Europe in the Middle Ages

by Ierne L. Plunket

We have often spoken of ‘chivalry’, the ideal of good conduct in the Middle Ages. The kings, princes, and knights, whose prowess has made the chronicles of Froissart famous, were to their journalist veritable heroes of chivalry, exponents of courage, courtesy, and breeding. Yet to modern eyes these qualities seem often tarnished, since the heroes who flaunted them were in no way ashamed of vices like cruelty, selfishness, or snobbery. A King John of France would die in a foreign prison rather than break his parole, but he would disdainfully ride down a ‘rabble’ of archers whom his negligence had left too tired to fight his battles. The Black Prince would wait like a servant on his royal prisoner, but accept as a brother-in-arms to be succoured a human devil like Pedro the Cruel; or put a town to the sword, as he did at Limoges, old men, women, and children, because it had dared to set him at defiance.

There is nothing of this tarnish in the chivalry of the peasant-maid who saved France. Pure gold were her knightly deeds, yet achieved without a trace of the prig or the boaster. Jeanne d’Arc was always human and therefore lovable, quick in her anger at fraud, yet easily appeased; friendly to king and soldier alike, yet never losing the simple dignity that was her safeguard in court and camp. Of all mediaeval warriors of whom we read she was the bravest; for she knew what fear was and would often pray not to fall into the hands of her enemies alive, yet she never shirked a battle or went into danger with a downcast face. A slim figure, with her close-cropped dark hair and shining eyes, she rode wherever the fight was thickest, always, in the words of a modern biographer, ‘gay and gaily glad,’ quick to see her opportunities and follow them up, joyful in victory, generous to her foes, pitiful to the wounded and prisoners.

The sight of her awoke new courage in her countrymen, dismay as at the supernatural in her enemies, who dubbed her a witch and vowed to burn her.

‘Suddenly she turned at bay,’ says a contemporary account of one of her battles, ‘and few as were the men with her she faced the English and advanced on them swiftly with standard displayed. Then fled the English shamefully and the French came back and chased them into their works.’

Orleans was relieved and entered, the reluctant, still half-doubting Charles led to Reims, and there in the ancient capital of France crowned, that all Frenchmen might know who was their true king. ‘The Maid’ urged that the ceremony should be followed by a rapid march on Paris; but favourites who dreaded her influence whispered other counsels into the royal ear, and Charles dallied and hesitated. When at last he advanced it was to find that the bridges over the Seine had been cut, not by the retreating English but by French treachery.

Paris was ripe for rebellion, and at the sight of ‘the Maid’ would have murdered her foreign garrison and opened her gates. Bedford was in the north suppressing a revolt, yet Charles, clutching at the excuse of the broken bridges, retreated southwards, disbanding his army and leaving his defender to her fate.

Her Voices now warned Jeanne of impending capture and death, but her mission was to save France, and hearing that the Duke of Burgundy planned to take the important town of Compiègne she rode to its defence with a small force. Under the walls, in the course of a sortie, she was captured, refusing to surrender. ‘I have sworn and given my faith to another than you, and I will keep my oath,’ she declared; and through the months that followed, caged and fettered in a dark cell of the castle of Rouen, exposed to the insults of the rough English archers, she maintained her allegiance, saying to her foes of the prince who had failed her so pitiably, ‘My King is the most noble of all Christians.’

Frenchmen (some of them bishops, canons, and lawyers of the University of Paris), as well as Englishmen, were amongst those who, after the mockery of a trial, sent Jeanne to be burned as a heretic in the market-place of Rouen. Bravely as she had lived she died, calling on her saints, begging the forgiveness of her enemies, pardoning the evil they had done her. ‘That the world’, says a modern writer, ‘might have no relic of her of whom the world was not worthy, the English threw her ashes into the Seine.’

France, that had betrayed Jeanne d’Arc, needed no relic to keep her memory alive. To-day men and women call her Saint, and one miracle she certainly wrought, for she restored to her country, that through years of anarchy had almost lost belief in itself, the undying sense of its own nationality. ‘As to peace with the English,’ she had said, ‘the only peace possible is for them to return to their own land.’ Within little more than twenty years from her death the mission on which she had ridden forth from Domremy had been accomplished, and Calais, of all their French possessions, alone remained to the enemies of France.

In summary of the Hundred Years’ War it may be said that from the beginning the English fought in a lost cause. Fortune, military genius, and dogged courage gave to their conquests a fictitious endurance; but nationality is a foe invincible because it has discovered the elixir of life; and when the tide of fortune turned with the coming of ‘the Maid’ the ebb of English discomfiture was very swift.