Helen of Troy

by Jack Lindsay

  Soon the rumour began to be put about that Joan had somehow escaped burning. In the 1430s an impostor appeared, using the name of Dame des Armoises. She visited Orleans, and was ‘very honourably received’. (10) A Norman chronicler was sufficiently doubtful of the true facts of the matter to remark, at the conclusion of his account of Joan’s career: ‘Finally, they burned her publicly, or another woman like her: concerning which many people were and still are of different opinions.’ (11)

  Today it is clear that the execution with which the English authorities had intended to write finis to a troublesome career, was, instead, the true start of one of the most considerable legends in European history. Like most legends it appears in a variety of guises. The Joan of Voltaire, the Joan of Schiller, the Joan of Michelet, the Joan of Anatole France and the Joan of George Bernard Shaw are all very different from one another. In modern historical literature she has been presented as everything from a great Christian mystic and visionary to the leader of a secret and unorthodox religion. The notion that she escaped burning persists; and some writers have been attracted by the idea that she was not a mere peasant girl at all, but a royal bastard with Valois blood in her veins. Theories of this kind seem to me unprovable.

  What is certain is the fact that Joan existed. Her existence is vouched for not only by contemporary chronicles, but by two primary documents which form the basis for any assessment of her life and character. The first of these is the so-called Trial of Condemnation, which forms the record of the proceedings before the ecclesiastical court at Rouen in 1431. The second document, the Trial of Rehabilitation, is more complex. It is the record of three linked investigations, which were designed to quash the proceedings held before Pierre Cauchon, Bishop of Beauvais, and Joan’s other judges.

  The Trial of Rehabilitation began with two preliminary inquiries: one held before Guillaume Bouillé, a former rector of the University of Paris and Canon of Noyon, in 1450; and another before the Papal Legate, Cardinal d’Estouteville, and Jean Bréhal, the Grand Inquisitor of France, which took place in 1452. This was followed, in 1455-6, by an inquiry on a much larger scale, begun before Jean Jouvenel des Ursins, Archbishop of Rheims, Guillaume Chartier, Bishop of Paris, and Richard de Longueil, Bishop of Coutances. Bouillé heard only seven witnesses; d’Estouteville, twenty-one; and in the course of the final inquiry depositions were taken from over a hundred: in Joan’s district of origin, and in Orleans, Paris and Rouen. One witness made a deposition in Lyons. There is, of course, a considerable overlap between the preliminary inquiries and the final one, both as far as the actual witnesses are concerned, and in the content of their depositions. In the record of the final inquiry, which forms the true Trial of Rehabilitation, we find testimony from members of every social class, ranging from peasants to a royal duke. All had known Joan personally, and all were asked to tell what they remembered of her.

  From these two documents we can trace the basic outline of Joan’s life: her birth at Domrémy, on the river Meuse, which was then one of the frontiers of France; her visit to Vaucouleurs to seek the help of Robert de Baudricourt, the captain of the town and the principal royal representative in the region; her journey to Chinon to see King Charles VII, whom she insisted on calling ‘the dauphin’ because (though his father was dead) he had not yet been crowned and anointed. From Chinon Joan went to Poitiers, where an inquiry into her bona fides took place. This having been carried out to the satisfaction of the investigators, she proceeded soon thereafter to the city of Orleans, then besieged by the English. With her was a royal army. Orleans was relieved in a way which many people thought miraculous, and this success was followed by the taking of Jargeau and Beaugency, and the rout of an English army at Patay.

  Joan then persuaded Charles VII to go to Rheims for the ceremony which, in her view, would make him a true king. This object was safely accomplished, and a number of important places were taken on the way, among them the city of Troyes where, in 1420, France had been handed over to the English by a treaty between Henry V of England, Philip the Good, Duke of Burgundy, and Charles’s own mother Queen Isabeau, acting on behalf of her mad husband Charles VI.

  After the coronation ceremony at Rheims, Joan wanted to make an attempt on Paris, and Charles VII reluctantly agreed to let her do this. The attack failed, Joan was wounded, and her credit at court was permanently damaged. The royal army retreated towards the Loire. In the winter of the same year, 1429, Joan undertook another campaign, this time against the places held by the famous mercenary captain Perrinet Gressart. She succeeded in storming Saint Pierre-le-Moiltier, but failed against La Charite, which was Gressart’s principal stronghold.

  The next March, Joan departed from Sully-sur-Loire, where Charles was staying with his favourite, Georges de La Trémoille. She did so without the king’s permission, and her aim was to campaign once more against the English and the Burgundians. She went to the town of Lagny-sur-Marne. There, with the help of a small mercenary force under an Italian captain, she defeated and captured the Burgundian freebooter, Franquet d’Arras. She then decided to try and relieve the city of Compiègne, which had just been invested by Anglo-Burgundian forces. Making a sally from Compiègne, she was pulled from her horse and captured by the men of Jean de Luxembourg, the ablest captain in the service of the Duke of Burgundy.

