How long was the Hundred Years War?

The Hundred Years War actually ran 116 years, from 1337 to 1453, making the name a rounding-down of one of history's longest conflicts. And it was not a single unbroken war but a long series of wars, raids, sieges, and battles punctuated by lengthy truces and periods of uneasy peace, all stemming from English claims to the French throne and control of French territory. Historians group it into phases because the fighting started, stopped, and restarted across more than a century, outlasting the lives of everyone who began it and passing through five English and five French monarchs.

It gave history some of its most famous moments: the English longbow's devastation of French knights at Crecy and Agincourt, and Joan of Arc, the teenage peasant whose visions rallied France before she was captured and burned at the stake in 1431. France ultimately won, expelling the English from nearly all French soil and ending centuries of English territorial ambition on the continent. The war also helped forge national identities in both countries and, by making massed longbowmen and later gunpowder decisive, hastened the decline of the armored knight and the feudal order built around him. So the tidy hundred is a nickname; the reality was longer, messier, and more transformative than the number suggests.