Edward III would launch England into a new age. Soon after this Edward was old enough to exercise royal power independently, he began to plot, prosecute, and spend prodigious sums on war against the kings of Scotland and France in pursuit of his right—as he saw it—not only to rule the old Plantagenet dominions in Normandy and Aquitaine, but to claim the French crown itself. This was the beginning of the Hundred Years War, which historians usually date between 1337 and 1453.
