Transcript of 632. Joan of Arc: Warrior Maid (Part 1)

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 for 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 'size' can rival a prouess, but it is God who has wrought this, God who leads her on. That's a poem written in July 1429. It would astound people to know that that poem was written by a French woman, a French woman, one of the most remarkable women, according to Tom Holland, in medieval history. 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? He was the Anthony Scaramucci because he's a big fan of astrology. She was the Anthony Scaramucci, or the father was the Anthony Scaramucci of medieval history. Then in 1389, her husband dropped dead at the plague, Christine. She had three small children and a mother and niece to support, and she turned to writing poetry. In those days, actually, you could make money by writing poetry, so good for her.

She made a fortune. She was prolific on a Sandbrookeian scale. In 1405, she boasted that, Between the years 1399 and the present year, I have compiled 15 major works.

That's good.

But, Dominic, that extract from the poem that you just read, that was the last poem she ever wrote. She wrote it in 1429, 1929, and it celebrated a girl who was even more famous, even more remarkable than she was, a girl that Christine called Lepucelle, the maid, but who is best known today as, of course, Joan of Arc.

Joan of Arc. 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. 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.

Actually, one of them begins, Little Catholic Girl. So quite like Christine's poem. I don't know whether they were influenced by her.

Undoueutely, they were. She's a pop icon, isn't she? Because she's a teenage girl, she's a rebel, she's an outsider.

She's doing things that teenage girls shouldn't do. 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 that bit you read, what is Christine celebrating? She's celebrating the fact that, as you've implied, the English are losing and the French are winning. But more than that, she is celebrating the sheer mad, glorious 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 Yearss 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've ended the last series about it with Ashencourt and Henry IV 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 R. R. 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. 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 night 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. It is one of, if not the most extraordinary stories the whole of history. I think we're so familiar with it that perhaps you need to do a deep dive to remind yourself of just how astonishing the story is. The thing is that even the greatest of historians have struggled to make sense of her, to make sense of her story.

Have you read The Waning of the Middle Ages?

Yeah, Johann Heisinger.

Yeah, it was a great Dutch historian and published in 1919. 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. This wasn't because he thought that she was unimportant, but absolutely the opposite. 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. He said of her that she is a figure more beautiful than any other nation possesses. 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. A 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 supernatural enemy, right?

Sorcerous. 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 poem. His take is very different to Christine's. Bedford says of her, She's a loose, infamous, and immoral woman dressed as a man. He can't leave it alone because five years later, he's still at it. He is directly blaming the decline of English fortunes in France on this monstrous sorceress, a disciple and limb of the fiend called the Pucelle, that used false enchantment and sorcery.

And the reason he is smoldering, smoldering with rage, is that 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's War. We've done 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 Joan so much, 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 intermingle relations between England and France. 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.

This is basically Theo Heaven. It's four episodes of the English Behaving Both Badly and Losing. Dominic, I'm sure you would join with me in dedicating this series to Theo on account. 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 repreasing everything that had gone right for England. 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, the English, unlike Joan, unlike Christine, do not think they're the baddies. They think that the French their own, 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 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 Yearss 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 preemptive strike, basically as a defensive measure, 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 Poitou, the great roister doyster 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 a 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 4, 8, 7, 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. It also has a very elaborate centralized framework of government. This means that under an effective king, the English state is able to raise taxes and recruit troops and provision armies much more effectively than the French king can, because in France, the kingdom is 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 it's strength lies in Infantry rather than the cavalry that the French tend to prefer. It's a mix of men at arms, a longbowman, and The Long Bows traditionally are seen by the English as absolutely what gives them the cutting edge. So a generation later, Sir John Fortescue, 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 Agencourt, when the French slaughtered as if they were cattle, according to an 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 pass 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, there are maybe up to 2,000 French noblemen are captured. 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 Duke of Family of Orléans will be playing a key role in Jones' story.

Okay, so Ashencourt, tremendous victory. Two years later, Henry IV 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 to 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, 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. It's Burgundy against Armagnac. It's Burgundy because the greatest of all the duks in France is the Duke of Burgundy. At the time of Henry IV'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 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 forming them into a posse is a guy called the Count of Armagnac. And so this is why you get these two rival factions, the Burgundians and the Armagnacs. And they start 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 Dauphins, 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. Essentially, I think even When 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 these... It's an 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 pogrum of the Armagnacs. The dofand, 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 IV from England-He's thinking, Yeah, it's all his Christmases come at once. Yeah, he's advancing Missing from the north. 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 Dauphins, agreed 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 Montreuil, which is some 50 miles southeast of Paris, so essentially between Paris and Bourges. So it's 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 Dauphine's men, right?

