Historical Revision: The Causes of the Hundred Years War

Abstract

MIODERN historiography of the causes of the Hundred Years War begins with the publication of a book by M. Gavrilovitch entitled Etude sur le traite de Paris de 1259. This work, as the title suggests, was a study of the Treaty of Paris of 1259, an agreemeint reached between Henry III of England and Louis IX of France that restored the tie of vassalage between the monarchs of the two countries, which had been broken by the confiscation of King John's fiefs in France by Philip Augustus in 1202. Although the latter part of the book is devoted to an account of the fulfilment of the terms of the treaty, most of the study is concerned with the negotiations leading up to the treaty and to the provisions of the treaty itself. Gavrilovitch published ill 1899. Between that date and the appearances in 1930 and 1940 of two general histories that took account of intervening articles an(1 monographs on the causes of the war, at leas-t thirty-three important titles were added to the bibliography.2 Most of these, however, dealt with the immedi-