In the south-west of France, about forty minutes by train from Bordeaux, lies the town of Castillon. Few people get on or off at this small station. From there, a street leads down into town, passes a few restaurants, a church, a mairie, crosses the Dordogne River and that’s it. It is a small, sleepy town where little ever happens. But once a year everything changes. Every July, this place is host to a festival with light shows, pyrotechnics and medieval reenactments, attracting more than 30 000 spectators. For it was here, on 17 July 1453, that the Hundred Years’ War ended.

The battle was the humiliating culmination of years of declining fortune for England. Normandy had been lost, and Aquitaine reduced to a small area around the city of Bordeaux. As the French forces approached, the English commander, John Talbot, rode out with a force to stave off the invasion. Normally a cautious man, Talbot attacked before his reinforcements had arrived, and was resoundingly beaten. His body was left in such a state that his herald had to identify it by his coat of arms. Evil rumours on the French side claimed that Talbot had had too much of the Bordeaux wine of which the English were so fond.[1] More likely he simply acted on false intelligence. Before too long Bordeaux had fallen, and the war that had started in 1337 was effectively over.

The remarkable thing about this conflict is not that the English eventually met with their demise, but that they were as successful as they were, and for so long. England won battles where they were vastly outnumbered, commanded as much territory as the King of France himself, and at one point imprisoned the French king in the Tower of London. This in spite of the fact that, on the eve of the Black Death, the population of France was three times that of England.[2] When we remember that England was also fighting an offensive war on foreign ground, which strategists believe requires a three-to-one advantage, the feat becomes little less than miraculous.

England’s advantages were significant, however. First of all, there was the military superiority they enjoyed on the technical and strategic front. The English longbow turned out to be a far more efficient weapon than the crossbow used by the French. English archers travelled on horseback, though both they and the knights would dismount before battle. Mixed retinues of archers, knights, and men-at-arms were therefore highly mobile and could move great distances in a short time.

England’s circumstances were also better on the political field. Ever since the Norman Conquest in 1066, the English nobility held their land directly from the king, and for the most part remained loyal to him. By the fourteenth century, the political community had been expanded further by regular meetings of Parliament, which provided a source of tax revenue for the crown in times of war. Competent and ambitious kings, like Edward III (1327-1377) and Henry V (1413-1422), could translate these political advantages into military ones. No less a writer than Petrarch was astonished by how “the meekest of the barbarians” had “reduced the entire kingdom of France by fire and sword”.[3]

For France, the situation was correspondingly bleak. The king’s authority did not extend much beyond his own lands, and virtually independent regions like Brittany, Burgundy and the English king’s fiefdom of Aquitaine were a constant thorn in the crown’s side. After the succession crisis in 1328, that helped trigger the war in the first place, the country had suffered from inadequate royal initiative. This culminated in the reign of Charles VI (1380-1422), fittingly nicknamed “the Mad”. Things were not helped by the usual French military conservatism; large cavalry-heavy units moving slowly across the landscape, all too willing to give the English battle on their own terms, where French crossbows proved a cumbersome and inefficient weapon. Only with the accession of the energetic Charles VII – the Victorious – did France’s fortunes change. With the help of the divinely inspired Joan of Arc, a reinvigorated military leadership and a treaty with Burgundy, the English were driven out of all their continental possessions save Calais. Fortunately for Charles, his reign coincided almost exactly with that of Henry VI of England (1322-1361), one of the most incompetent kings that nation has ever seen.

What was more conducive to England’s early success: was it the cohesiveness of its body politics, or the advantage allowed by military strategies and technology such as the longbow? For the historian, it is tempting to emphasise the former. This is partly because socio-political history today is more fashionable that military history, with its musty air of the old-fashioned “kings and generals” style of writing, where the course of history was decided almost entirely on the battlefield. Partly, though, it is also due to an aversion to what is – often dismissively – called technological determinism: the idea that technological innovations drive historical development, while society and politics can only follow. It is akin to Marx’s historical materialism based on the means of production, but is even more reductive, since Marx never thought of historical developments in purely material terms.

When it comes to medieval history in particular, technological determinism is most often associated with the American historian Lynn Townsend White Jr. Born in San Francisco, White studied as an undergraduate at Stanford. Already in his first year of university, he became so fascinated by the Middle Ages that he decided to dedicate his career to the study of this period. That career took him to a PhD at Harvard, teaching positions at Princeton and UCLA, and saw a prodigious output of publications.[4] Early on, however, White grew disillusioned with contemporary historiography’s reliance on written records – which are scarce and unreliable for much of the Middle Ages – while ignoring the material world as documented through archaeological discoveries. In his seminal work, Medieval Technology and Social Change, he described how inventions such as the stirrup and the heavy plough, along with other innovations, were the drivers of significant social and political change in medieval Europe.[5]

