Joan of Arc and the Hundred Years War by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Published: 2007-08-10T17:44:09+00:00

Biographies

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Figure 11. Joan of Arc and the siege of Paris. Courtesy Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris.

late April, determined to block Burgundy’s move, Joan returned to the field without even taking leave of Charles. She drove the English out of several towns on her way to Compiègne. There, whether betrayed by Burgundian sympathizers in the town or by her own disregard for her personal safety, Joan was captured on May 23, 1430, taken by an archer. The archer turned her over to his lord, the Bastard of Wan-donne. He, in turn, presented her to Philip the Good, who eventually sold her to the English for a handsome price. The enemy rejoiced at her capture and wrote letters declaring her guilty of horrible crimes and fiendish influence. Far away in London, a chronicler noted simply under the rubric 1430: “In this year, on May 23, a certain woman called the Maid of God, was captured by the English at the town of Compiègne.”12

Moved from castle to castle, Joan finally arrived at Rouen on December 23, 1430. There, the Maid was tried in a partisan trial and condemned as a relapsed heretic, on a technical point involving her refusal to abandon male clothes. She was burned at the stake in Rouen on May 30, 1431, at the Old Marketplace.

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Biographies

John II the Good (1319–1364, r. 1350–1364) King John II of France, called “the Good” for embodying the quintes-sential chivalric virtues, has paradoxically been portrayed as a classic example of royal ineptitude. This unfavorable image may owe in part to his bad luck at having ruled during one of the darkest periods of French history. His reign began four years after the ignoble French defeat at Crécy.

During his own reign, and under his own direction, the French army suffered a still more humiliating defeat at Poitiers, where John himself was taken prisoner. The economic effects of the Plague, which struck France two years before John took the throne, and the pervasive sense that the nobility was depleting the royal treasury without providing military security in return, added to the sense of national calamity. Growing up under one set of ideals, John saw the world embrace new principles, more practical than chivalric, and was unable to adapt in time to the new order.

It must not be forgotten that the good King John was often partial to brutal violence. One of the first acts of his reign was the execution of his constable, Raoul de Brienne (1350). Later on, almost paranoid in his fear of treason, John burst in on a banquet given by his son at Rouen, seized Charles of Navarre, and executed the count of Harcourt without formal charges or trial (1356). But by then the king had lost his constable and confidant, Charles of Spain, to assassination instigated by Charles of Navarre (1354), his son-in-law of two years. Whereas John II had a reputation for impetuousness and bad temper, there were an equal number of signs that he wished to act and treat others honorably—including the poor.

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