St. Joan of Arc

John Beevers

• Publisher: TAN Books
• Year: 1989
• ISBN:
  9781505102253
• Topic: Theologie & Religion
• Subtopic: Christliche Konfessionen

The 19-year-old saint who defeated England in 15 months, saved her country, crowned its king, and changed history was burned as a heretic. Yet 500 years later, she was canonized and became the patron saint of France. A unique and almost unbelievable story! 192 pgs;

1. The Girl

IT RAINED throughout the night. In the English camp the soldiers lay exhausted in their sodden tents. Some were ill; all were hungry, dirty, and unkempt. They had stormed Harfleur, losing many of their numbers in the business and many more had died of dysentery. They had set out to march to Calais to wait there until more men from England could join them. But the French set out after them and now they had caught them and there were three Frenchmen to every Englishman. There was jubilation in the French camp. At last, after many, many years of savage fighting, the English were to be destroyed.

The dawn came slowly, for the clouds were low and heavy with rain. The English rose and constructed before their ranks a palisade of sharply pointed stakes sloping toward the enemy. The archers assembled. Their weapons were a bow of yew wood five feet long and a bundle of arrows each two feet six inches in length, tipped with steel and flighted with the feathers of the gray goose. The arrows could drive through an armored breastplate and through the body of the man behind it. The English bowman was the most formidable killer in Europe. He did not look it. He was short and stocky, usually dirty and ill-shaven, wearing a patched or torn leather doublet and a rusty light helmet. He could, of course, neither read nor write. He drank a lot and swore more or less continually. His favorite oath was "God damn," which was so commonly on his lips that throughout France the English were called "Godons," the nearest the French could get to the native pronunciation. But he had no rival in the art of shooting an arrow with immense power, accuracy, and speed. The high, unending whistle of the English arrows was a sound of terror. For a century it had meant defeat and death. And, most important of all, the English bowman was the freest man—of his condition—in all Europe. He was not a serf. Nor did his king and the great barons despise him. They knew his worth too well. They were all bound together in a rough camaraderie. So on that gray autumn morning, king, lords, and bowmen faced the French, ready to die together but quite sure that, once again, victory would be theirs.

A spectator would not have had that certainty. The French were a formidable host, seemingly invincible. In immaculate armor, the chivalrous Frenchmen sat astride their heavy chargers. Very few men were on foot, only a handful of pikemen and the cross-bowmen who used the slow and cumbersome machine which fired a bolt released by a trigger. Banners and pennants were flying; there were shouts and laughter and the neighing of horses. All were well armed and supremely confident, and they outnumbered the English by three to one. All they had to do was to charge and trample the English into the mud. But, as even the most patriotic French historian admits, the leaders of the French at that time were stupid and incapable of learning the simple, bloody lessons the English had given them over and over again. They persisted in believing that battles were won by nobles encased in armor and sitting on steeds as strong as cart horses and not much more agile. They despised foot soldiers and made little use of them. If they got in their way during a battle, they rode them down.

And so, at about ten o'clock on that particular morning, they and their horses advanced to slaughter the English. A great line of metal-clad figures moved at a clumsy gallop across the soggy ground. It was magnificent, both as a spectacle and a target.

The English waited. At last, as the French lumbered within range, there came the growling shout, "For God, for Harry, and St. George!" and, as it died away, the thin whistle of the arrows. It was a very quiet business compared with a modern battlefield, quiet but deadly, and the knights of France began to tumble from their saddles. Those behind pressed on, riding over and crushing the fallen until they, in their turn, toppled down with an arrow through the throat or ribs. Straight and pitiless, the flight of the arrows never ceased, nor did the French advance. Those few riders who reached the English had their horses impaled on the sharpened stakes, and a dismounted man in armor was easy meat. When the English bowman had killed a fair number of the French and reduced the rest to a confused, leaderless mass, they dropped their bows, picked up billhooks, short-handled maces and knives, and sallied forth from behind their stakes. It was all over before the sun went down. Ten thousand Frenchmen were dead, many of them—against all the laws of war—having had their throats slit because they were not worth holding to ransom. Another thousand of the French were prisoners. The English lost just over a hundred men.

That day was St. Crispin's Day, October 25, in the year 1415, and the place was Agincourt.

It was a great victory, one of the many inflicted on the French since the battle of Crécy in 1346, when the English archers first showed their quality. It seemed that there was nothing to stop the whole realm of France from falling into English hands. But over on the other side of France a girl had been born less than three years before. Her name was Joan, and later she was to say to the English invaders: "Go away. For God's sake, get back to your own country." It was not long before they went, driven out by the victorious French. That the French were victorious was due to one person and one person only—this girl.

