Just a little girl, only 16 years old.
Isn't this something miraculous?
Wielding her weapons as though they weighed nothing at all.
Indeed, she seems to have been raised for just such a moment.
So strong she is and resolute.
Her enemies stumble in flight before her.
Not one of them can stand up to her.
And all this she does before the gaze of the world.
She drives her foes out of France.
She recaptures castles and towns.
Never has anyone seen such formidable deeds.
Not hundreds, not thousands of men can compare with her.
Of our brave and able warriors, she is the chief captain.
Neither Hector nor Achilles can rival her prowess.
But...
It is God who has wrought this.
God who leads her on.
So that's a poem written in July 1429.
It would astound people to know that poem was written by a French woman, a French woman, one of the most remarkable women, according to Tom Holland, in medieval history.
So she's often described as the first professional female writer in Western history.
Her name was Christine de Bison.
She was born in Venice, actually, so maybe I should have given her a little bit of an Italian lilt.
But she came when she was four years old.
Yeah, so she came to France.
Her father was appointed the court astrologer, wasn't he?
So he was the Antoni Scaramucci, because he's a big fan of astrology.
She was the Antoni Scaramucci, or the father was the Antoni Scaramucci of medieval history.
And then in 1389, her husband dropped dead of the plague, Christine.
She had three small children and a mother and a niece to support.
And she turned to writing poetry.
And in those days, actually, you could make money by writing poetry.
So good for her.
She made a fortune.
Yeah.
She was prolific on a kind of Sandbrookian scale.
So in 1405 she boasted that between the years 1399 and the present year I have compiled 15 major works.
Whoa, that's good.
Dominic, that extract from the poem that you just read, that was the last poem she ever wrote.
She wrote it in 1429, and it celebrated a girl who was even more famous, even more remarkable than she was, a girl that Christine called La Pucelle, the maid, but who is best known today as, Of course, Joan of Arc.
Joan of Arc.
So the most famous woman in medieval history, one of the most celebrated women who's ever existed, one of the most famous characters from medieval history of any gender who's existed.
So if you think about, you've got a list here of all the people who've written songs about her.
Leonard Cohen, Madonna, Kate Bush, Arcade Fire, Little Mix, The Cranberries.
You mentioned one of my favorite bands, Orchestral Maneuvers in the Dark.
They actually wrote two, Joan of Arc and Maid of Orleans.
Yeah, and they're both excellent.
Yeah, very good.
And actually, one of them begins, Little Catholic Girl.
So quite like Christine's poem.
I don't know whether they were influenced by her.
Undoubtedly, they were.
So she's a pop icon, isn't she?
Because she's a teenage girl.
She's a rebel.
She's an outsider. teenage girls shouldn't do.
And I think that understanding of her, that tradition, it begins with Christine, who is the author of the very first poem ever written about Joan.
Because, you know, that bit you read, what is Christine celebrating?
She's celebrating the fact that, as you implied, the English are losing and the French are winning.
But more than that, she is celebrating the sheer mad, glorious joy, improbability of what she's describing that a little girl, only 16 years old, is leading an army into battle and, what is more, winning.
Yeah, and the extraordinary thing?
I mean a couple of extraordinary things.
She's so young, she's a girl and she is a peasant girl and, to give people a sense, who don't know anything about joan of arc, we're in the 15th century.
It's the hundred years war england have had all their own way so far well, a lot of it their own way.
It looks like the English have won the Hundred Years' War.
We ended the last series about it with Agincourt and Henry V and his great victories.
And now this is going to be the great turnaround in French history.
And as you say in your notes Tom, it feels like something less from the pages of history than from the pages of either fantasy.
George RR.
Martin or something, or indeed a fairy tale.
Yeah, because this is a girl who claims that she has been ordered by supernatural voices to save France.
And she puts on male dress and she rides to the distant court of the king.
And the king amazingly, agrees to meet her and is persuaded by her that she has this God-given mission to defeat the king's enemies and to see him crowned.
And she then rides in armor like a knight At the head of a great army.
She liberates the famous city of Orléans on the River Loire from a siege.
She then leads the king through enemy territory.
And she does indeed succeed in crowning him in a distant cathedral, in a city set amid hostile territory.
She is then captured.
She's put on trial.
She's convicted of heresy.
And notoriously, she is burnt to death.
And it is one of, if not the most extraordinary stories in the whole of history.
And I think we're so familiar with it that perhaps you need to kind of do a deep dive to remind yourself of just how astonishing the story is.
And the thing is that even the greatest of historians have struggled to make sense of her, to make sense of her story.
So have you read The Waning of the Middle Ages?
Yeah, Johan Huizinga.
Yeah, it was a great Dutch historian and published in 1919.
And in his study of 15th century Burgundy and northern France, he pointedly omitted Joan, even though she is probably the most famous character from that period.
And this wasn't because he thought that she was unimportant. but absolutely the opposite.
So he wrote about it years later, why he had admitted Joan.
I knew that she would have torn the book I visualized in my mind completely out of balance.
What kept me from introducing her in it was a sense of harmony that, and a vast and reverent humility.
And he said of her that she is a figure more beautiful than any other nation possesses.
And that's a Dutchman.
That's a Dutchman.
But, of course, not everybody has agreed with that verdict, have they, Tom?
Because even at the time, there were a lot of people who, in fact, especially at the time, there were a lot of people who took a very different view of La Pucelle, the maid of Orléans.
And chief among them were people we've already mentioned who were, of course, the English.
So they absolutely loathed and indeed feared her, didn't they?
As not merely a normal mortal enemy, but as a kind of supernatural enemy right?
Sorceress, a witch.
Yeah.
So here is the Duke of Bedford, who was the regent for his infant nephew, Henry VI, during this period.
And he's summing up the maid only a week after Christine de Pizan had completed her poems.
And his take is very different to Christine's.
Bedford says of her, she's a loose, infamous and immoral woman dressed as a man.
And he can't leave it alone because five years later, he's still at it.
And he is directly blaming the decline of English fortunes in France on this monstrous sorceress, a disciple and limb of the fiend called the Poussel, that used false enchantment and sorcery.
And the reason he is simmering, smouldering with rage, is that this, you know, her life and her rise to prominence coincides with the turning point in this long-running struggle between England and France in the 14th and 15th centuries that comes to be called the Hundred Years' War.
