On 17 July 1453 John Talbot's Anglo-Gascon army charged Jean Bureau's entrenched artillery park at Castillon and was destroyed; Talbot was killed, Bordeaux fell in October, and the Hundred Years' War was over.
The battle of Castillon, fought on 17 July 1453 beside the Dordogne east of Bordeaux, is conventionally the last battle of the Hundred Years' War — and a landmark in military history as the first great field victory won by massed gunpowder artillery. The army of John Talbot, the aged "English Achilles", attacked a fortified French artillery camp on the strength of a false report and was shot to pieces in front of its rampart.
The defeat was final in a way no earlier battle had been. Talbot was dead, no relief could be raised in an England sliding into civil war, and when Bordeaux capitulated on 19 October 1453, three hundred years of Plantagenet Aquitaine ended. No treaty was ever signed; the war simply stopped, because the English had nothing left to fight it with.
Gascony was not Normandy: Bordeaux had been English for three centuries, its prosperity built on the wine trade with England, and when Bureau's armies first overran the duchy in 1451 the Bordelais soon found French taxation and rule intolerable. Their envoys invited the English back, and in October 1452 Talbot landed with a small force and retook Bordeaux to genuine local rejoicing. Reinforced in 1453 to perhaps six to ten thousand English and Gascon troops, he faced three converging French royal armies.
In July 1453 one of those armies, its operations directed by the artillery master Jean Bureau, besieged the town of Castillon on the Dordogne. Bureau, expecting Talbot, did not merely besiege — he built a fortified artillery park outside the town: a ditch and rampart lined with up to three hundred guns, its rear covered by the river, garrisoned by some seven to ten thousand men. It was a trap disguised as a siege camp.
Talbot marched hard from Bordeaux, and at dawn on 17 July his vanguard scattered a screen of French archers posted in a priory outside the town — first blood that confirmed his instinct to press on. Then came the report that decided the battle: a great dust cloud was rising from the French camp. Talbot read it as a retreat beginning and ordered an immediate assault. The dust was the camp followers and horses being sent to the rear before the fighting.
The English attacked dismounted, in the front rank Talbot himself — unarmoured and on a pony, keeping an oath sworn during his captivity after Patay never again to wear armour against the King of France. The assault reached the rampart and stayed there, in the killing ground, for perhaps an hour, as guns loaded with ball and scrap fired into it at ranges where a single shot cut files of men in half. When a thousand Breton cavalry under Peter II of Brittany came in on the right flank, the attack disintegrated. Talbot's pony was killed under him and he was finished with a hand-axe; his son Lord Lisle died trying to stand over the body.
Castillon surrendered the next day, and the remaining Gascon towns followed through the summer as Bureau's siege train came before their walls. Bordeaux, blockaded by land and river, held until 19 October 1453, then yielded on terms; this time Charles VII garrisoned it with citadels and expelled the leading English partisans. The three-century-old union of England and Aquitaine, older than the war itself, was finished.
England kept only Calais — held until 1558 — and a royal title to France that its kings would not formally abandon until 1802. There was no peace treaty: the war ended by exhaustion, and within two years the veterans of Lancastrian France were fighting each other at St Albans in the opening battle of the Wars of the Roses. The same year Castillon was fought, Constantinople fell to Ottoman guns — 1453 marking, at both ends of Europe, the power of artillery over the medieval world's walls and battle lines.
Castillon inverted the tactical story the war had told since Crécy. For a century the English had won by standing on the defensive and letting the enemy attack a prepared position; at Castillon it was the French who stood in a fortified position with superior missile weapons — now guns rather than bows — and the English who broke themselves attacking it. Talbot's recklessness supplied the occasion, but the deeper cause was institutional: a permanent royal army with the best artillery establishment in Europe against an expedition raised by a bankrupt government.
The battle's reputation as the "first field victory of gunpowder" should be stated precisely: guns had appeared on battlefields since Crécy itself, and at Formigny they had played a disruptive part. Castillon is the first great battle in which massed artillery, emplaced and fought as the core of the position, was the decisive arm. Warfare between armies of the old type continued for decades — but after 17 July 1453, no one could doubt what the new weapon meant.