Before we begin her story, there is some history to be mastered. It is confused, full of squalid motives and not very interesting, but without a knowledge of it we cannot appreciate the greatness of Joan. No doubt we all knew something of this history in our schooldays and no doubt we have all forgotten it.

On Christmas Day, 1066, William, Duke of Normandy, was crowned King of England in Westminster, and for the next four centuries France and England were closely linked, so closely that at one time it seemed they might form one great kingdom. In 1152, William's great-grandson, Henry II, married Eleanor of Aquitaine and acquired her lands, so that he ruled an area of France stretching from the English Channel to the Pyrenees and from the Bay of Biscay to within—at one point—a few miles of the Rhone. More than half France was ruled by the King of England and, for many years, it was a situation accepted without question by the French. But it was not destined to last. French nationalism began to develop. There were incidents, bitter quarrels and skirmishes—still very far short of a major war, but serious enough for the two countries to sign the Treaty of Paris in 1259, by which Henry II's grandson, Henry III, handed vast areas of France back to the French Crown and agreed that he would hold what he kept in homage to the King of France.

All seemed settled. Edward I succeeded his father, Henry III, and married the sister of the French King. He also married his son to Isabelle, the daughter of the King. This son came to the throne in 1307 and reigned as Edward II. From his marriage with Isabelle of France he had, in 1312, a son who became King of England in 1327. The next year the French King, Charles IV, the third king France had had in fourteen years, died, leaving no son. Edward at once claimed the throne of France through his mother, Isabelle, the sister of Charles. The French would have none of this and invoked the Salic Law, by which no woman could succeed to the throne of France. Edward argued that this law did not prevent his mother from transmitting the right of succession to him. But the French took Philip of Valois, the nephew of an earlier king, as their monarch, and Edward did homage to him, since Guyenne, the French province, still belonged to England. Then, however, Philip foolishly helped the Scots in another of the brawls that broke out between them and the English.

Even more important, France began to interfere in the affairs of Flanders. Wool was England's most important product. Nearly all of it was sold to Flanders and woven into cloth there. This trade was the keystone of England's economics. If Flanders were ever controlled by a hostile France, this trade would end and England's greatest industry would die. The Flemings themselves eagerly urged Edward to press his claim to the French throne. So, in spite of having paid homage to Philip, Edward decided to renew his claim and fight to establish it.

Thus began the Hundred Years' War. It opened in 1338 and ended in 1453. It was a most foolish and unnecessary war. France was reduced to extreme misery, and England was left with Calais as her only possession in France. But it was not a struggle that ended inconclusively. It established France and freed England from too intense a preoccupation with the mainland of Europe. Both these things could have been accomplished without such slaughter, and England must take most of the blame for this century of bloodshed.

Fortunately we need not begin to follow the fortunes of this war until it enters its closing phase. There were many skirmishes, many sieges, and many battles. There were truces and treaties, an occasional year or two of uneasy peace, acts of treachery and heroism—in fact, all the chaos and confusion, the material and spiritual jumble of any war.

Matters began to move slowly to their climax after Agincourt, and in 1420 there was signed the Treaty of Troyes. There were three parties to it: England, France, and the Duchy of Burgundy. (Burgundy, though legally a fief of France, was in fact an independent and powerful state and an ally of England.) By this treaty, Henry V of England assumed the title of Regent of France and heir to its throne. He was to marry Catherine, the daughter of the King of France, Charles VI, and succeed to the throne on the death of Charles. The treaty went on to exclude from the succession the son of Charles VI, the seventeen-year-old Charles, the Dauphin. Henry married Catherine. He had a son by her and then, in 1422, he died. Two months later Charles VI of France died. So the political situation was suddenly and disastrously altered, as the new King of England, Henry VI, was a baby of nine months. By the Treaty of Troyes, he was also King of France.

The Dauphin, now nineteen, was the true King of France by right of inheritance, but the Treaty of Troyes had dispossessed him. Yet half France accepted him as King; the other half, led by Philip, Duke of Burgundy, was determined that he should never reign. The Duke of Bedford, uncle of the infant Henry VI, governed as Regent that part of France held by the English. The Dauphin kept himself south of the river Loire. It is highly probable that if Henry V had lived until his son reached manhood, the whole of France would have accepted this son as the legitimate King, for he was, after all, half a Valois. That, however, is one of the innumerable "ifs" of history. As it was, France was as divided territorially, politically, and emotionally as she was during the Vichy regime of the last war.

