The longest war in European history contained about thirty hours of famous battle. This book is about the other hundred and sixteen years.

Crécy, Poitiers, Agincourt ? the battles everyone remembers add up to roughly a day and a half of combat. What filled the century around them was the chevauchée: mounted raids sent to burn villages, wreck harvests, and prove to the French peasantry that their king could not protect them. Eleven years in, the Black Death arrived and killed perhaps a third of both kingdoms. The war did not stop. It absorbed the plague, changed how it was paid for, and kept going for another century.

This is the whole story in a single volume: the feudal tangle that put a crowned king of England on his knees before the king of France, the longbow's rise and its sudden obsolescence, a king of France captured on the battlefield and ransomed for a kingdom's price, peasant revolts on both sides of the Channel, a teenage girl who talked her way to an army and was burned by a church court whose full transcript survives ? and the guns that ended everything in five years, in a war that finished with no treaty at all.

The outcome nobody planned is the real subject. England went in speaking French at court and came out speaking English in parliament and law. France went in a patchwork of near-independent magnates and came out with a standing army and a permanent tax. Paying for a hundred and sixteen years of soldiers built the institutions we now call nations ? and no one intended any of it.

What you'll learn:

• Why the war was mostly raids, and what the chevauchée strategy actually cost France
• What the longbow really did at Crécy and Agincourt ? evidence over folklore
• How the Black Death landed inside the war and transformed wages, taxes, and rebellion
• How ransoms, wool customs, and war taxes built Parliament and the French state
• Joan of Arc's campaign, trial, and rehabilitation, told from the surviving records
• Why field artillery ended the war in five years after a century of stalemate

This book is for you if:

• You want the entire war in one readable volume, not five scholarly ones or a single battle
• You read narrative history that follows the money as closely as the armies
• You suspect the chivalric version of the Middle Ages left out the burning villages
• You want Joan of Arc from the trial transcript, neither mystified nor debunked

Two feudal kingdoms went in. Two nations came out. Nobody planned that.