Late Middle Ages

Joan of Arc and the lifting of the Siege of Orléans

Jehanne, the daughter of Jacques d’Arc and Isabelle Romée, was born c. 1412 at Domrémy, a small village on the Meuse in the marches of Lorraine. In 1429, at seventeen, she led a French army into Orléans; on 17 July of the same year she stood with her banner in the cathedral of Reims as the dauphin Charles was anointed king. A year later, in May 1430, she was captured under the walls of Compiègne; on 30 May 1431, she was burned at the stake in the Place du Vieux-Marché at Rouen, aged nineteen. In the long history of the Hundred Years’ War, no single career is more thoroughly documented and more stubbornly contested. The records of her two trials — the condemnation of 1431 and the rehabilitation of 1456 — are the fullest set of depositions in medieval French history. The historiography of the Maid of Orléans is one of the great industries of medieval studies.

A peasant from the borderlands

Domrémy lay in the territory of the duke of Bar, nominally a vassal of the king of France, and a marchland between the kingdom and the duchy of Lorraine. The villagers were peasant subjects of the lord of Domrémy, Jacques d’Arc being one of the more substantial of them. The family had been loyal subjects of the duke of Bar; her godfather was a labourer of the village, and her parish priest, Guillaume Frontet, was the man who first taught her the Pater Noster and the Ave Maria. The voices, as she described them at her trial, came in her thirteenth year: first the Archangel Michael, then Saint Catherine of Alexandria and Saint Margaret of Antioch, and they told her, in the simple and direct language of the countryside, that she was to go to the dauphin and have him crowned at Reims.

The 1420s were a disastrous time for the French. Henry V had won the battle of Agincourt in 1415, the Treaty of Troyes of 1420 had disinherited the dauphin in favour of Henry’s heirs, and Henry had died in 1422 only a few weeks after Charles VI. The infant Henry VI, crowned king of England and of France at Westminster in December 1426, was the formal sovereign of the entire Valois inheritance, and the duke of Bedford, the regent in France, was systematically extending the conquest. The fall of Meaux in 1421, of Pontoise in 1430 (after Joan’s death), and the long preparations for the conquest of the Loire were the working out of that policy.

Voices, visions, and the committee at Poitiers

In May 1428 Joan made her way to Vaucouleurs, a small town on the Meuse held by the king’s captain Robert de Baudricourt, and asked to be sent to the dauphin. Baudricourt thought her mad, a “paillarde” come out of her village; he sent her home. She returned in the autumn, and a second time in January 1429, when the dauphin’s cause was at its lowest. Baudricourt finally gave her a small escort, in male dress, to ride to Chinon. The journey of about three hundred miles, through enemy-held territory, took eleven days.

The interview with the dauphin is the subject of legends: the ring, the angel, the “sign” of the angel that was to be given him. What is documented is the examination at Poitiers, conducted by a commission of theologians of the University of Poitiers and including the archbishop of Embrun, Jean de Vénac. The commission was not concerned with Joan’s voices. It was concerned with her morals, her virtue, and the political usefulness of her claim. It found “nothing evil in her, only good,” and the dauphin decided to use her.

The legend of Joan’s recognition of the dauphin disguised among his courtiers is first recorded in the Chronique de la Pucelle, written in the 1450s; the trial record says only that the dauphin, with the king of Sicily and others, received her. The theology of the trial — the divine voices, the claim to be sent by God — is also absent from the Poitiers record. The committee accepted her as a “valid” and useful instrument; the trial of 1431 was to be conducted, on the same basis, by a much more hostile set of examiners.

The forts around Orléans and the relief of May 1429

The English had begun to close in on Orléans in 1428. The city, the only large place in central France still loyal to the dauphin, commanded the Loire and guarded the approaches to Bourges and the south. The army of the duke of Bedford, under the command of Thomas, Earl of Salisbury, arrived in October 1428, and began a methodical blockade. By Christmas the English had built a chain of bastides — the Augustins on the north, the Tourelles on the south, Saint-Laurent, Saint-Pouair, the London Tower of the bridge — and the city, with the Bastard of Orléans (Jean, Count of Dunois) and a garrison of perhaps 2,500 men, was under siege. The Earl of Salisbury was killed on 27 October 1428 by a stone from a canon on the city wall, one of the first recorded casualties of artillery fire in the field, and command passed to William de la Pole, Earl of Suffolk.

Joan arrived on 29 April 1429. She had with her a small army of about 4,000 men: men-at-arms under the Duke of Alençon, the Bastard of Orléans, and Jean de la Hire, supported by the city itself. Her contribution, the chronicler Jean de Wavrin reported, was the spirit. The English outworks fell in quick succession: Saint-Loup on 4 May, Saint-Jean-le-Blanc on the 6th, the Augustins on the 7th. The Tourelles, which commanded the bridge, was stormed on 7 May 1429, Joan herself being wounded by an arrow through the shoulder but staying in the fighting. On 8 May the English, in their entrenchments under the command of Sir John Fastolf and Suffolk, withdrew. The siege of Orléans was over.

