MEANWHILE IN EUROPE 213to 1453. It wasn't actually one continuous war, of course, but a series of
campaigns interrupted by periods of peace. Before the war, there really was
no such thing as "England" and "France." There was just territory, con-
trolled by various nobles, who had various affiliations with other nobles.
Empires, such as that of the medieval Carolingians, had been collections of
territories. Being the emperor of these territories meant possessing the
right and power to collect taxes there and draft soldiers from among its
people. Emperors could mix and match and shuffle their collections of ter-
ritory, trading or fighting over patches with other monarchs the way chil-
dren fight over toys or exchange baseball cards. The people of two
territories owned by the same emperor did not feel any sense of common
peoplehood on that account. They weren't united in a feeling of kinship
just because they both belonged to Charles the Bald.
A sense of shared peoplehood did, however, begin to develop over the
course of the Hundred Years' War. For one thing, it became more dis-
tinctly the case that people in France spoke French and people in England
spoke English. The French began to feel ever more united with others who
spoke their language and lived in the same invaded territory and ever more
distinct from the English-speaking armies who kept coming amongst
them. Meanwhile, English soldiers, thrown together with one another over
long campaigns that might recapitulate a campaign their fathers had been
on, and which their sons might go on, felt ever more united with each
other in a team-spirit kind of way. Over this period the "king" developed
into something more than just the biggest nobleman: the idea of"king" as
embodiment of "nation" began to form.
The Hundred Years' War began as a war between big-shot nobles and
their knights, with yeomen who carne along to carry the baggage and some-
times shoot their silly bows at other yeoman, those arrows being completely
ineffectual against the real warriors, the men in metal suits. Partway through
the Hundred Years' War, however, the English longbow was invented, a bow
that could shoot harder and further than previous bows and whose arrows
could pierce armor. Suddenly, a team of archers standing far behind the
lines, could bring down a row of knights before they even got off their lists.
From that moment on, knights no longer determined the outcomes of
battles, which meant that knights were obsolete. Feudal political organiza-
tions consisted of networks of personal connections. As feudalism faded,