The Saber and Scroll Journal Volume 6, Issue 1, Winter 2017 | 页面 12

the destruction of this English Army, Normandy was lost.
The Political Struggle
Of course, family ties and the lack of an heir often were cause for political
turmoil. The quest for a male heir to secure the line was often an obsession for
rulers. It is not surprising that this too was one of the underlying political reasons
for the Hundred Years’ War. Charles IV died heirless in 1328. England’s Edward
III asserted that the throne of France was his due to his birthright from his mother.
Instead, the French nobility crowned Philip VI of Valois. Adding insult to injury,
this French usurper attacked the British wine country of Aquitaine, a large province
in southwestern France. By feudal law, Aquitaine was a fiefdom to the English
Crown. With Philip’s attack on Aquitaine and claiming it as rightfully his, war was
inevitable. Edward, of course, responded militarily and thus began a long drought
of French success on the battlefield through seemingly the rest of the fourteenth
century.
If the French military, logistical, and economic structures and population
were not already stressed enough by the early fifteenth century, the assassination of
the Duke of Orleans led to civil war in France. Much as America’s Civil War
allowed Napoleon III to crown Maximillian as the Emperor of Mexico, the
English—who were seriously threatened with the loss of their Brittany
possession—now got a breathing spell. With the soon to be crowned Henry V, this
breathing spell saw France soon courting disaster. Yet the English were slow to
capitalize upon this opportunity. The always unsettled Scottish border, with the
Scots supplied and egged on by France, the faux Richard II paraded about, and then
a full blown rebellion in Wales were more than merely distracting to Henry IV, and
upon his death Henry V.
The setting as well has many interesting current and near past history
parallels. The use of the “assigned” companies who periodically pillaged the
French countryside could be thought of as warring by proxies. The Cold War saw
many conflicts waged by proxies to not only win control of land but to also sway
the court of public opinion at home and in their own regional and global sphere.
Both sides used the most important two social media of their day—public letters
read as pronouncements in towns and the Catholic Church. The importance of the
Catholic Church lay in the fact that the Pope could consecrate one side as the
defender of the faith. In addition, at the parish level, the church from the pulpit
could sway opinion by preaching for the cause of either the French or English.
Other competing elements affected the West for the next five hundred
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