Historian Janina Ramirez opens her account of the Hundred Years War by tracing how a dispute over the French crown between England and France curdled into more than a century of warfare. She frames the conflict as a divorce between two intertwined royal houses, starting with Edward III's decision to press his claim to the French throne and abandon the conventions of medieval warfare. The episode centers on the Battle of Crecy, where Edward's low-born English archers cut down the mounted French nobility, a result that stunned European courts used to knights deciding wars. From there Ramirez follows the Black Prince, Edward's son, as he leads a scorched-earth campaign across French territory designed to terrorize the population and force capitulation rather than win set-piece battles. Ramirez visits historic sites connected to the campaign and uses them alongside period sources to explain how tactics, class, and technology upended the old rules of chivalry. The episode ends with France reeling and the war only beginning.