We've done, you know, a long-running series on it, a couple of seasons, haven't we?
We're now coming to the decisive moment.
And that's one reason why Christine de Pizan celebrates Jones so much is, is that, as Christine puts it, Joan will cast down the English for good, for this is what God wishes.
And this really is a turning point in the history of the sort of intermingled relations between England and France.
And I'm sorry to say I have to warn our listeners.
I don't normally agree with trigger warnings, but in this case I do.
The English will not come off well in this story.
So this is basically Theo Heaven.
It's four episodes of the English behaving both badly and losing.
And Dominic, I'm sure you would join with me in dedicating this series to Theo on that account.
So it's the story of how the English come to lose once and for all the Hundred Years' War.
But I think before that we should cheer our English listeners up by reprising everything that had gone right for England.
So how they had come to invade France, how they'd come to conquer a lot of it, how they came to seem actually on the verge of winning the war outright.
Obviously, English, unlike Joan, unlike Christine, do not think they're the baddies.
They think that the French throne rightfully belongs to their king and that a succession of astonishing victories has comprehensively demonstrated the fact that God agrees with this.
Because otherwise, if the English were not justified in invading France, God wouldn't have allowed them to win so many victories over the French.
A crucial point here is that England is much smaller and much less populous and much less rich than France.
So England is the underdog.
I think when we started the Hundred Years' War series, we compared it to Ukraine versus Russia.
One giant, one behemoth, and a much smaller country that has actually, in this case, launched a pre-emptive strike, basically as a defensive measure against, and has enjoyed extraordinary success beyond the wildest dreams you would think of England's kings.
And England has done very well, and the two kings in particular.
So one is Edward III, the victor of Crecy and Poitiers, the great kind of roister-doister of English history.
And the other is Henry V. So he has won a tremendous victory at the Battle of Agincourt.
But then he dies.
So the point of his success, the point at his peak he's become, he's the dominant figure in France, isn't he?
Yeah, he's the leading military figure in the whole of Europe.
And if you want to hear the story of Henry V, we did a series on it a year or so ago, and that is episodes 487 and the next three.
But it's not just the military genius of Henry that had enabled England to impose itself against all the odds on France.
So it also has a very elaborate, centralized framework of government.
And this means that under an effective king the English state is able to kind of raise taxes and recruit troops and provision armies much more effectively than the French king can, because in France the kingdom is kind of divided up into all kinds of different dukedoms and counties and so on.
The other advantage that Henry V has in invading France is an incredibly effective military machine.
And its strength lies in infantry rather than the cavalry that the French tend to prefer.
And it's a kind of mix of men at arms and longbowmen.
And longbows traditionally are seen by the English as absolutely what gives them the cutting edge.
So a generation later, Sir John Fortescue, kind of leading analyst of the age.
He says, the power of England standeth most upon our poor archers.
And the great demonstration of this was in 1415 at Agincourt, when the French slaughtered as if they were cattle.
According to one English chronicle,
The French high command, the cream of the nobility, decapitated.
Loads of them perished on the battlefield.
A key figure who will be coming back to, an important somebody to remember, the Duke of Alençon.
So he was the commander of the second of the two French divisions.
And he had all these holdings in Normandy, which now passed to his six-year-old heir.
And they are now very vulnerable, aren't they?
So people should remember that.
That six-year-old heir, he will be featuring later in this story.
And also, as well as the slaughter, maybe up to 2000 French noblemen are captured by, And the most distinguished of these is the French King's nephew, the Duke of Orléans, because his title is one of the highest ranking in France.
He gets taken to England where he is destined to spend years and years in captivity.
And again we mention him because the city of Orléans and the Ducal family of Orléans will be playing a key role in Joan's story.
Okay.
So Agincourt, tremendous victory.
Two years later, Henry V comes back to France, and he cuts a sway through Normandy.
One of the places that he systematically absorbs is Alençon which, as we described, has fallen to this six-year-old heir.
Yeah, so he's lost all his inheritance, basically.
Exactly.
By 1419, Henry has taken Rouen, the chief city of Normandy, He now commands the upper River Seine.
That means that basically Paris is vulnerable.
And not only has Henry got the wind in his sails, but the French are in utter chaos and shambles, aren't they?
Because basically France has descended into anarchy.
Yeah.
So proficient a commander though Henry is, there is no way I think that he could have been as successful as he turned out to be.
Had France been ordered, had it not been racked essentially by a really very, really violent civil war.
And it is so French that the rival factions in the civil war.
One of them is named after probably France's greatest wine growing region and the other is named after brandy.
So it's Burgundy against Armagnac.
And it's Burgundy, because the greatest of all the dukes in France is the Duke of Burgundy And at the time of Henry V's invasion, this is a guy called John the Fearless.
He has loads of holdings in the east of France, including obviously Burgundy.
So he's a vassal of the French king, but he also has loads of holdings in the low countries.
And so he's also a vassal of the Holy Roman Emperor.
And that means that he kind of has an independence from France that other noblemen in the kingdom tend not to have.
And this provokes all kinds of envy and resentment.
None of these rival peers individually can compare with the authority of the Duke of Burgundy.
But if they all gang up, then they measure up to him.
And the guy who takes the lead in kind of forming them into a posse, is a guy called the Count of Armignac.
And so this is why you get these two rival factions, the Burgundians and the Armignacs.
And they start kind of tearing each other to pieces.
And to begin with, it looks like the Armagnacs have the upper hand.
And this is because they hold two cards.
The first, they hold Paris, so the capital of France.
The Duke of Burgundy and his supporters have been expelled from the capital.
But they also have the backing of the Dauphin, so the heir to the French throne.
He's a guy called Charles.
He's 16 years old.
He's very sickly.
He's very moody.
He has no great self-confidence.
He has very spindly legs.
And essentially, I think even at the age of 16, he has a slight look of Vladimir Putin, only with very rubbery lips.
And the reason that he's been cast in the spotlight is his father has gone completely mad, hasn't he?
Yes.
So Charles VI.
So...
Then there's a big twist, isn't there?
An amazing twist.
I remember seeing an illustration of this when I was a boy, of all of these kind of sort of illustrated book about all this stuff, and I loved it.
So Burgundian troops in 1419 get into Paris.
They batter the Count of Armagnac to death.
They carve his cross, his saltire, from his coat of arms into his flesh.
