English Army Crushed at Formigny: Hundred Years' War Nears Its End

French cavalry and cannon shattered the English army at Formigny on April 15, 1450, killing or capturing nearly the entire 4,000-man force and shattering England's century-long grip on Normandy. The battle marked the first major engagement where gunpowder artillery decisively defeated the English longbow formations that had dominated European warfare since Crecy in 1346. Two small French culverins, positioned beyond bowshot, raked the English lines with fire the archers could not answer. The English commander, Sir Thomas Kyriel, had landed at Cherbourg with 3,000 men and picked up reinforcements while marching toward Bayeux. His longbowmen had won every major battle of the Hundred Years' War, from Crecy to Poitiers to Agincourt, by planting stakes and destroying French cavalry charges with volleys of arrows. At Formigny, Kyriel deployed this proven formation along a stream, confident that French knights would break themselves against it as they always had. The French commander, the Comte de Clermont, refused to cooperate. Instead of charging, he brought up two small cannon and bombarded the English positions from a distance the longbows could not reach. The English broke formation to charge the guns, sacrificing their defensive advantage. At that moment, a second French force under Arthur de Richemont, the Constable of France, arrived from the south and struck the English flank. Caught between two armies in open ground, the English formation collapsed. Formigny effectively ended English control of northern France. Normandy, held by England since Henry V's conquest in 1417-1419, fell within months as French forces swept through one garrison town after another. By August 1450, Cherbourg, the last English stronghold in Normandy, surrendered. Only Calais and a strip of Gascony remained of England's once-vast French territories. The Hundred Years' War, which had begun in 1337, would formally end in 1453 with the English expulsion from Bordeaux, but Formigny was the battle that made that conclusion inevitable.