So it seems. And certainly, whether the Dauphine 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 Dauphine 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, his father's body is bleeding. Rather than combine with the Dauphat against Henry IV and the English, Philip the Good now goes to Henry IV, 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 have to yield to the inevitable, don't they?

Well, the king does. Charles VI, who is, by this point, a race-like specter, completely mad, and so therefore, essentially a puppet of the Duke of Burgundy. He is In the city of Thoua in Champagne, which is southeast of Paris, Henry VI joins Philip and Charles VI there, and they draw up a treaty. 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. 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. Lancaster. The house of Lancaster will take the place on the French throne of Charles VI's own dynasty, the house of Valois. 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 Restes History Club. What would have If Henry V had lived, would England and France have become one kingdom? 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. He's been bumped off the line of inheritance. He has no prospect, really, of defeating Henry V, partly because Henry V is the greatest warrior of the age, but also because the Dauphat can't risk himself in battle, because without him, the house of Valua really would be extinct. There is no one else to keep the Valua line going. And then things get even worse, because on the sixth of December 1421, Henry and his new bride, so the sister of the Dauphat, Catherine, Catherine gives Henry IV, not just a child, but a son, whom they'd call the 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 God wants. And so when people work with Henry, they're not doing so because they're proto-Marshall-Paintans or something. It's not a question of cowardly collaboration. It's because they genuinely look at the situation. They say, This is all part of the divine workings out of God's intention for the world.

I think also there's a certain grudging respect for Henry V. He's a serious person. This is a guy who could lick a crumbling kingdom into shape. But also, I 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. If you back the Armagnacs, you're never going to accept this. But if you are a Burgundian sympathizer, then you absolutely are. In a sense, it's simultaneously the Hundred Yearss War and the Civil War between the Burgundians and the Armagnacs have become interfused. This is explains why so many people in France are willing to accept the House of Lancaster as a legitimate replacement for the House of Valois.

Theo has actually made a good point in the chat, which is that the English and French ruling classes are so similar in their devotion to the ideas of chivalry, in their devotion to the stuff about courtly love, the use of French, all of that stuff, that it doesn't necessarily feel like you're accepting the rule of foreign barbarians, right?

I'm not sure that is entirely true, because this is the first century, really, in which the English aristocracy are not speaking French as their native language. Interesting. 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. Just plucking at random an example, let's look at one. He is a very distinguished churchman, and he goes by the name of Pierre Cauchon. He'd been born in Arras, 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 baptized. Cauchon had then gone to Paris to study at the University there, which is the greatest center for theology in the whole of Europe. 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 center of gravity is very much that region, Paris, and the region between Paris and the low countries where of Burgundy has his center of gravity. Cauchon is very, very devoutely convinced that only the Anglo-Burgundian Alliance has any prospect of stabilizing France. And so he goes full in.

I think it is unfair to think of it. 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 Cauchon, 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 2 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 Cauchon is 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. In 1418, she retires to an Abbey where her daughter was a nun, and she doesn't write anything else. There are lots of other people who are recording the horrors of the age, so the hunger, the brutality, the wolves padding through the outskirts of Paris, all this stuff. But Christine is so appalled. It's like she's gone into a catatonic shop. It doesn't speak at all.

But then, Tom, there are more twists in this very George R. Martin 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 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. All the hard men in the English government had fought with him, had been at Agencourt or Normandy. They are absolutely committed basically to fulfilling this treaty that Henry had done so much to draw up. 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. In France, he is going to serve the infant, Henry VI, as regent. So effectively, in France, he is now the head of this Anglo-Bergundian alliance.

And he is a proper person. He's People may be anticipating because they know the English is 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 two major centers of English power in France. This churchman says of Bedford, Wise and generous at once, feared and loved. There's a brilliant observation by Jonathan Sumption in the last of his enormous volumes on the Hundred Years's War. 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. There is something slightly of Cromwell, I think, about Bedford. Robust. 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, Anne. 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 the fact that Bedford is so impressive, this is why people like Cauchon are so happy to serve him.

It's the best rule of France ever had, Tom.