That's a nice detail.
There's then a huge pogrom of the Armagnacs.
The Dauphin, the heir to the French throne, basically young Vladimir Putin.
He has to be smuggled out of Paris and he sets up a court in Bourges, in central France, which is south of the Loire.
So that's the context.
While Henry V, from England, he's thinking, yeah, it's all his Christmases, come at once.
Yeah, he's advancing from the north and actually he gets to the city's gates, doesn't he not?
Long after this, a few months after this, in August 1419?
And then there's another amazing twist, which is the head of the Burgundians, John the Fearless and the Dauphin agree to meet.
And this is one of my favorite summit meetings in all history.
Yes, and it is one of the most notorious episodes and consequential episodes in French history.
Yeah, so this summit is held on the 10th of September on a bridge at Montreux, which is some 50 miles southeast.
So essentially between Paris and Bourges.
So it's kind of neutral territory.
And the bridge, again, is designed to be a neutral space.
The problem is it all goes wrong because John the Fearless, the Duke of Burgundy, is assassinated.
By the Dauphin's men, right?
So it seems.
And certainly whether the Dauphin personally is responsible for it or not the son of the Duke of Burgundy, who is now the Duke of Burgundy himself Philip, who is known as Philip the Good.
He blames the Dauphin for the murder of his father.
And this means that the blood feud between the Burgundians and the Armagnacs is now absolutely entrenched, to the degree that Philip the Good you know, his father's body is bleeding.
Rather than combine with the Dauphin against Henry V and the English, Philip the Good now goes to Henry V and he signs up to an english alliance, crikey.
This is a twist.
So the result of this basically, is that things are looking terrible for the french because the burgundians and the english have joined forces, and so the following may, basically the french.
They kind of have to yield to the inevitable, don't they?
Well, the king does so.
So charles vi, who is, by this point, kind of a race-like specter, completely mad, and so therefore essentially a puppet of the Duke of Burgundy.
He is in the city of Troyes in Champagne, which is kind of southeast of Paris.
Henry V joins Philip and Charles VI there, and they draw up a treaty.
And by the terms of this treaty, Charles VI remains on the French throne until he dies.
Henry will rule as his regent, and he will marry Charles VI's daughter Catherine.
Mm-hmm.
On the death of Charles VI, the French crown will pass to Henry and his heirs.
So Henry of Lancaster, so to the House of Lancaster.
And the House of Lancaster will take the place on the French throne of Charles VI's own dynasty, the House of Valois.
And once England and France have come under the rule of the House of Lancaster, They will be separate kingdoms but they will be joined under one crown and there will be peace and amity and all will be well.
And this is the plan.
This is one of the questions we're asked most often at live shows and bonus episodes of the Restless History Club.
What would have happened if Henry V had lived?
Would England and France have become one kingdom?
And in a way, I think this series... answers that question.
Yeah, I think it does.
But in the meanwhile obviously, for the Dauphin Charles VI's son, who's now just been disinherited, this is terrible news, because he's been publicly condemned by his own father as a murderer.
You know, he's been bumped off the line of inheritance.
And he has no prospect really of defeating Henry V, partly because Henry V is the greatest warrior of the age, but also because the Dauphin can't risk himself in battle because without him the house of valois really would be extinct there is no one else to to keep the valois line going and then things get even worse because on the 6th of december 1421 henry and his new bride so the sister of the dauphin catherine catherine gives henry v not just a child but a son whom they'd call with great originality Henry, the future Henry VI.
And so this means that the House of Lancaster now has an heir.
And so a lot of people in France.
It's important if we stop the clock there December 1421.
France is in anarchy.
The English have taken advantage, taken Paris, all of this.
Henry is the regent now.
He expects to be king.
He has a son ready.
If you're sitting there in France, you look at this and you say, well, this is how it's going to be.
And this is God's plan.
This is obviously what God wants.
And so when people work with Henry, they're not doing so because they're, you know, proto-martial paint hands or something.
It's not a question of sort of cowardly collaboration.
It's because they genuinely look at the situation.
They say this is all part of the divine workings out of you know of God's intention for the world.
I think also there's a certain grudging respect for Henry V. He's a serious person.
You know, this is a guy who could kind of lick a crumbling kingdom into shape.
But also, I think, for lots of people in France who decide to back the House of Lancaster.
It's not really about the English at all.
It's about what your identity is in the civil war.
So if you back the Armagnacs, you're never going to accept this.
But if you are a Burgundian sympathiser, then you absolutely are.
So in a sense it's It's simultaneously.
The Hundred Years' War and the civil war between the Burgundians and the Armagnacs have become interfused.
And this explains why so many people in France are willing to accept the House of Lancaster as a legitimate replacement for the House of Valois.
And Theo has actually made a good point in the chat, which is that the English and French ruling classes are so similar know, in their devotion to the ideals of chivalry, in their devotion to kind of their stuff about courtly love, you know the use of french, all of that stuff, that it doesn't necessarily feel like you're you're accepting the rule of kind of foreign barbarians, right?
I'm not sure that is entirely true, because this is the first um century really in which the english aristocracy are not speaking french as their native language.
Interesting,
So it is noted as something exceptional when an English aristocrat speaks very good French, as we will see.
Here's a quick question then.
In other words, if this had happened a century or two earlier, the outcome might have been different.
It might indeed.
But, as it is, there are obviously lots of very distinguished, very clear thinking Frenchmen who are prepared to accept the House of Lancaster.
And just, you know, plucking at random an example.
Let's look at one.
So he is a very distinguished churchman and he goes by the name of Pierre Cochon.
He'd been born in Reims, a city to the north of Paris where, by ancient tradition, the kings of France were always crowned.
This is where Clovis, the very first king of the Franks to accept Christianity, had been baptised.
Cochon had then gone to Paris to study at the university there, which is the greatest centre for theology in the whole of Europe.
And there, as a student, he had become a very enthusiastic partisan of the Burgundian cause.
Hates the Armagnacs.
He's appointed the Bishop of Beauvais, which is a city in Champagne, about 50 miles northwest of Paris.
So his centre of gravity is very much that kind of region, Paris and the region between Paris and the Low Countries, where Burgundy has his centre of gravity.
And Cochon is very, very devoutly convinced that only the Anglo-Burgundian alliance has any prospect of stabilizing France.