Reims and the road to Compiègne

The relief of Orléans was, in military terms, only a lifting of a siege. Politically, it was decisive. The dauphin, now styled Charles VII, set out from Gien on 29 June with an escort of perhaps 12,000 men; the towns on the route, Auxerre, Troyes, Chalons, opened their gates without fighting. The king was crowned on 17 July 1429 in the cathedral of Reims by the archbishop Regnault de Chartres, with Joan standing by his side holding her banner. The political theology of the Valois — the unbreakable link between the king and his anointing — was reaffirmed.

The campaign that followed was less successful. An attempted march on Paris in September 1429 failed; the city was reached, skirmished around, and abandoned. Joan was with the army at the siege of La Charité in November, but her position was weakening. The dauphin’s court, the financial experts of the Bureau brothers, and the more sober of his captains were beginning to doubt her usefulness. In the spring of 1430, with the Burgundian party ascendant in the Île-de-France, she was sent to relieve Compiègne, a town on the Oise besieged by John of Luxembourg. She entered the town on 23 May 1430. On the same day, in a sally under the walls, she was pulled from her horse and brought out by the Burgundians.

Rouen, 1431: the trial in context

The Burgundian captors sold Joan to the English for a sum said to be 10,000 livres tournois. The English, conscious of the propaganda value of a condemnation, brought her to Rouen, the English capital in France, and constituted a court under the presidency of Pierre Cauchon, bishop of Beauvais, a man with a long record of service to the English. The trial ran from 21 February to 30 May 1431. The seventy articles of accusation, which survive in the Latin minutes of the Procès, included sorcery, divination, idolatry, schism, and the wearing of male dress. The court heard a great number of witnesses — including several of Joan’s companions from the Vaucouleurs ride, and the seamstress who had been set to watch her in prison — and a long and often fractious record of the prisoner’s answers was kept.

Joan was convicted on twelve counts and, on 24 May 1431, was told to abjure. She signed a short act of abjuration, was condemned to perpetual imprisonment “in the bread of sorrow and the water of affliction,” and was remanded to the secular arm. Within a few days, she was found wearing male dress again — the evidence is ambiguous, but the court accepted it — and was condemned as a relapsed heretic. She was burned in the Place du Vieux-Marché on 30 May 1431, and her ashes were thrown into the Seine. The English cardinal Henry Beaufort, in a letter preserved in the Gesta Henrici Quinti tradition, congratulated himself on having “the witch” out of the way.

Rehabilitation, saintship, and the long memory

The English attempt to obliterate Joan’s reputation failed. The rumours of her survival were not seriously entertained, but the political and religious context of her condemnation became increasingly embarrassing. In 1450, after the reconquest of Normandy, Charles VII’s chancery began to receive petitions for a new trial. The pope, Nicholas V, authorized a process in 1452; the formal rehabilitation, conducted by a commission under the cardinal of Beauvais Guillaume Bouillé, opened in November 1455 and ended on 7 July 1456 with the formal annulment of the verdict of 1431.

The 1456 process, which produced a final set of 146 witnesses and a verdict of innocence, is the indispensable counterpart of the 1431 trial. It is one of the great documents of French history, and the scholarly edition of it, undertaken by Régine Pernoud, has dominated the modern historiography of Joan. In 1869 a cause de canonisation was opened; in 1909 Joan was beatified by Pius X; in 1920 she was canonized by Benedict XV. Her feast, 30 May, is a French national holiday; her image, reproduced in the iconography of the Third Republic, of the Occupation, of the Liberation, and of the European Union, has been the most politically resilient figure in French history.

The historiography of Joan is too large to summarise. The older tradition, that of Jules Quicherat and of Anatole France’s breezy Vie de Jeanne d’Arc (1908), treated her as a patriot; the revisionist work of Régine Pernoud, and the social-historical work of historians such as Philippe Contamine, have made the documentation central; the psycho-medical and feminist readings of the late twentieth century — those of Marguerite Duportal, Maryse Fonck, and many others — have interrogated the categories of “voices” and “patriotism” themselves. The scholar most associated with the academic rehabilitation in English is the late Robert Boutet, but the work continues. The Maid remains, as she was to Charles VII, “la Pucelle.”

References and further reading

  • Régine Pernoud, Jeanne d’Arc (Paris: Fayard, 1986) and her ed. of the Procès de condamnation et de réhabilitation de Jeanne d’Arc, 5 vols. (Paris: Klincksieck, 1960–1989).
  • Philippe Contamine, La Guerre de Cent Ans, 9th ed. (Paris: PUF, “Que sais-je?,” 2017).
  • Kelly DeVries, Joan of Arc: A Military Leader (Stroud: Sutton, 1999).
  • Jonathan Sumption, The Hundred Years’ War, vol. IV: Cursed Kings (London: Faber & Faber, 2015) and vol. V: Triumph and Illusion (2021).
  • Olivier Bouzy, Jeanne d’Arc en vérité (Paris: Mengès, 2007).