Meanwhile, what if 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. I think the Dauphin, recognizing this, has been doing his best to try and balance that out. So he's got He's got himself a queen. 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. The Angevans, they're a very serious dynasty. She's probably the most formidable woman in the kingdom. 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 she clearly is a very smart woman, and she's famously gorgeous. She's a very keen supporter of the Arminax, and so that's why she has swung behind the Dauphin, given the Dauphin her daughter to be his wife. In July 1423, she is absolutely delighted when her daughter gives the Dauphat 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'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, so to 1429, so at the end of the 1420s. The Dauphin is still very much on the outside, isn't he? 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 Rhinse- He hasn't been crowned in Rhinse.

He's miles away in English Held territory. There's no prospect of getting there.

The English very much seem to have the upper hand, don't they?

Yeah. And crucially, the English have maintained their reputation for military invasibility. So the Dover had actually gone north of the Loire, which effectively constitutes the frontier between Lancasterian 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 disast wrong. So the English and the French meet outside a town called Verneuil, and 8,000 of the Dauphat's men are either killed or captured by the Duke of Bedford and his army. And among those who are captured is the young son of the Duke of Alençon, who had died at Agencourt. 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, this is terrible for Alençon because He's captive. He needs to raise money for ransom, and all his land is gone. So he's in desperate straits.

So most of France now, north of the River Loire, so we're talking about 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 English are now thinking, do we drive south of the Loire? 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 Dauphine, his fly-bitten two-bit capital of Bourges, and we'll finish this.

Yes. The key to essentially breaching the Loire, which at this point is much broader than it is today. I mean, it's a serious barrier. So they essentially need to secure a really, really strategically significant crossing point. And the obvious place is Aulian, which is the northernmost settlement. So the Loire curves northwards. Aulian is at the northernmost point of this curve, and therefore, nearest to Paris, which is under English control. And if the English can capture Aulian, 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 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 Aulian with the goal of starving the city into submission. The English commander is a guy called William de la Pole, who is the Earl of Suffolk. 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 terrifying rugby player that you can imagine.

Vinnie Jones. He's a part for Vinnie Jones.

Vinnie Jones. That's who he is. Well, he's not Vinnie Jones, actually, because he is very aristocratic. I think rugby is slightly better. He's He's posh, but he'll rip your arm off.

He's played by Lawrence Delaglio.

Exactly. He's Lawrence Delaglio. 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 Mahro Eto'oje.

I guess. Yeah, on the BBC.

Yeah, exactly.

So these are serious men, always 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 arms houses. And it looks like the city will fall because every French attempt to relieve the siege has been beaten off almost disdainfully. The Dauphin has exhausted his reserves, both of cash and of men. As a result, people who previously had been backing him in the Loire Valley are starting to... They sense where the wind is blowing, and they're starting to 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 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. 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 third name, I know nothing. I was born in the village of Domrémy. ' So that is the deep position 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 There's 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, you've got to give all kinds of caveats, and everybody who writes about Joan of Arca always does. Joan's words in these records are rendered into Latin by the Clark who are recording them. 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. Even the witnesses at her rehabilitation, they also have their own agenda, lots of incentives to 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 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. When you read the records of the of the trial. Her personality completely shines through. 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. 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 Mitford in your pantheon.

She's not an aristocrat like Unity Mitford. She's not a courtesan like Emma Hamilton, and she's unique. 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 '80s, called Joan of Art: The Image of Female Heroism. 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 as saint. To reiterate, she is a female teenage peasant girl. When When we hear her speak, I think what we're also hearing, all the more loudly, is the silence of all those 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. 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 skepticism 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 skeptical about. I mean, there is no question about that.

Okay, 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 Heil, 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. I think the idea that she's a shepherd, there are biblical echoes there. That's why it suited people who were praising her to say But Joan herself was having none of it. She regarded shepheresses with a great deal of snobbery.

Oh, no, she's Virginia Wolf.

In her trial, she said, I learned to spin and to sow. She challenged the women of Rouen to spin and sew better than her. She does this because to be a seamstress, to be a spinner, a spinster, you're on a higher level than a shepheress.

She's from Domrémy. 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 Meurs runs through it. 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. The villages fight each other quite often, don't they? People are badly wounded or even killed in the fighting between these two villages.