And so he goes full in.
And I think it is unfair to think, you know, you mentioned Marshall Pétain.
This is not a Vichyist policy.
I think in the context of the time, it's entirely understandable.
A quick note for listeners.
They should remember this bloke, Pierre Cochon and his support for this alliance and his role in this story.
Just keep him in your heads as you listen to this series, because he will play a very, very significant role.
In the way that if you're reading a detective story and it's mentioned in chapter two that there's a gun on the mantelpiece, you can be fairly confident that gun is going to go off at some point.
He's going to go off.
So Cochon is kind of representative of those who side with, the House of Lancaster.
Obviously, there are lots in France who think this is appalling, a disgrace, a humiliation.
And one of them is Christine de Pizan, very loyal to the royal family.
She'd been raised in the court.
And she is so upset by what has happened that this incredibly articulate, prolific poet just falls silent.
And in 1418 she retires to an abbey where her daughter was a nun and she never.
She doesn't write anything else.
So there are lots of other people who are recording the horrors of the age.
So you know the hunger, the brutality, the wolves padding through the outskirts of Paris, all this kind of stuff.
But Christine is so appalled.
It's like she's gone into a kind of catatonic shock.
Doesn't doesn't speak at all.
But then, Tom, there's there are more twists in this very George R.R.
Martin style story.
So first of all, August 1422, Henry V dies unexpectedly young.
Yes, so he never sits on the French throne.
And then the guy who is on the French throne, this sort of mad puppet, Charles VI.
He dies two months after that.
So now they're at the equation.
The new king of France, according to the treaty, will be Henry V's infant son, Henri II of France or Henry VI of England.
But he's a baby.
So what now for the English?
Well, they're not going to give up on Henry V's dream.
And there is a deep personal sense of obligation to Henry V.
You know all the hard men in the English government had fought with him had been at Agincourt or Normandy.
They are absolutely committed to basically to fulfilling Henry's this treaty that Henry had done so much to draw up.
And this is where the Duke of Bedford, who we have already mentioned before, comes in.
John of Lancaster, the Duke of Bedford.
He is Henry V's younger brother.
He is therefore the uncle of Henry VI.
And in France, he is going to serve the infant Henry VI as regent.
So effectively, In France, he is now the head of this kind of Anglo-Burgundian alliance.
And he is a proper person, right?
He's not some, I mean he is.
People may be anticipating because they know the English are going to lose.
He's a waste of space.
Not at all.
He is an experienced captain.
He's a sensible guy.
He's scary.
He ticks every box.
Yeah.
So there's a churchman in Rouen which, along with Paris, is one of the kind of the two major centres of English power in France.
And this churchman says of Bedford, wise and generous, at once feared and loved.
And there's a brilliant observation by Jonathan Sumption in the last of his enormous volumes on the Hundred Years' War.
And he says that Bedford maintained a standing army in France, to quote Sumption, something which England would not have again until the time of Oliver Cromwell.
And there is something likely of cromwell, i think robust, about bedford.
He's very robust.
He's also a very civilized man.
So it's noted that he speaks good french.
He's a great patron of french churches, of french artists, he's married to the sister of philip the good and so he has a french wife.
So he is absolutely able to keep the French administration on side, because even though most of the military are English, the civilian government is French.
And this and the fact that Bedford is so impressive.
This is why people like Cochon are so happy to serve him.
It's the best rule of France ever had, Tom.
Meanwhile, what of the Dauphin?
Or, in fact, Charles VII, as he now properly is, if you're backing the House of Valois.
But the thing is, nobody is calling him Charles VII.
They're all still calling him the Dauphin because he seems an insubstantial figure still.
And so I think the Dauphin, recognising this, has been doing his best to try and balance that out.
So he's got himself a queen.
So he has married a girl called Marie.
And she is the daughter of a very, very impressive woman.
She's called Yolande.
And she is the Dowager Duchess of Anjou.
So the Angevins, I mean, they're a very serious dynasty.
And she's probably the most formidable woman in the kingdom.
So she's described by one fan as the wisest and most beautiful princess in Christendom.
She's seen all the other princesses.
Well, I think I mean, I think she clearly is a very smart woman and she is.
But she's famously gorgeous.
And she's a very keen supporter of the Armagnacs.
And so that's why she has swung behind the Dauphin, given the Dauphin her daughter to be his wife.
And in July 1423, she is absolutely delighted when her daughter gives the Dauphin a son who is called Louis.
And now Yolande is all in.
I mean, she really wants to see her grandson king of all France.
And so you have, you know, the You've got the infant Henry VI.
You've got the infant Louis as Charles VII's son.
The House of Lancaster, the House of Valois both have everything to play for.
So let's fast forward a few years because this doesn't change straight away.
So if we go forward seven years, right, so to 1429, so at the end of the 1420s.
So the Dauphin is still very much on the outside, isn't he?
So he's still called the Dauphin because he basically doesn't, he's not really the king of France.
He hasn't been crowned because Reims.
Well, he hasn't been crowned in Reims.
It's miles away in English held territory.
There's no prospect of getting there.
And the English very much seem to have the upper hand, don't they?
Yeah.
And crucially, the English have maintained their reputation for military invincibility.
So the Dauphin had actually gone north of the Loire, which effectively constitutes the frontier between Lancastrian France and Valois held France.
And he had tried to rest Normandy, which is the central territory under English rule, back from Bedford.
But it all goes disastrously wrong.
So the English and the French meet outside a town called Vernay, and 8000 of the Dauphin's men are either killed or captured by the Duke of Bedford and his army.
And among those who are captured are is the young son of the Duke of Alençon, who had died at Agincourt.
This little boy, he's grown up.
He's now 15.
It's his first battle and immediately he's been taken captive.
And so this is terrible.
But what's even worse is that Bedford now officially confiscates his duchy and Bedford himself becomes the Duke of Alençon.
And so effectively.
I mean this is terrible for Alençon, because he's captive, you know, he needs to raise money for ransom and all his land has gone.
So it's he's.
He's in desperate straits.
So most of france now north of the river loire so we're talking about sort of north central france is now controlled by either the duke of bedford, for the english, or philip the good, the duke of burgundy right and the the english are now thinking do we drive south of the loire?
And actually the Duke of Bedford says to his captains right, the next stage of the war is we will force our way across the Loire and we will take the fight to the Dauphin, his sort of fly bit and two bit capital of Bourges.
