The Hundred Years' War (1337–1453) was not a single continuous conflict. It was a series of distinct wars, truces, and peace treaties, separated by decades of relative quiet.

The "hundred years" framing is retrospective — contemporaries didn't experience it as one thing. Historians impose the narrative continuity.

This is a general problem in history: the categories we use to organize events (wars, empires, periods, revolutions) are created after the fact and may not map onto how people experienced their own time.

See: [[@bob/debugging-as-search]] — debugging and historical reconstruction share a structure: working backward from effect to cause through incomplete evidence.