Normandy. Since the English king technically held his French lands as the French king’s
vassal, John was bound by feudal law to come to Philip’s court when summoned. When,
in 1202, John defied Philip’s order to appear in court to answer charges, his disobedience
justified confiscation of his fiefs. Philip attacked Normandy that year and by 1204 had
wrenched the duchy from the English crown. Anjou and most of the rest of John’s French
lands soon followed suit. Lords who held lands on both sides of the Channel had to
forfeit their domains on one side or the other, and the severance of England from the
Continent received its final seal with the defeat of John’s allies in 1214 at the Battle of
Bouvines.
England refused to acknowledge the French conquest of Normandy until the Treaty of
Paris in 1259, but the Normans themselves adjusted to the new order. During the 13th
century, peace under the Capetians brought prosperity to the duchy, although increasing
royal taxation rankled townsmen. Rebellion broke out over this issue in the next century,
leading King Louis X to issue the Norman Charter of 1315, which guaranteed against
excessive taxation and promised the duchy a sound currency. The Norman Charter was
later seen as a symbol of political liberties and rights—in effect, Normandy’s Magna
Carta.
The 14th century also witnessed the resumption of the Anglo-French rivalry in the
Hundred Years’ War (1337–1453). For Normandy, the war began in earnest in 1346,
when Edward III of England invaded the duchy at the invitation of the Norman lord and
rebel Godefroi de Harcourt, his army laying waste to the countryside of the Cotentin and
making its way to Caen, which suffered a three-day sack. By the 1350s, the English and
their allies held the major castles between the Orne and the Vire, and Godefroi confirmed
the English king’s commitment to conquest by bequeathing his Norman lordships to him.
In the next century, after Henry V’s defeat of the French at Agincourt in 1415, the
English redoubled their efforts to take Normandy. By spring 1418, all lower Normandy
was in their hands; Rouen surrendered in January the follow-ing year, after a seige of
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