And we'll finish this.
Yes.
And the key to essentially breaching the Loire which, at this point, is much broader than it is today.
I mean, it's a it's a serious barrier.
So they essentially need to secure a really, really strategically significant crossing point.
And the obvious place is Orléans, which is the northernmost settlement.
So the Loire kind of curves northwards.
Orléans is at the northernmost point of this curve and therefore nearest to Paris, which is under English control.
And if the English can capture Orléans, then the road south will be open and they can follow it into the bowels of the kingdom of Bourges.
And effectively, Bedford hopes that would then be game over for the Dauphin.
So preparations are made.
Summer of 1428, a huge English army disembarks at Calais.
Evidence of the ability of the English state to kind of raise forces, something vastly in excess of anything that the Dauphin can do.
And by November, English forces have constructed siege walls and fortifications around Orléans, with the goal of starving the city into submission.
And the English commander is a guy called William de la Pole, who is the Earl of Suffolk.
And he had been one of Henry's key commanders In the conquest of Normandy.
Another serious and formidable person.
Absolutely.
And with a particular talent for capturing cities, because that was the main focus of the conquest of Normandy.
They had to capture places like Rouen and so on.
He has two lieutenants.
One of them is the hard man of early 15th century England, a guy called John Talbot, who's an absolute animal.
I mean, he's... He's played by Ray Winston, is he not?
Yeah, he's played by Ray Winston or the most kind of terrifying rugby player that you can imagine.
Vinnie Jones.
There's a part for Vinnie Jones.
Vinnie Jones.
That's who he is.
Well, he's not Vinnie Jones, actually, because he he is very aristocratic.
So I think rugby is slightly better.
He's kind of posh, but, you know, he'll rip your arm off.
He's played by Lawrence Delaglio.
Exactly.
He's Lawrence Delaglio.
And he has a younger partner in the command.
It's a guy called Lord Scales.
He's only 23.
He's also a very, very hard man.
I mean, he's killed a lot of his enemies already by this point.
He's played by Maro Itoje.
Yeah, I guess.
I guess.
Yeah, on the BBC.
Yeah, exactly.
So these are serious men.
Orléans is in serious straits.
And by early 1429, basically, Everyone in Europe is thinking the English have got this.
So we have the record of a Venetian merchant in Burgundy.
And he writes to a family member in Venice.
If the English take Orléans, they will have no difficulty in making themselves lords of all France and sending the Dauphin packing to beg his bread at almshouses.
And it looks like the city will fall, because every French attempt to relieve the siege has been beaten off kind of almost disdainfully.
The Dauphin has exhausted his reserves, both of cash and of men.
And, as a result, people who previously had been backing him in the Loire Valley are starting to.
You know, they sense where the wind is blowing and they're starting to kind of go over to the English.
Meanwhile, around Orléans, week by week, day by day, ever more siege lines are going up.
The city seems doomed.
There seems no prospect left of relieving it in any way and so effectively.
If all your is going to be saved for the house of valois, it is going to take a miracle.
But dominic, from where could such a miracle possibly come?
I don't think we've ever had a more exciting cliffhanger.
Um, come back after the break and we will find out.
In my own village they call me Jeannette.
Since I came into France, I have been called Jeanne.
Of my surname, I know nothing.
I was born in the village of Domremy.
So that is the deposition given by the woman that we call Joan of Arc.
And she gave that on the 21st of February, 1431, at her trial in Rouen on charges of heresy.
And we can tell a lot from the records of that trial.
And also a second inquiry which was staged by the French themselves in 1456, because that was trying to overturn the completely legitimate verdict of that first trial and to rehabilitate Joan.
The records are very detailed, aren't they, Tom?
And they have an immediacy and a humanity that really brings her alive as a character.
Yeah, I mean you've got to give all kinds of caveats.
Everybody who writes about joan of arc always does so.
Jones words in these records are rendered into latin by the clerks who are recording them and obviously she is on trial for her life and she's an uneducated girl being pressed by very educated men who, let's face it, want to kill her, and even the witnesses at her rehabilitation.
They also have their own agenda, Lots of incentives to kind of tailor what they're reporting.
So all of those caveats have to be borne in mind.
But, that said, we know about Joan and we can hear her in her own words in a way that is incredibly important.
Unusual for people from the middle ages full stop.
Well, especially young women from peasant background.
You never hear from them.
Absolutely.
Because that is what's really extraordinary.
We're not hearing a duke or an abbot or a king talking.
We are hearing a young peasant girl.
And when you read the records of the of the trial, her personality completely shines through.
She i'm going to lay my cards on the table, dominic you may disagree, but she is witty, she is courageous, she's incredibly charismatic and it's it's these records, i think, that have really burnished her story in the modern period.
She's up there with emma hamilton and unity in your pantheon, so she's not an aristocrat Like Unity Mitford.
She, you know, she's not a courtesan like Emma Hamilton.
And she's kind of unique.
So there's a brilliant book that I read when I was at a very impressionable age by Marina Warner.
I think it came out in the early, early 80s called Joan of Arc, The Image of Female Heroism.
And in her introduction, Marina Warner says of Joan that she's not a queen, she's not a courtesan, she's not a beauty, not a mother, not an artist of one kind or another, nor until the extremely recent date of 1920, when she was canonized a saint.
To reiterate, she is a female teenage peasant girl.
And when we hear her speak, I think what we're also hearing all the more loudly is the silence of all those kind of numberless peasants from medieval Christendom whose words no one ever thought to record.
Tom, this is very moving from you.
I do find it a moving story.
I find it a powerful story.
And I find the fact that we can hear her words it is a crucial part of what makes this story so fascinating, I think.
So let me just pledge to the listeners that I will suspend my natural scepticism and cynicism for at least the next 30 seconds.
Let's talk about her family.
Well, I mean, you are going to have lots to be sceptical about.
I mean, there is no question about that.
OK, brilliant.
Love it.
So let's talk about what we know.
Let us start with her family.
So we know that her father was called Jacques d'Arc, Jacques of Arc.
Yeah.
And so that's where the name Jeanne d'Arc comes from.
Her mother is Isabelle.
We know that her mother must have been pious, because Joan says from my mother I learned my Lord's Prayer, my Hail Mary and my creed.
