Joan of Arc (3 page)

The Hundred Years' War is one of those historical events or epochs to which the imagination is not naturally drawn. The late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries can be thought of as the otiose and yet malnourished rump of the Middle Ages. The major war was not a cataclysmic horror but the drawn-out dance of nearly a century of fruitless and debilitating destruction. Rather than imagining a great blaze, we should think of a series of small brushfires that are never put out but smolder continually, creating a noxious smoke and sparking other small fires in the vicinity, filling the air with poisonous vapors and destroying the land's possibilities for productive habitation. The population of France had been decimated by plagues and famine in the fourteenth century, but now the countryside was being devastated not as the result of great battles but because of the marauding of the armies when they were not engaged.These freebooters, called
écorcheurs,
or fleecers, ravaged the land looking for spoils—the only way they could support themselves, since the powers who had hired them (England and France) could not raise enough money to pay them properly. Ostensibly the war was fought under the banner of chivalry, but the gap between the chivalric ideal and the behavior of those who claimed it was enormous. The
écorcheurs
were not noble themselves, but their behavior was tolerated by nobles who turned a blind eye.

The people of the countryside had to contend with a shifting cast of ravagers, and all the divisions of this vexed society were mirrored in the mixed origins of the
écorcheurs.
The mix was made more complex by the fact that the marauders whom we would think of as “French” were composed of two separate and warring factions, the Armagnacs and the Burgundians. At the time of Joan's birth, France was not only at war with England; it was also in a state of virtual civil war, the rich duchy of Burgundy having allied itself with the English against the French monarchy.

The Burgundian marauders were the ones whose effect Joan and her family most closely felt. In 1425 the Burgundians, and some English, drove off the cattle of the inhabitants of Domrémy, and the church was burned and plundered; 1425 was the year that Joan first heard her voices. The juxtaposition of Joan's first experience of civil violence and the onset of her puberty may be one of those historical accidents that suggest more than they finally explain. But, no doubt, the witnessing of hatred and disorderat a vulnerable time in her life marked Joan permanently. In 1428, months before she left Domrémy on her mission to crown the dauphin, her family had to flee their home for the neighboring town of Neufchâtel as a result of Burgundian marauders. It was here that Joan worked at the inn of a woman called La Rousse, generating later rumors that she had consorted with soldiers. It was here, and no earlier, that she learned to ride a horse.

Joan was clear, when she spoke during her trial of her early years, that the Burgundians were her chief enemy and that Domrémy was united in its hatred of them. With her usual avoidance of understatement she said, “I knew of only one Burgundian there, and I could have wished his head cut off—however only if it pleased God.”
²
But just across the river Meuse, in the neighboring town of Maxey, the citizens were supporters of Burgundy. The children of both villages would come home bloody from fighting over loyalties to the duke or the king. It is tempting to wonder what would have become of Joan had she been born on the other side of the river Meuse, where devotion was not to the beleaguered king but to the duke who had allied himself across the Channel.

This confusion of affiliations is an index of the disorder of the times and the muddled loyalties that a nature like Joan's, thriving on clarity, must have found as anguishing as the burning of her church and the destruction of her neighbors' cattle. But muddle and confusion are the hall-mark of the Hundred Years' War, which victimized thousands because of an unclear dynastic claim, a problem created by the fact that the royal families of England and France were closely related by blood.

The dynastic muddle begins with Edward II of England. He claimed the French crown as a result of his being the grandson of Philip IV, the French king, who died in 1314. Philip's three sons had no male issue; Edward was the child of Philip's daughter, Isabella. When the youngest of Philip's sons died, the contenders to the throne were Edward of England and Count Philip of Valois. Philip of Valois was the son of the dead king Philip's younger brother. Edward's claim to the throne was, therefore, a generation nearer to the crown than Philip of Valois's, but its validity was weakened because it came through the female line. Whether this invocation of the “salic law” was in fact valid, or just a ploy used by the French to prevent having an Englishman on their throne, has been a matter for scholarly debate.

