Hundred Years' War (1415–53)
By 1449, the French had retaken Rouen. In 1450 the Count of Clermont and Arthur de Richemont, Earl of Richmond, of the Montfort family (the future Arthur III, Duke of Brittany) caught an English army attempting to relieve Caen at the Battle of Formigny and defeated it. The English army was attacked from the flank and rear by Richemont's force just as they were on the verge of beating Clermont's army. The French proceeded to capture Caen on July 6 and Bordeaux and Bayonne in 1451. The attempt by Talbot to retake Guyenne, though initially welcomed by the locals, was crushed by Jean Bureau and his cannons at the Battle of Castillon in 1453 where Talbot had led a small Anglo-Gascon force in a frontal attack on an entrenched camp. This is considered the last battle of the Hundred Years' War.
Hundred Years' War (1337–1360)
The Black Death had reached England in 1348. The widespread effects of the plague had effectively put the war on hold. However, by the mid-1350s the disease had receded sufficiently to allow the country to start rebuilding its finances. So in 1355 Edward's son, Edward the Black Prince, resumed the war and invaded France from English-held Gascony and by August of that year he had begun a brutal campaign of raids known as "chevauchée". This campaign was designed to terrorise and demoralise the people, discredit their leaders and drain the French king's financial resources. Anything that was portable was looted and anything that could not be taken away was broken or burnt. An observer at the time said, of the Black Prince, that "as he rode to Toulouse there was no town that he did not lay waste."