  Jean de Luxembourg transferred his prisoner to the near-by castle of Beaulieu, and then, after she had made an attempt to escape, to his principal residence at Beaurevoir. Here Joan leapt from a tower and there is some dispute whether this was another attempt at escape or an attempted suicide. She survived her fall with little injury. Meanwhile, her captor was negotiating her sale to the English authorities in Normandy.

  At the end of 1430 Joan was transferred to English custody at Rouen. Here she was tried for heresy and witchcraft by the ecclesiastical tribunal already mentioned. The trial began on 21 February 1431. On 24 May Joan made a public abjuration in the cemetery of the church of Saint-Ouen, and was taken back to her prison in Rouen castle. On 28 May she was found to have resumed male dress in her cell. On 29 May the court was re-convened and declared that she had relapsed into her former errors. Her execution followed.

  According to Joan’s own account, she was about nineteen years old (12) at the time when her trial took place. This means that she was born in 1412 or 1413. We may even be able to fix the day and the approximate hour. Three days after the victory of Patay, Perceval de Boulainvilliers, one of Charles VII’s chamberlains and Seneschal of Berri, wrote an excited letter to the Duke of Milan, describing the personage of the moment. He says that she was born on the night of Epiphany, as the peasants celebrated in the fields, and as the cocks began to crow. (13) Her birth was thus at the time of the false dawn, about 5.30 a.m. on 6 January, as the revellers were stumbling home after their night of celebration. The place was the village of Domrémy.

  Joan’s family had a place at the very centre of the social organization of the village. Her father, Jacques d’Arc, was born about 1375, and came from elsewhere. The general belief is that he was born at Ceffonds in Champagne. This was a little village dependent on the Abbey of Montier-en-Der. The serfs of this abbey had a tradition of rebellion against the monks, their overlords. They also had a traditional dislike of the English, who came into their orbit through the marriage of Blanche, widow of the last Count of Champagne, to Edmund, brother of Edward I. These facts have a certain resonance, if we take them in the context of Joan’s story.

  Despite the fact that he was born elsewhere, Jacques d’Arc played an increasingly important part in village affairs. In 1420 he appears as one of the two lessors of the Château de l’Ile, a strongpoint upon an island in the Meuse, the river upon which Domrémy lay. During the troubled times through which France was passing, the villagers meant to use it as a place to shelter their livestock. In October 1423, when the villagers agreed to pay protection money to a local mercenary captain, Robert de Saarbruck, Jacques d’Arc signed as ‘doyen’, and was placed
in rank immediately after the mayor and the sheriff. Among the ordinary tasks of the doyen were the command of the watch and keeping guard over prisoners. Such duties must have made him seem an important figure to a child during the anxious 1420s, and particularly so to a child who happened to be his own daughter. The doyen also collected taxes and saw to the verification of weights and measures.

  By 1427 Jacques d’Arc was a man who carried enough authority in the affairs of the district to be appointed official representative of the people of Domrémy in a suit which had been brought before Robert de Baudricourt, captain of Vaucouleurs. Baudricourt was in effect the king’s viceroy, and the supreme power in the region where Domrémy lay.

  Joan’s mother, Isabelle Romée or Isabelle de Vouthon, came from a village which lay immediately to the south-west of Domrémy. Isabelle’s origins were humble. Her brother, Jean de Vouthon, was a thatcher and tiler. Nevertheless another brother, Henri, was curé at Sermaize, which is close to Ceffonds. It may have been he who arranged the marriage between Jacques d’Arc and his sister. And it was apparently Isabelle who possessed a little property, both at Vouthon and in Domrémy where the couple lived. Despite repeated assertions by the witnesses at the Trial of Rehabilitation that Joan’s parents were ‘not rich’, they had about twenty hectares of land in and around Domrémy, of which twelve were arable, and the rest equally divided between pasture and woodland. Rather than living in the miserable earth-walled hovel which was the common habitation of peasants in many parts of France, they had a substantially built, if small, stone house which can still be seen today.

  One of the most interesting things about Joan’s mother is her surname. Romée was the sobriquet given to those who had made the long pilgrimage to Rome, or at any rate an ambitious pilgrimage of some kind. Historians have usually asserted that Isabelle must have inherited it from her parents, or from some remoter ancestor. In this case, perhaps it came from the distaff side, as Joan told her judges that ‘in her country, girls bore the name of their mother’. (14) On the other hand, we do know that Isabelle had a taste for pilgrimages. Her immediate reaction to her daughter’s sensational departure for Chinon to see the king was to set out for Puy-en-Velay, (15) where the Jubilee of Puy was being celebrated, as it was whenever Good Friday coincided with the day of the Annunciation (25 March 1429). As it happens, there were special links between the diocese of Toul, in which Domrémy was situated, and the chapter of Notre Dame du Puy. But this can hardly have been Isabelle’s reason for going. What led her there must have been the fervour aroused by a place and a cult which were to the France of the fifteenth century what Lourdes is to our own time. Isabelle’s journey to Puy at this particular juncture makes one think of her as a woman who had been affected by the emotional currents which were sweeping through the religious life of the epoch. Joan was later to assert that ‘no one taught her her belief, unless it was her mother’. (16) The evidence we have thus seems to show that Joan’s parents were contrasted in character. Her father’s natural authority in the household would be reinforced by the official positions he assumed; while any emotion lacking from his character would be made up from the mother’s side.

