ABSTRACT
Edward III, at the request of the Pope’s nuncios, agreed at Christmas 1337 to suspend hostilities against the French until March, and this truce was later extended to midsummer. In the meantime, however, fighting continued in Gascony, and in the spring of 1338 a French fleet appeared in the Channel, which attacked Portsmouth and ravaged the Isle of Wight. On 6 May Edward announced that he regarded the truce as no longer binding. The war which then began in earnest was to last more than one hundred years. Hostilities, of course, were nothing like continuous throughout that period, and this makes it possible to study the course of the war in phases. A first phase may be said to have ended when in 1360, at Brétigny near Chartres, a treaty was agreed between the French and English which came subsequently to be known as the ‘great peace’.