In 1337, Philip of Valois, after declaring Edward a “contumacious vassal,” confiscated the duchy of Gascony, which the English considered theirs since the time of Eleanor of Aquitaine (1122-1204). Edward, unwilling to give up his sovereignty in Gascony, waged war with France. But the economic conditions at home made it a half-hearted effort for the English, and for some years the war went on with no clear victory on either side, only misery for the peasants who were its victims, particularly the victims of the underpaid, underemployed soldiers. Then in 1346, the English scored a decisive victory at the Battle of Crecy, and ten years later they did the same at the Battle of Poitiers, during which time King John of France was captured by the English and held for ransom. He died in London in 1364. Under the leadership of his son Charles V, an intelligent and able ruler with little stomach for war, France prospered while England was too absorbed in its own domestic troubles to continue the fight. Charles V's reign lasted from 1364 to 1380; he was succeeded by his son Charles VI.

Enter Henry V, the first English king strong enough to devote himself to full-scale operations in France. Henry was both a great king and a great general. His counterpart in France, Charles VI, was probably a paranoid schizophrenic subject to long bouts of insanity. The Battle of Agincourt, in 1415, won the French crown for Henry's heir, and he persuaded the defeated Charles VI to give him his daughter Catherine in marriage, thus strengthening his claim to the French crown. But both Henry V and Charles VI died in the same year, 1422. Henry's one-year-old son, Henry VI, and Charles VII, then nineteen, were both proclaimed kings of France.

Echoes of this dynastic struggle are familiar to us from Shakespeare: Richard II's errors of extravagance are set against the backdrop of the economic disaster of the Hundred Years' War; and the breach that Henry V rode into was at Agincourt—his victory there resulting in untold hardship for the French population. Even though Henry's soldiers were, as a result of his good leadership, relatively better disciplined than their predecessors (Pistol, Henry's former friend, is executed for brigandage), the French still had endured seventy years of devastation, during which English troops plundered their stores of food and wine, stole their harvests, drove their cattle from their fields, feasted in their towns by night and set them aflame in the morning. The noble soldiers with the golden tongues whom we encounter in Shakespeare were of the same party as the brutish mercenaries whom the French, including Joan, knew by their constant curse “goddamns” (rendered by them as “godons,” their name for their invaders).

And lest we forget what the real implications of the dynastic claims were, we should try to imagine an English France. An extension of the island kingdom across the channel: a Normandy, Brittany, Provence, all English-speaking, a cultural history in which there was only cheddar and no brie, only Congreve and no Molière, only Chippendale and no French Provincial, only Turner and no Monet. In our time we have seen the ravages of nationalism so clearly that it is easy to think of it only as a curse, but to imagine the flattening out of culture that could have occurred if the English had won the Hundred Years' War is a deeply dispiriting mental exercise.

Joan, then, came into a world tainted with political and economic disorder, and the moral tone of the society reflected this. Abuses were rampant; the countryside starved while the king's court was luxurious. The atmosphere of the time was a dark cloud of depression and entropy. It is against this gray-brown background that the girl in white armor, on her black horse, placed herself.

If the state was in disarray, the Church was no better. At the time of Joan's birth in 1412, there were three claimants to the papacy: one in Rome, one in Avignon, and one in Spain. She was born into a Church torn by schism, and at the time of her death, although a council of the world's bishops had removed all the contenders to the papal throne from office and elected a new one, Martin V, the old Spanish pope, Benedict XIII, despite the fact that he had no authority and no followers, would still not give up his claim.

The history of the Great Schism is an indication of the mutually infecting relationship between a civil and religious order. Originally, the first Avignon pope had moved there because internal wars in Italy made it impossible for an orderly running of the Church's affairs to take place in Rome. But Avignon was in France, and France was involved in a war with England; England and her allies—particularly Germany and Italy—naturally resented the profits that would accrue to France as a result of the papacy's being centered there, so they put pressure on the Church to return the seat of St. Peter to Rome. In 1378, when the cardinals met in Rome to elect a pope, the population of Rome stormed the streets, demanding the election of an Italian. Probably in response to this, the cardinals elected Bartholomew, archbishop of Bari. Urban VI, as he was known, was a man of such violence of temper that all the cardinals fled his vicinity in Rome and moved back to Avignon to elect another pope, claiming that the election was invalid, since it had been motivated by fear of the crowd. The cardinals elected a Frenchman who took the name of Clement VII.