And we know that she had a sister and three brothers, two of whom will feature in this story.
And we've described them as peasants, but they're not the underclass.
They're not the lowest of the low, are they?
They are.
And she's actually, it's often said she's a shepherd girl.
I mean, that's one of the most common things that people say about her.
But she wasn't.
They were more respectable than that, right?
No.
And I think the idea that she's a shepherd.
There are kind of biblical reasons echoes there.
That's why it suited people who were praising her to say it.
But but joan herself was having none of it.
Um she, she regarded shepherdesses with a great deal of snobbery.
Oh no, she's virginia wolf.
So in her trial she said i learned to spin and to sew.
Um, and uh she, she challenged the women of rouen to spin, and so better than her.
And she does this, because to be a seamstress, to be a spinner, a spinster is um, you know, you're on a higher level than a shepherdess, right?
So she's from Domremy.
And the location of this place is interesting and really important because it is, dare I say, liminal.
It's on the frontier between two different places, Champagne and Lorraine.
The River Meuse runs through it.
And the fact that it's on a frontier is important because it's basically drawn into the civil war by definition, because the village is pro-Dauphin but the next village is pro-Burgundian.
And the villagers fight each other quite often, don't they?
And people are badly wounded or even killed in the fighting between these two villages.
Yeah.
And also Domini is on the front line of the English attempt to annex the region and pacify it completely.
So, as Joan is growing up, There are more and more English raiding parties who are starting.
You can see them on the horizon and they are fighting with rival companies who are loyal to the Dauphin.
And this notion of free companies, something we've talked about throughout our series on the Hundred Years' War.
These are kind of semi-freelance bodies of men, lots of whom are pretty criminals.
And so it's very, very frightening.
It's kind of Wild West situation.
The bad guys galloping into town.
And we know that this does happen to Domremy and to other villages around.
So when Joan was 11, her cousin was killed by a cannonball that was fired into the church of a neighbouring village where he'd taken refuge.
And then the church in Domremy itself is burnt down and most of the village with it at least once.
And so for Joan, the ringing of church bells which are sounded when danger is threatening.
You know, this would have been something with which she was very, very familiar.
So in the summer of 1428 so this is the same year that the English are landing to head down for the siege of Orléans an Anglo-Burgundian army embarks on the systematic conquest of the region.
All the Dauphinist strongholds fall, all except one.
And this is a fortress called Vaucouleurs, which is very formidable, has a large garrison.
And it's under the command of a nobleman from Lorraine by the name of Robert de Baudricourt.
And de Baudricourt has very good connections at the French court and specifically with the house of Anjou.
So that is Yolande and her dynasty.
And de Baudricourt is very brave, but he's also brutal and unscrupulous.
And you have to assume that basically, you have to be brutal and unscrupulous if you're going to hold a fortress against the onslaught of the English and the Burgundians.
All right, so that's the background.
So Joan has been growing up in Domremy in this very violent frightening dangerous, divided landscape.
And how does that shape her character, would you say?
Well, I think that it leads her to identify the Dauphin as the kind of the ultimate guarantor of France's stability.
I think she comes to have a sense that if only the Dauphin could be put on his throne and crowned and the English could be driven out, then everything would be fine.
And Marina Warner is brilliant on this in her book.
Talking of Joan, she had a natural inclination for clear-cut situations with identifiable centres of authority.
The king's supreme position and her magnetic attraction for it bear witness to this taste.
She liked unity, organisation, rallied groups.
So she's basically a kind of working class Tory.
That's, you know, that's what she wants.
She wants order and she wants royal rule.
But she's also intensely pious.
And again, you can see why, you know, you're growing up surrounded by this violence.
And the sounding of the bells is what alerts you to danger coming.
So I guess, just subliminally, you would come to associate Bells with the hope of safety, with the prospect that warnings may be coming.
And so Bells seemed to have been very, very important to her to have played a very, very strong role in her emotional and spiritual life.
And so we know from the court records that because a friend of hers recorded it, you know, at her rehabilitation trial that once the sacristan forgot to ring the bells for Compline And Joan told him off and said go and ring them.
And if she was out in the fields and she heard the bells ringing, she would always kneel.
They have an immense significance for her.
And I think that you said she's pious.
I mean, she clearly is.
But I think, what the bells?
When she hears the bells, she is being reminded and reassured that, amid all the violence of the age, there is a link to God and his saints and that they are close to her.
They care for her. and that her prayers will be heard.
Okay.
And she can't read and write.
She's illiterate.
But you mentioned God and his saints.
She's pretty obsessed with some of these saints, isn't she?
And she regards them.
I mean, we did an episode a long time ago about Catherine of Siena, about another teenage girl whose proximity, who had this almost obsessive, this totally transcendent and dominating, um fixation with you know that being the bride of christ and all this kind of thing.
And there's sometimes, i think, about joan there's something similar, again a teenage girl, a sort of fixation on this case on the boat, on the, the personalities of three saints in particular.
There are certainly similarities uh, and we'll maybe come to them later in the series with catherine sienna, but i think there are also differences, and And the key one is that Joan, unlike Catherine, as we've said, is illiterate.
And therefore she is dependent on both stories and images.
And we know she loves stories.
She loves chivalric romances, for instance.
She's very familiar with these.
But she also loves stories of the saints.
And I don't think she's unusual in her familiarity with them.
The leading saints, the most famous saints, are as familiar to children growing up in medieval Europe this time as kind of singers or sports stars would be to teenagers today.
But there are three, it seems, who are the particular focus of her devotion.
And the first of these is really unsurprising.
It's St.
Michael, who is the great warrior archangel, the captain of heaven who, in the book of Revelation, throws down Satan.
And for the French, he is the great emblem of their resistance.
So we've said how Henry V conquered all of Normandy.
That's not quite true, because playing the role of Asterix's village in this scenario is Mont Saint-Michel, the mount of Saint Michael, the great monastery there, on this island.
And that is holding out against the English.
And so the fact that it is dedicated to Saint Michael.
It emphasizes the way in which this warrior archangel is presumed by the French to be fighting on their side.
And so the Dauphin commissions two great standards, both of which show St.
Michael trampling down the serpent, trampling down Satan.
And more specifically, and one of the reasons why Joan is definitely familiar with him he's the patron saint of the region in which she is growing up.
So St.
Michael, very significant.
So you can see that.
