The French Succession Crisis of 1328 That Started the Hundred Years' War Twelve Years Later

The Capetian dynasty had ruled France in unbroken male-line succession for 341 years — from the election of Hugh Capet at Senlis in May 987 — when King Charles IV died at the royal castle of Vincennes on 1 February 1328. He left no son. He left a pregnant widow who, two months later, gave birth to a daughter. The Capetian male line was over.

The French political establishment had been preparing for this contingency for some years. Charles was the third of three sons of Philip IV who had died in succession without producing a surviving male heir between 1314 and 1328 (Louis X died in 1316 leaving only a daughter; Philip V died in 1322 leaving only daughters; Charles IV died in 1328 in the same condition). The succession framework that the French magnates had established in 1316 — the so-called Salic Law exclusion of female-line claims to the French throne — would now have to absorb its substantial test.

The cousin who inherited under the Salic Law framework was Philip of Valois (Philip VI), the son of Charles of Valois (younger brother of Philip IV). The cousin who had a substantially-stronger genealogical claim under any other inheritance framework was Edward III of England, the 15-year-old son of Isabella of France (the only surviving daughter of Philip IV). Philip VI was the choice. Edward III did not initially protest. Twelve years later he changed his mind.

What the Salic Law actually said

The substantial Salic Law that the French succession framework invoked was a 6th-century Frankish legal code, the Pactus Legis Salicae, originally promulgated under King Clovis around 510 AD. Its specific provision on female inheritance was a single clause, De alodis (“Concerning allodial property”), which stated that no portion of “Salic land” — substantively the unentailed inherited freehold property of a Frankish landholding family — could pass to a female heir if any male heir existed.

The clause had been a property-law provision for nearly eight centuries before it was first cited as a constitutional principle in 1316. Its substantive application to the royal succession was the work of the French magnates who had to find a justification for excluding the female-line claim of King Louis X’s daughter Joan (later Joan II of Navarre) and giving the throne to her uncle Philip V. The same logic was extended in 1322 when Philip V himself died without male heirs and the throne went to his brother Charles IV. By the time the same question arose for the third time in 1328, the Salic Law exclusion had become the substantive constitutional principle of French royal succession.

The 1328 application was substantively more controversial than the 1316 or 1322 applications. Louis X’s daughter Joan and Philip V’s daughters had been excluded in favour of their adult uncles in two clear-cut cases. The 1328 case was different: the senior candidate under any rule that admitted female-line claims was Edward III of England, whose mother Isabella was the surviving daughter of Philip IV and the substantial closest blood-relative of the deceased Charles IV. The French magnates’ choice to exclude Edward in favour of the more distant male-line cousin Philip of Valois was substantively a political choice — driven by Edward’s foreign nationality and his strong English military-political base — that the Salic Law was retroactively invoked to legitimise.

What the parties actually did

Philip VI was acclaimed King of France by the French magnates in early February 1328, before Charles IV’s posthumous daughter had even been born. He was formally crowned at the cathedral of Reims on 29 May 1328. His succession proceeded substantively without armed opposition; the French political establishment had aligned on his candidacy and the military-strategic position of the Valois faction was effectively unchallengeable in the immediate institutional moment.

Edward III was 15 years old in 1328 and was substantively under the regency of his mother Isabella of France and her lover Roger Mortimer, who together had deposed Edward’s father in 1326 and were running England as de facto regents through the period. The English political-military establishment was substantively unprepared for a French succession contest in early 1328. The Mortimer-Isabella regency accepted Philip VI’s accession and arranged for Edward III to perform formal feudal homage to Philip for the English-held duchy of Aquitaine — the formal acknowledgement that Aquitaine was held by the English crown as a feudal vassal of the French crown.

The Aquitaine homage was performed at Amiens on 6 June 1329. Edward III was 16. The substantive political acknowledgement was that Edward had accepted Philip VI as his feudal overlord and had implicitly conceded the French throne. The matter appeared, in the political-institutional moment of 1329, substantively settled.

What Edward III subsequently did

The political settlement did not survive. Three substantive subsequent developments progressively reopened the succession question:

The 1330 Nottingham coup, in which the 17-year-old Edward III overthrew the Mortimer-Isabella regency, executed Mortimer at Tyburn, confined his mother to comfortable house arrest, and took personal control of the English royal government. The new Edward III administration was substantively more politically ambitious than the Mortimer-Isabella regency had been.

The progressive deterioration of Anglo-French relations through the 1330s over a sequence of substantive issues: the question of French support for the Scottish independence movement (Philip VI was supporting the deposed Scottish king David II against the English-allied Edward Balliol); the question of French interference with English merchant shipping in the Channel; the question of French confiscation of Aquitaine. By 1336 the political relationship had substantively broken down.

Philip VI’s formal confiscation of Aquitaine in May 1337 as a sanction for what he treated as English political-military misconduct. The Aquitaine confiscation was substantively the formal beginning of what would become the Hundred Years’ War. Edward III’s response on 7 October 1337 was a formal repudiation of his 1329 Aquitaine homage and a counter-claim to the French throne in his own right — substantively the first formal English-royal claim to the French throne based on the rejected 1328 succession.

The first English military campaign of the war began at Cadzand in October 1337. The substantive military operations would continue, with various intermissions and substantive transformations, for 116 years until the French recovery of Bordeaux in 1453 effectively ended the war.

The substantive consequences

The 1328 succession crisis is substantively the single moment at which the constitutional framework of European royal succession entered modern recognisable form. The Salic Law exclusion of female-line claims — substantively a French ad-hoc institutional invention of the 1316–1328 period — was subsequently extended (with substantive local modifications) to several other European royal succession frameworks and remained the dominant European royal-succession principle until the 20th-century democratisation reforms. The English royal-succession framework — which has consistently admitted female-line claims — became the substantive exception to this dominant European pattern, with the subsequent consequences that the English-royal succession has had a substantially different cultural-political character from the continental-European royal-succession traditions throughout the modern period.

The substantively immediate consequence of the 1328 succession crisis — the Hundred Years’ War of 1337–1453 — was the foundational political-military event of late medieval French and English history. The substantive demographic consequences (approximately 3 million dead across France and England), the substantive political consequences (the development of French national identity through the war; the development of the English parliamentary tradition through the war’s fiscal demands), and the substantive cultural consequences (the entire late-medieval English literary tradition from Chaucer through Malory; the substantive late-medieval French chivalric-literary tradition from Froissart through Christine de Pizan) all descend substantially from the constitutional question that Charles IV’s death had posed in February 1328.

The Capetian dynasty had ruled France for 341 unbroken years. The Valois dynasty that succeeded it would rule for 261 years (1328–1589). The Bourbon dynasty that succeeded the Valois would rule for 203 years (1589–1792). Each transition involved political-constitutional crisis; the 1328 transition was the first and the most consequential.