The Hundred Years War

English kings spent these centuries fighting abroad, and the longest of those campaigns was the Hundred Years War, which despite its name was a long war with France that actually lasted 116 years. Its most famous moment came at Agincourt: the English at the Battle of Agincourt were led by Henry V and beat a much larger French army.

Closer to home, Edward I had taken Wales, and holding it meant building on a scale nobody could miss. Conwy Castle and Caernarvon Castle both still stand in Wales, raised in the same campaign and for the same purpose: to make a conquest permanent in stone.

All of this belonged to the long stretch of English history that followed the Norman Conquest and is now known as the Middle Ages, sometimes called the medieval period: centuries in which English kings were almost constantly at war, whether against the Welsh, the Scots or the French.