On 24 June 1450 Caen, the last English stronghold in Normandy, fell to the French. Lancastrian Normandy was lost. Less than three years later English-held Gascony was also overrun, marking the end of the English presence on the continent and any pretensions to the throne of France. Symbolically at least, to some contemporaries and most subsequent observers, this was a symptom of the wider malaise that affected the dual-monarchy of Henry VI. Gascony, however, was not the last English possession on the continental mainland. Since 1347 English kings had held Calais in Picardy and a small area of land around it. Calais had been captured by Edward III in August of that year, the one tangible benefit of the Crécy campaign. By the third decade of the fifteenth century this area of English rule was known as the marches of Calais or, more rarely, the Pale. It remained in English hands until the successful French siege of January 1558. As the last foothold of English kings on the continental mainland, Calais became the focus of the crown's military and diplomatic efforts to assert its pretensions to the French throne. It served as the bridgehead for invasions of France by English kings in 1475, 1492, 1513 and 1544. Despite its importance in the English wool export trade, Calais was, as contemporaries recognised, above all a ‘town of war’. It had the largest permanent establishment of military resources in late medieval and early Tudor England and served as the arena in which the English elite of the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries could gain experience in war, diplomacy and politics.