And then there's two female saints.
And you can see why they would appeal to a teenage girl who perhaps well, these are saints who are noted for their resistance, for their courage.
Also, I found being harsh a little bit for their victimhood or their martyrdom, right?
They're martyred rather than surrender their virginity.
So I guess to Joan, they are emblems of courage and independence.
And one of them, St.
Catherine of Alexandria.
Again, it's not just Joan who's devoted to her.
She's probably the best loved saint of the age.
And actually, Joan's sister, who died while she was still a girl, had been called Catherine.
Right.
And so Catherine of Alexandria, she was meant to be married to a pagan Roman emperor or something.
She's broken on a wheel, hence the Catherine wheel, the firework.
And everyone thinks she's brilliant.
And then the other one is, I have to admit, I'm not familiar with her work.
And that is Margaret of Antioch.
Well, I'm very familiar with her because she was swallowed by a dragon and then regurgitated.
She's become the patron saint of midwives.
And Sadie, my wife, of course, is a midwife.
So very big news here.
But she's another saint who was martyred for refusing to surrender her virginity.
So that's clearly something that Joan is alert to.
But also there is a story of St.
Margaret.
She's so desperate to learn the scriptures and so on that she enters a monastery disguised as a man.
Ooh, a telling detail.
Very telling detail.
So just on this thing about the saints, I think this is massively important for listeners who are not super familiar with the world of medieval Christendom to get into their heads.
The point of the saints for somebody like Joan, who is, as you said illiterate, is that they occupy a space between the concrete, physical world very violent and brutal and dangerous world of 15th century europe and the transcendent world, the purity, the order of heaven.
They basically mediate between those two things, don't they, and that's why, for someone like her, they have such cosmic, immediate presence yeah, and and significance.
They live in her heart as much as they do in her mind, presumably.
Yeah, I think that the closeness of the heavenly order, the supernatural order, is something that Joan, as she's growing up, completely takes for granted.
Other people take it for granted too, but she is.
I mean by the fact the stuff about her kneeling when she hears the bells.
She is peculiarly pious, do you think?
Even before her first supernatural visitation.
Peculiarly pious, peculiarly impressionable, peculiarly imaginative, peculiarly... self-confident as well i think okay um so i think a very distinctive little girl probably yeah i mean you're not really selling her to be honest as a playmate but um but actually the people she's playing with are very different from the other peasant children right because when she's in 13 years old actually tellingly when she's basically entering adolescence i think 14 25 something happens so tell us what happens Well, she described it herself in her trial.
The voice first came at noon on a summer's day in my father's garden.
And she specified that this voice came from the direction of the village church.
So that's where the bells would be rung from and that it was bathed in light.
And Joan insisted to inquisitors, who were very sceptical about it, that right from the beginning she had understood this voice to be good and worthy and that it was a voice sent from God to guide her.
And she never let go of that assertion of that conviction.
And in time, she came to understand it as the voice, not of God himself, but of an angel.
But she did not, to begin with, I think, identify it with St.
Michael specifically, nor with Catherine, nor with Margaret, although in the long run she would.
To begin with, I don't think she had a sense.
Well, we will see, because the question of what these voices are and what Jane thought the voices are is a complex and fascinating one.
And it will evolve, I think, over the course of her life.
But what is absolutely clear is that she experiences it as real.
And she essentially has conversations with this.
Initially, it's a voice.
Then it becomes voice, multiple voices.
But she has conversations with these voices in the way that she has conversations with everyone else, namely in a kind of very forthright and kind of firm manner.
So if the voices tell her something that she doesn't agree with, she tells them that.
That is unusual, because most people who hear voices I mean actually madly.
The last person we talked about hearing voices was one of the suspects in the Jack the Ripper case.
But when people hear voices, they then do what the voice tells them.
They don't argue back with the voices.
And this is a contrast, as we'll come to, between Joan and other female mystics of the age, is that for Joan, these are kind of like voices that you might hear through headphones or something.
It's not entirely a mystic experience from her description of it.
It's literally like you listening to Theo, quite like.
Well yes, the messages that we get from theo and these voices.
To begin with they offer her spiritual guidance, but then increasingly, they start to give her a political mission and over the course of of the months and then the years, this mission comes to be clarified.
So to begin with the voices are giving her a kind of vague instruction that she should go to the dauphin and ride in front of him and drive the english out of france.
Then it becomes more precise.
She should lead the Dauphin to Rass and have him crowned there.
And then, late in 1428, by which time the news of the siege at Orléans will have reached Domremy, she's told by the voices to ride to Orléans and to break the English siege.
And the voices, I mean, these are mad things to tell a teenage girl.
But the voices say, well, don't worry.
You know, we will guide you.
We will support you. throughout this mission that we've given you.
And if you do as instructed, then in the long run the whole of France will indeed be liberated from the English.
And this liberation will be the ultimate proof in the eyes of the world that you are indeed on a mission from God.
And you mentioned that Joan, you know, she answers back to the voices.
But she never doubts their veracity, right?
She never questions whether the voices might be demons or she might be misled.
Because they're good.
She has a sense of them as good.
She has total confidence in what the voices are telling her.
And she actually, again, I think it's interesting that she's just entered her teens.
She takes a vow of chastity.
She's going to protect her virginity.
Her parents have lined up a fiancé for her.
She says, you're out.
I'm not interested in you.
And then...
We get to late 1428.
So, you know, things are looking very dicey for the Dauphin, the French cause.
And this is the point when she decides, right, I'm going to do what the voice is telling me.
I'm going to get stuck in and begin the work of driving out the English.
Yeah.
But how do you begin?
You're a peasant girl, you know, on the edge of things.
Where are you going to go?
There's only one place you really can go.
And that is Vaucouleurs, which is the one fortress in the region that is still holding out for the Dauphin, under the command of Robert de Baudricourt.
And she tells her father, this is what I'm going to go and do.
Her father is appalled.
I mean he's already outraged that you know she's turned down the man that her father has chosen for her to marry.
And also he's been having these nightmares in which he sees Joan running away with men at arms.
And the implication of that is that, you know, essentially he's worried that she is going start misbehaving sexually, she's going to run away with a soldier.
So she's now 16, what she's about?
16 years old, i mean.
Any father, you know.
Your 16 year old daughter comes to you and says i'm basically going to run off and like, join the army.