The book, though a best-seller in its time, was not without its detractors. Technological determinism, after all, raises serious questions of its own. Why, for instance, does an invention arrive when it does, and not before? Is it not, perhaps, social developments that drive technological innovation, rather than the other way around? Why does new technology have so little impact on one society, while radically changing another? China invented gunpowder, but did not take over the world; they invented moveable print, but it did not lead to democratisation. Yet when these inventions arrived in Europe, these were the results. It was the highly fragmented and urbanised nature of European society that allowed these developments, not the technology in and of itself. For all the criticism levelled against him, Lynn White was certainly not blind to this fact. “As our understanding of the history of technology increases,” he wrote in Medieval Technology, “it becomes clear that a new device merely opens a door; it does not compel one to enter.”[6]

As for the longbow the English used to such great effect in France, it may have represented a military innovation, but it was certainly no new invention. As the name implies, it is simply a bow – one of the oldest weapons known to man – but longer. At almost two metres in length, it demanded enormous strength and skill to draw and fire with accuracy. It was the training required, rather than the equipment, that made it so hard for other nations to emulate the English. A good archer had to start practicing at an early age, and hone his skills constantly thereafter. For this reason, laws were passed as early as the thirteenth century mandating archery practice among Englishmen. On 1 June 1363, Edward III wrote the sheriff of Kent to ensure that able-bodied men spent their feast days with bows and arrows, threatening with imprisonment those who chose to “attend or meddle with hurling of stones…handball or football…cock fighting or other vain games of no value”.[7] It is hard to imagine such measures introduced to much effect in France. Though the longbow did not have the same armour-piercing force as the crossbow, it more than made up for this by its rapid rate of fire. Arrows rained down on the enemy in constant showers that were deadly both to bodies and to morale.[8]

It was its usage, then, rather than the weapon itself, that made the longbow such a formidable implement. Overall, game-changing weapons have been rare throughout human history. Arguments have been made for the chariot, empowering the military aristocracy of Bronze Age civilisations, and the crossbow itself, that allowed the Han Chinese to contain barbarian invasions from the central Asian steppes.[9] Then there is, of course, gunpowder and firearms, that helped the French drive out the English in the fifteenth century and were later so central to Europe’s colonial expansion. But any new military technology will only provide an enduring strategic advantage as long as the enemy is incapable of replicating it; otherwise, it will simply help escalate, rather than decide the conflict. Furthermore, new technology has little value on its own, unless it is properly integrated with existing technology and institutions.[10]

So where does this leave us on the question of political versus military history; socio-economic versus technological-strategic explanations for the relative success of warring nations? Is true history all about revealing the deeper structures behind, leaving technical details to the philistines? Or should we ignore all the vague, uncertain, peripheral stuff and focus on where wars are truly decided: in the field? Perhaps there is another way to look at it, where military affairs are not only an integral part of society, but where the two must be seen in conjunction to be fully understood. To put it another way: the way a people wages war is inseparable from how it lives. The Greek phalanx, for example, can be seen as an extension of the egalitarian society of the Greek city state. Germany’s intense industrialisation in the nineteenth century provided the extensive rail network that allowed rapid mobilisation and troop movement during the wars of unification. And as for England, it was from their wars against their Celtic neighbours at home that they learned how to wage war overseas: the Welsh showed them the power of the longbow, the Scots taught them to dismount. In the most brutal way possible, they benefitted from a form of multicultural enrichment.

This advantage was all spent by the time John Talbot died on a field outside Castillon in 1453. The victory was a cause for celebration for the French crown, and for the nation as a whole. The citizens of Bordeaux and wider Aquitaine, however, were more ambivalent about the course of events. The English thirst for the excellent Bordeaux wine had made the region rich off of exports. With the English driven out, that trade route all but dried out, and wine merchants had to look for other options. The city never forgot its heritage, and the English lion can still be seen in the coat of arms of Bordeaux, though now reduced from three to one. On the place where Talbot died, a chapel was built in his honour, later replaced by a monument. Today, the only memorial marking the site of the battle of Castillon is a tall column commemorating the “English Achilles” – the last great English commander of the Hundred Years’ War.

[1] Georges Minois, Charles VII : Un Roi Shakespearien (Paris: Perrin, 2005), 605–6.

[2] Ole Jørgen Benedictow, The Complete History of the Black Death (Woodbridge, Suffolk: The Boydell Press, 2021), 259.

[3] Andrew Ayton, Knights and Warhorses: Military Service and the English Aristocracy under Edward III, Reprinted (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 1999), 9.

[4] Bert S. Hall, ‘Lynn Townsend White, Jr. (1907-1987)’, Technology and Culture 30, no. 1 (1989): 194–213.

[5] Lynn White, Medieval Technology and Social Change (London: Oxford University Press London, 1962).

[6] White, 28.

[7] Calendar of Close Rolls, Edward III, 1360-1364, Vol. 11 (London, 1909), 534-5.

[8] Clifford J. Rogers, ‘The Efficacy of the English Longbow: A Reply to Kelly DeVries’, War in History 5, no. 2 (April 1998): 233–42.

[9] William Hardy McNeill, The Pursuit of Power: Technology, Armed Force, and Society since A.D. 1000 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 9–10, 36-9.

[10] George Raudzens, ‘War-Winning Weapons: The Measurement of Technological Determinism in Military History’, The Journal of Military History 54, no. 4 (October 1990): 403-34.