Yeah. Also, Domaine is is on the front line of the English attempt to annex the region and pacify it completely. As Joan is growing up, there are more and more English raiding parties who are starting to see them on the horizon, and they are fighting with rival companies who are loyal to the dauphin. This notion of free companies, something we've talked about throughout our series on the Hundred Yearss War, these are semi freelance bodies of men, lots of whom are pretty criminal. It's very, very frightening. It's Wild West situation, the bad guys galloping into town. We know that this does happen to Domremy and to other villages around. When Joan was 11, her cousin was killed by a cannon ball that was fired into the church of a neighboring village where he'd taken refuge. Then the church in Domremy itself is burnt down, and most of the village with it at least once. For Joan, the ringing of church bells, which are sounded when danger is threatening, this would have been something with which she was very, very familiar. 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-bergundian army embarks on the systematic conquest of the region.

All the dauphinist strongholds fall, all except one. This is a fortress called Vaucouleurs, which is very formidable, has a large garrison, and it's under the command of a noblemen from Lorraine by the name of Robert de Baudricourt. De Baudricourt has very good connections at the French court, and specifically with the house of Anjou, so that is Yolande and her dynasty. 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. Joan has been growing up in Domrémy in this very violent, frightening, dangerous, divided landscape. How does that shape her character, would you say?

Well, I think that it leads her to identify the Dauphin as the the ultimate guarantee tour 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. Marina Warner is brilliant on this in her book, Talking of Joan, she had a natural inclination for clear-cut situations with identifiable centers of authority. The King's supreme position and her magnetic attraction for it bear witness to this taste. She'd like to unity, organization, rallied groups. She's basically a working class story. That's what she wants. She wants order and she wants royal rule.

But she's also intensely pious.

Again, you can see why you're growing up surrounded by this violence. The sounding of the bells is what alerts you to danger coming. I guess just sublimately, you would come to associate bells with the hope of safety, with the prospect that warnings may be coming. Bells Bells seem to have been very, very important to her, to have played a very, very strong role in her emotional and spiritual life. We know from the court records that because a friend of hers recorded it at her rehabilitation trial, that once the sacristan forgot to ring the bells for compleon, and Joan told him off and said, Go and ring them. If she was out in the fields and she heard the bells ringing, she would always kneel. They have an immense significance for her. 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. 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? She regards them. We We did an episode a long time ago about Catherine of Siena, about somebody, another teenage girl who had this almost obsessive, this totally transcendent and dominating fixation with being the bride of Christ and all this thing. Sometimes I think about Joan, there's something similar. She's again a teenage girl, a fixation, in this case, on the personalities of three saints in particular?

There are certainly similarities, and we'll maybe come to them later in the series with Catherine Siena. But I think there are also differences. The key one is that Joan, unlike Catherine, as we've said, is illiterate, and therefore she is dependent on both stories and images. 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. I don't think she's unusual in her familiarity with them. The The leading saints, the most famous saints, are as familiar to children growing up in medieval Europe this time as singers or sports stars would be to teenagers today. But there are three, it seems, who are the particular focus of her devotion. The first of these is really unsurprising. It's Saint Michael, who is the great warrior Archangel, the captain of heaven, who, in the Book of Revelation, throws down Satan. For the French, he is the great emblem of their resistance. We've said how Henry IV. 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.

The fact that it is dedicated to St. Michael, it emphasizes the way in which this warrior Archangel is presumed by the French to be fighting on their side. The Dauphine 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 Saint 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 victim or their martyrdom, right?

They are martyred rather than surrender their virginity. I guess to Joan, they are emblems of courage and independence. One of them, Saint Catherine of Alexandria, again, it's not just Joan who's devoted to her. She's probably the best loved saint of the age. Actually, Joan's sister, who died while she was still a girl, had been called Catherine.

Right. 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. Everyone thinks she's 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. Crikey. She's become the patron saint of midwives. 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. That's clearly something that Joan is alert to. But also there is a story of St. Margaret. She's so desperate to look learn the scriptures and so on, that she enters a monastery disguised as a man.

Oh, a telling detail. Very telling detail. Just on this thing about the saints, I think this is massively important for our 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, 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 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 is 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?

Peculially pious, peculiarly impressionable, peculiarly imaginative, peculiarly self-confident as well, I think. Okay. So I think a very distinctive little girl, probably.

Yeah. I mean, you're not really selling her to to be honest, as a playmate. But actually, the people she's playing with are very different from the other puzze children, right? Because when she's 13 years old, actually, tellingly, when she's basically entering adolescence, I think, 14, 25, something happens. 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. 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. Joan insisted to inquisitors who were very skeptical 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. In time, she came to understand it as voice, not of God himself, but of an angel. But she did not, to begin with, I think, identify it with Saint 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 Joan 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 very forthright and firm manner. So if the voices tell her something that she doesn't agree with, she tells them that.