And well, i'm going to go, i'm going to go to a fortress full of men yeah, and you know, and and come up, tell them some cock and bull story.
You'd be very, very worried, you'd be perturbed.
So the thing is, joan is a runaway, you know she.
She deliberately ignores her father's orders and runs away to Vaucouleur, full of violent soldiers and men.
And she goes to Baudricourt, who's a quite unscrupulous person, we've already said.
So kind of quite a dangerous man.
She goes to him and she explains her mission.
And he first time says, you're mad, go away.
Second time, you're mad, go away.
She's still hanging around in Vaucouleur.
She's ignoring what Baudricourt has said.
So in January 1429, de Baudricourt comes to the house in Vaucouleur where Joan has been staying, and he has brought the local priest with him.
And he tells the priest, this girl is possessed by an evil spirit.
Exercise the evil spirit.
But Joan just kneels in front of the priest and reproaches the priest and says, what are you doing?
You've heard my confession.
You know that I
I am literally on the side of the angels.
And so the priest says, well, she's not possessed.
There's nothing I can do here.
And so Joan stands up and she turns to de Baudricourt.
And a third time, she says, take me to the Dauphin.
And this time, de Baudricourt relents.
And this might be on his own initiative, or it might be that he has received word from his two regional overlords.
And these are a guy called Charles, the Duke of Lorraine, and René of Anjou.
And René of Anjou is the second son of Yolande, the mother-in-law of the Dauphin.
So why do these two guys who are serious people, aristocratic people, power brokers, why on earth would they be encouraging?
What clearly de Baudricourt himself, another serious person, thinks is a sort of loony girl who's just got mad crackpot ideas.
Why do they indulge this?
Well, Charles of Lorraine is very ill at the time.
And he's been brought word that there's this girl claiming a mission from God.
And this isn't massively unusual.
You know, every so often it's usually girls, but sometimes boys as well will appear claiming that they've got messages from God.
And they are often capable of performing incredible miracles.
And so I think that Chancellor Lorraine hopes that perhaps Joan will heal him.
But Joan says, no, I'm not going to do that.
I can't heal anyone.
And in this, again, she's unusual.
The only thing she does miraculous is her mission.
You know, she's not going around healing the sick or anything like that.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And she dismisses it as nonsense.
Why would I be able to heal anyone?
Let's look at what I can do.
And Charles is not offended by this.
In fact, he's rather impressed.
And he gives her some money and he gives her a horse, because of course she's going to need a horse if she's going to ride all the way to the Dauphin, who's in Chalons, just south of the Loire, which is about 300 miles away.
As for René of Anjou, you know, we've said he's the brother of the Dauphin's queen.
He really has a stake in ensuring that the Dauphin stays in the fight and he may well think, as Yolande may well have thought oh, you know, I mean, let's try.
What have we got to lose?
I suppose, and there's probably also a slight element of like come on, let's just get rid of her, tell her to go.
No, I don't think so.
You don't think so.
You think they believe in it.
I think they actively think we've got nothing to lose.
She may be what she says she is.
I think they are very, very interested in what Joan has to say, because I think they're desperate.
De beaudricourt definitely still has reservations, because what happens now is a very controversial development in jones story.
Jones says okay, i'm going on this mission, i need male clothing if i'm going to go right.
And de beaudricourt gives her male clothing.
But we know from later source, which describes his reaction to it, that he handed this male clothing over only with the utmost repugnance, to quote the court records.
And this isn't surprising because the 15th century, it's fair to say, is not a trans-friendly era.
So cross-dressing is seen as being an abomination unto God.
And that is because it is specifically condemned in the book of Deuteronomy in the Old Testament.
The woman shall not wear that which pertaineth unto a man.
So we've said that Joan is very pious, but when she wants to, she's perfectly capable of ignoring a direct biblical dictate.
So I don't want to plunge into my sceptical, amateur psychology too much straight away, but to say she's entered her teens, she's taken a vow of chastity protecting her virginity is incredibly important to her and she now says she wants to dress as a man.
There are, you know, implications for this.
Maybe, let's say secular, secular minded listeners might draw implications from this about what is actually nagging at her.
We should wait until we've told her whole story and listen to what she actually has to say at the trial before kind of trying to work out what might have been going on here.
But I hear you, Dominic.
I hear you.
Anyway, so she has her outfit of male clothes.
She has her hair cropped into the nightly pudding bowl that anyone who's seen the painting of Henry V will recognise.
She's got her horse.
She's been given a sword, which anyone with nightly pretensions needs.
And de Baudricourt has given her two pages of And intriguingly, four men at arms.
So her father's dream has come true.
Oh no, her father must be gutted.
And of course they are there to guard her because they are going to be riding across what is effectively bandit territory.
And this also is you know, you could say.
Well, it's a sensible precaution for any girl who is going to ride 300 odd miles through a war zone to disguise the fact that she is female.
Although it has to be said that at no point does Joan ever justify her cross-dressing in those terms.
And the clear implication which, in time, she will make explicit, is that her voice has told her to dress in male clothes.
That it's not a question of practicality and pragmatism.
She never says that.
She never says that.
And the male clothing, as we will see in our next episode, serves for her.
Well, we will tease out what it means to her, but it is clearly something very, very spiritually psychologically, symbolically significant to her.
But why?
What does it have to do with her mission?
What are her voices?
These are all questions that we will explore.
Perhaps or we'll start exploring in our next episode, when Joan arrives at the court of the Dauphinne and reveals to the Dauphin the mission that she has been given by God.
Very exciting.
And actually, I have to say, an absolutely fascinating story.
I remember when you were researching this Tom, you were saying to me this is one of the most intriguing stories to have done on the rest of Cistern.
It's certainly panning out that way.
So if you want to find out what happens when Joan arrives at the Dauphin's court whether she succeeds in saving Orléans from the English We're going to be telling the whole story in the next three episodes.
And if you're a member of the rest is history club, you can hear those episodes straight away.
If you would like to start the new year on an inspiring and exciting note, then do join the rest is history club at the rest is historycom, because we are planning all kinds of exciting benefits for you this year.
Not just the usual ad, free listening and early access to series, but all sorts of thrilling bonus series to come, for club members only.
However, the key thing is Joan of Arc and what will happen next in her story.
And that is what we will be investigating next time.
Au revoir.
Au revoir.
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