But Urban would not withdraw his papacy, so there were two popes, both with legitimate claims to having been properly elected. Neither Clement nor Urban possessed admirable qualities. Abuses and corruption were particularly egregious, largely motivated by the Church's constant need for new sources of money as a result of newly powerful monarchs unwilling to knuckle under to papal demands for revenue. Urban was interested in speaking to these abuses, but his approach was to insult and bully his enemies; Clement seems to have had no impulse to attend to corrupt practices at all.

This corruption led to the rise of such reformers as John Wycliffe in England, and his disciple in Bohemia, Jan Hus. Wycliffe and Hus were appalled by the greed of the clergy and the hierarchy, and their distance from the people whom they were meant to serve. They advocated the use of reason in coming to spiritual and moral conclusions, and a translation of the Bible into the vernacular in order that it could be more widely available to the people.

Wycliffe's teachings had comparatively little immediate effect in England, but Hus had an enormous following in the kingdom of Bohemia, where the university's popular anticlericalism gave him an important base. His own popularity contributed to the Church's decision to burn him as a heretic in 1416.

It is easy to see the roots of Protestantism in the ideas of Wycliffe and Hus, and it is not difficult to understand the Church's unease at the power of this new, popular movement. Part of their anxiety about Joan can be traced to the threat they felt from popular movements which stressed private inspiration and the primacy of the individual conscience; in burning Joan, they believed they were burning a heretic; her death, mirroring Hus's, was a blow for orthodoxy against the disease of antiauthoritarian populism.

This spirit had expressed itself in the secular realm by revolts among the lower orders—the jacquerie in Champagne, Picardy, and Beauvais, and the artisans of London—all these taking place in the last years of the fourteenth century. Every word out of Joan's mouth at her trial reinforced the clerics' suspicions; they could hardly have invented speech that could more clearly have indicated her insistence on the primacy of her own vision over the authority of the Church.

This authority had been remarkably shored up after the disaster of the schism by the success of the Council of Constance and the election of Pope Martin V in 1417. When Joan came on the scene in 1429, the Church was determined to hold on to the authority it had been successfullywielding for a dozen years. Its new sense of authority expressed itself in an increased appetite for enforcing orthodoxy—as seen in the execution of Jan Hus.

The newly shored-up Church understood the sources and limits of its power. It had to contend with a world of powerful monarchs—it could not afford to ignore the wishes of kings as it had a century earlier. This new understanding of itself as a player in a geopolitical game made the Church much more aware of the need to ally itself with the strong rather than the weak. With France in a state of chaos, the choice to connect itself with England and its allies rather than France was a clear one for the Roman Church. This would have tragic consequences for Joan.

While these struggles for power were playing themselves out in the larger arena, on a local level, the late-fourteenth-and early-fifteenth-century Church was replete with lively popular activity, which took its form in an active folk tradition, visionary activity of a private, mystical nature, and apocalyptic preaching whose fiery tone roused the populace to ardor. St. Bernardino of Siena and St. Vincent Ferrer were both charismatic, colloquial speakers whose bonfire-of-the-vanities rhetoric attracted huge followings.

The grafting of pre-Christian and popular customs onto Christian practice was a cause of great anxiety to a Church which was all too aware of rumblings of rebellion and discontent. This was reflected in the behavior of Joan's judges during her trial. They seemed almost fixated on the popular folk practices of the villagers of Domrémy. They concentrated on a local custom of dancing around what was called the fairy tree. Joan seemed bored by their interest in fairies; she asserted that she never saw one, that some people in the town said there were some, but she had no knowledge of that. She spoke about some of her play with the other girls, and we get a picture of what is unusual in Joan's history: an ordinary life. She said that she hung garlands on the fairy tree and that she danced there with the other children, but that she “sang more often than she danced.” It is a charming moment in the trial: Joan's care to distinguish between the childish activities of singing and dancing, giving pride of place to singing as if to make sure that at least in this happy occupation she was clearly and properly seen.