  When their daughter was born, Jacques and Isabelle chose numerous godparents for her. She may have had as many as seven godmothers and four godfathers altogether. This multiplicity was not at all uncommon at the time. The purpose, in part, was to make up for the lack of written records and for the high rate of mortality. But the godparents also served to bind the child to the community. One of Joan’s godmothers was the wife of the mayor; and one of her godfathers, Jean Morel, represented the people of Domrémy in their suit before Robert de Baudricourt at the same time as Jacques d’Arc himself. One of the few certain relics of Joan of Arc is the baptismal font at which she was held. This survives in the much-altered church at Domrémy: a simple, octagonal, stone basin, it must be the most ancient object there. Joan was not the first child of the Arc family to be brought to it, and she was not to be the last. She had two brothers and a sister who were older than herself, and she was followed by a younger brother.

  The eldest brother, Jacquemin, plays no part in her story. He seems to have been almost grown up by the time she was born, and by 1425 he was living at Vouthon, probably working the land that came to him from his mother. Then — it is not certain in what order — came a sister, Catherine, and another brother, Jean. Catherine was married to Colin Le Maire, son of the mayor of the immediately neighbouring village of Greux, and died before Joan set out on her mission in 1429. Pierre, the youngest child in the family, born around 1413, was the member of it who took the most substantial role, in the events which followed Joan’s departure from Domrémy. He accompanied her on her campaigns, and was captured with her on the fatal sortie from Compiègne.

  Domrémy, the village in which Joan was born and in which she grew up, occupied a rather special position in the complicated political situation of the time. From the religious point of view, it depended from Greux, which contained the principal church. Greux, in turn, was attached to the bishopric of Toul, which was not a French see but one which belonged to the Holy Roman Empire. The feudal relationship was different. Domrémy lay on the very frontiers of the duchy of Lorraine — the river Meuse formed the boundary. Technically it was a part of the duchy of Bar, but in fact belonged to that portion which was called the Barrois mouvant because it ‘moved’ or depended directly from the French crown. Joan was thus, from her birth, a subject of the French king, ruled directly by the royal administration.

  In practice Domrémy was administered from the nearby town of Vaucouleurs, although, to complicate matters still further, this applied to only a portion of the village. The southern part, which included the Château de l’Ile already mentioned, and about thirty houses, formed a seigneury belonging to the Bourlemont family. This seigneury depended from the castellany of Gondrecourt, which in turn depended from the duchy of Bar, itself a fief of the Empire and not of the French crown. Patchwork arrangements of this type were the rule rather than the exception under feudalism. What made Domrémy different was the ease with which the various relationships could be interpreted in national terms, as forming a kind of microcosm of the distressed realm of France.

  In Joan’s day the Bourlemonts were a declining power. The main line died out in 1412, and the property passed to a niece of the last seigneur. Her husband had other seigneuries elsewhere, and she did not take much interest in the Château de Bourlemont, much less in Domrémy. It was her representative, Jannel Aubri, mayor of the village and husband of one of Joan’s godmothers, who in 1420 arranged to let the Château de l’Ile, which was a mere enclosure with a chapel attached to it, for a period of nine years to one Jean Biget and to Joan’s own father. It was a wise precaution on their part to rent it — Joan was later to remember helping to drive the cattle there ‘for fear of the men at arms’. (17) We gain the impression that, though threatened from time to time by roving bands of marauders, the inhabitants of Domrémy made up for this by an unusual degree of independence from feudal control.

  The district that surrounded Domrémy remained loyal to Charles VII in an area which was otherwise Burgundian or English in its allegiances. Robert de Baudricourt, who governed the territory dependent on Vaucouleurs, used many shifts to preserve his little dominion. On the whole he was successful. The district did not suffer nearly as much as many other parts of France from the ravages of warfare. There were constant alarms, but nothing like the repeated razzias which the peasants suffered elsewhere.

  Occasionally, however, danger came uncomfortably close. Lorraine was a mass of squabbling feudatories, and in July 1419 two of them fought a small battle at Maxey, which was just the other side of the Meuse. Among the prisoners was the husband of one of Joan’s godmothers. In 1421 part of the English army penetrated as far as nearby Gondrecourt, and it seems likely that the skirmishers reached the outskirts of Domrémy. The strain of events such as these, was, nevertheless, more psycho-logical than p
hysical. The inhabitants of Domrémy got enough to eat, and they had roofs over their heads. Their lot was easy compared to that endured by many of their contemporaries. We find no sign of the social breakdown which afflicted other parts of France.

  II

  Joan’s childhood has so often been traduced that it is now hard to form any idea of what it must have been like. Yet there is enough material in the main sources to enable us to form an opinion. True enough, the witnesses at the Trial of Rehabilitation often give us the impression that they are reproducing a formula. The questions put to them seem designed to elicit a stock response — testimonies to Joan’s sweetness of character and perfect religious orthodoxy. All the same, we probably know more about Joan during her earliest years than we know about any of her contemporaries at the same period of their lives. Some of this material is doubly precious because it comes to us from her own mouth.