elite soldiers on ‘their’ side and from bearing the brunt of taxation for the war effort. The social rebellions of the Jacquerie in France (1358), the Great Rising in England (1381) and similar actions in the Low Countries all demonstrate the intolerable burden that aristocratic war placed on the lower classes of Europe. Medieval writers argued that these conflicts arose from a lack of regimen among the ruling class, and Giancarlo reveals how accounts of governance attempted to ameliorate this crisis. In addition to demonstrating the complex social dynamics that are lost when we think of the Hundred Years War in solely national terms, Giancarlo sheds light on the extensive textual efforts of intellectuals desperately trying to ameliorate the fractures of communal identity caused by the war.

Where Giancarlo examines how medieval writers reform ideas of the common good, Lucas Wood explores the affordances and limitations involved in such intellectual artifices. Concentrating on the French diplomat and writer Alain Chartier’s Quadrilogue invectif, a dream vision centred on healing the wounds of the bien commun [common good], Wood shows how Chartier stages a dialogue that would be impossible yet necessary for answering the demands of the moment. What emerges through Wood’s analysis is a sense of literature’s capacity to reimagine the world that simultaneously recognises the artificiality of such creation. By insisting that France’s problems are ideological, and not military nor financial, Chartier creates a space for the writer to intervene. Yet Chartier also reflects on the artificiality of his vision, what Wood calls its ‘oneiropolitics’: the fact that the rapprochement Chartier imagines is only possible within the realm of the dream vision.

The final part of the volume, ‘Lives during wartime’, concerns how the war shaped, and was shaped by, individual lives. Alani Hicks-Bartlett turns our attention to a writer even more prolific than Chartier on the misfortunes of France during wartime: Christine de Pizan. In Hicks-Bartlett’s hands, Christine’s entire oeuvre can be read in terms of the old maxim that the personal is the political, as Christine blends autobiographical and courtly productions with reflections on the state of the nation, most often a lamentable portrait of decline. This admixture of personal grief and public exhortation to cure the ills of the kingdom is crystallised in the abundant tears that flow through many of Christine’s texts. These tears – sometimes in Christine’s eyes, but also imagined to be wept by the queen or other noble women, even by any potential reader of Christine’s work – are most often explicitly feminised, an embodied response to the suffers and frustrations felt especially by women during the traumatic losses of war.

One need not be a Christine, though, to become involved in a continent-spanning conflict. Jennifer N. Brown shows how two of the most important religious visionaries of the late Middle Ages, Bridget of Sweden and Catherine of Sienna, were conscripted into the war effort. By tracing the reception history of these visionary writers – how their works were read, excerpted and translated – Brown reveals that the politics of the Hundred Years War, particularly Anglo-French antagonism, and the alliances it created, inflect attitudes to the two saints. One of Bridget’s revelations judged England’s claim to the throne of France to be legitimate. As such, her cause was taken up enthusiastically in England, and this passage was translated into Middle English and circulated separately from the other revelations; on the other side of the conflict, the French theologian Jean Gerson was strongly opposed to any visionary woman and fought to diminish their views.

One of the key insights of Brown’s chapter is how manuscript evidence yields a greater understanding of the transnational politics of the Hundred Years War. J. R. Mattison continues this line of inquiry by examining the corpus of manuscripts exchanged – by gift, purchase, bequest and theft – between England and France during the conflict. Concentrating on the collecting practices of Duke Humfrey, brother to Henry V and renowned bibliophile, Mattison shows how the war created new opportunities for the circulation of manuscripts. As trophies of war, manuscripts became important tokens of English supremacy, and their movement was part of a broader translatio imperii from France to England. Moreover, as Mattison reveals, exchanging these manuscripts was a key way for aristocratic men to uphold the homosocial bonds of England’s ruling class.