Okay, 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 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.

Yeah, 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 the months and then the years, this mission comes to be clarified. So to begin with, the voices are giving her a 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 Rase and have him crowned there. Then late in 1428, by which time the news of the siege at Orléans will have reached Domrémy, she's told by the voices to ride to Orléans and to break the English siege. The voices, I mean, these are mad things to tell a teenage girl. But the voices say, Well, don't worry. We will guide you. We will support you throughout this mission that we've given you. If you do as instruction, protected, 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, she answers back to the voices, but she never doubts their voracity, 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. 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 fiance for her. She says, You're out. I'm not interested in you. Then We get to late 1428. Things are looking very dicey for the Dauphine, the French cause. 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 on the edge of things. Where are you going to go? There's only one place she really can go, and that is Vaucouleurs, which is the one fortress in the region that is still holding out for the Dauphine under the command of Robert de Baudricourt, war. 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 she's turned down the man that her father has chosen for her to marry. Also, he's been having these nightmares in which he sees Joan running away with men at arms. The implication of that is that essentially he's worried that she is going to start misbehaving sexually, that she's going to run away with a soldier.

She's now 16. What? She's about 16 years old. I mean, any father, your 16-year-old daughter comes to you and says, I'm basically going to run off and join the army.

Well, I'm going to go to a fortress full of men and 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. She deliberately ignores her father's orders and runs away to Vaucouleurs, full of violent soldiers and men. And she goes to Baudricourt, who's a quite unscrupulous person, we've already said. So quite a dangerous man. She goes to him and she explains her mission. First time, he first time says, You're mad, go away. Second time, you're mad, go away. She's still hanging around in Vaucouleurs. She She's ignoring what de Baudricourt has said. In January 1429, de Baudricourt comes to the house in Vauclure, where Joan has been staying, and he has brought the local priest with him. He tells the priest, This girl is possessed by an evil spirit. Exercise the evil spirit. But Joan just nails in front of the priest and reproaches the priest and says, What are you doing? You've heard my confession. You know that 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 the D'Audricourt, and a third time she says, Take me to the Dauphin. And this time, D'Audricourt 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 Auvinjou. And René Auvinjou is the second son of Yolande, the mother-in-law of the Dauphin.

Why do these two guys, who are serious people, aristocratic people, power brokers, why on Earth would they be encouraging what clearly de Baudric Core himself, another serious person, thinks is a loony girl who's just got mad crackbot 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 claiming a mission from God. This isn't massively unusual. 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. I think that Charles Lorraine hopes that perhaps Joan will heal him. But Joan says, No, I'm not going to do that. I can't heal anyone. In this, again, she's unusual. The only thing she does, miraculous, is her mission. She's not going around healing the or anything like that. And she dismisses it as nonsense. Why would I be able to heal anyone? That's not 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 Chalon, just south of the Loire, which is about 300 miles away. As for René Van Jou, we 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, 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 Baudricourt definitely still has reservations because what happens now is a very controversial development in Joan's story. Joan says, Okay, I'm going on this mission. I need male clothing if I'm going to go. And de Baudricourt 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. 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 betaineth unto a man. We've said that Joan is very pious, but when she wants to, she's perfectly capable of ignoring a direct biblical dictate.

I don't want to plunge into my skeptical 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 implications for this. Maybe, let's say, secular-minded listeners might draw implications from this about what is actually nagging at her.

We should wait until we've told her her whole story and listened to what she actually has to say at the trial before 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 IV will recognize. She's got her horse. She's been given a sword, which anyone with nightly pretensions needs. And the Baudricourt has given her two pages, 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 could say, well, it's a sensible precaution for any girl who is going to ride 300 odd miles through a warzone 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. 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 What does it have to do with her mission? What are her voices? These are all questions that we will explore, perhaps, or we start exploring in our next episode when Joan arrives at the court of the Dauphin and reveals to the Dauphin the mission that she has been given by God.

Very exciting. 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 of the most intriguing stories have done on the RESTIS history, and it's certainly panning out that way. If you want to find out what happens when Joan arrives at the Dauphat'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 RESTIS 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 Restes History Club at theresteshistory. Com 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. That is what we will be investigating next time. Au revoir. Au revoir. What's really going on between Donald Trump and Venezuela right now?

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