In the northeast of the country was the hamlet of Domrémy. Half of it was in France, half in the Duchy of Bar, a duchy supporting the Anglo-Burgundian cause. The hamlet stood on the left bank of the river Meuse. The crest of the slope rising from the opposite bank marked the boundary of the Duchy of Lorraine. In Domrémy lived a small farmer named Jacques or Jacquot d'Arc, a native of Champagne. He was married to Isabelle Romée, who came from a village a mile or two north of Domrémy. Their neighbors considered them "good and pious Catholics and good farmers, of good reputation and an honest way of life, but not very well off." The couple, it is true, were far from rich, but by the standards of the neighborhood they were not poverty-stricken. They had a house, a garden, some livestock, and were rudely fed and roughly clothed. As far as their physical conditions of life were concerned, we should consider they lived a brutish and squalid existence. Their house was small, dark, and damp with an earthen floor; chickens wandered in and out and rushlights or a smoky fire gave the only light at night. Close by the door was a great dungheap. The food was coarse, with meat only on the great feast days. They washed rarely and were lousy. But we need not pity them for all this. No one has ever been made any happier by bathtubs and fluorescent lighting.

On January 6,1412, a daughter was born to them. They already had two boys and a girl, and a third boy was to be born later. This second daughter, born on the feast of the Epiphany, was baptized in the church of St. Rémy near her father's house. She was named Jeanette. After she had left Domrémy for good, she was always called Jeanne. The English-speaking world calls her Joan. She grew up without ever going to school and could neither read nor write. Later she learned to trace her name and signed the letters she dictated. Her mother taught her the Our Father, the Credo, and the Ave Maria and she heard many stories about the saints. When she grew older she began to work, helping with the spinning and cooking and going with her father and brothers to the fields and weeding and digging there. She also took turns at tending the cattle the villagers turned loose to graze in the river meadows. One of her friends said of her: "She was brought up as a good Christian and was a model of good behavior. She gave alms for any money her father could spare her. She liked going to church and went a good deal. She went gladly to confession, and I often used to see her kneeling before the priest. We were always telling her that she was too pious. She was a hard worker and did every kind of job about the house, and she was always spinning." Another friend declared: "Joan was good and sweet. She was often embarrassed by what people used to say about the number of times she went to church." It must not be thought from this testimony that she was a little prig. Devout and good she certainly was. She was also very gay and lively. She ran races with the other village girls and took part in all the village festivals.

Near the village was a great beech tree known as L'Arbre des Dames, or "the Ladies' Tree." Report had it that in the olden days fairies used to visit it and spend the night dancing around its massive trunk. In the neighborhood there were also wells and streams said to be the haunts of the fairies. On Rogation Sunday, the whole village, led by the priest, used to go in procession to these streams and wells and to the Ladies' Tree, and the priest read extracts from St. John's Gospel at each halting place, as this Gospel was considered particularly efficacious in banishing every kind of spirit. On Laetare Sunday, the fourth Sunday in Lent, the young people used to visit the tree and dance under it and picnic there. They gathered wild flowers, made garlands of them, and hung them on the tree. They paid similar visits on the great feast days later in the year. Joan went with them and "behaved just like the others," according to one of her godfathers. But her visits to the tree were not so frequent as those she made to a little chapel in the woods about a couple of miles from her home. It was dedicated to Our Lady of Bermont and had a statue of Our Lady and the Child Jesus which was credited with miraculous powers. She went there regularly, either alone or with Catherine, her elder sister.

But her days were not an uninterrupted business of work, prayer, and games. Domrémy and the Surrounding district were not exempt from the horrors which were sweeping France. Everyone lived in a state of alarm, and day and night one of the villagers kept watch from the church tower, ready to ring the bells the moment he caught sight of any troops. Joan's father, acting for all the villagers, had rented an abandoned castle on an island in the Meuse, and on more than one occasion all the villagers and their cattle fled to this stronghold and stayed there until a band of marauding soldiers had passed through Domrémy, looting it as they went. Once a knight and his followers descended on the village before the alarm could be given. They stripped the houses of their wretched furniture and drove off all the cattle. Joan was thirteen when that happened. The husband of one of her godmothers was carried off in another affray and had to be ransomed. The husband of a cousin was killed. They were not regular armies which caused such distress, but bands of armed ruffians who gave only a nominal allegiance to the two great warring parties. They spent their time looking for ill-defended villages to plunder, and what they could not carry off they usually burned. In 1428, the church at Domrémy was burned to the ground and the crops in the fields destroyed. So Joan grew up in the midst of violence. She never, because of her station, knew a comfortable life; because of her country's plight, she never knew a peaceful one.

In the summer of 1424—the actual month and day are unknown—all was changed for Joan. And the history of Europe was changed.

Joan was twelve when she experienced the key event of her life. She herself has told what happened: "I was in my thirteenth year when a voice from God came to help and guide me. At first I was very frightened. This voice came about noon in summer when I was in my father's garden. I had not fasted the day before. I heard the voice coming from my right from the direction of the church. I rarely hear it without seeing a light, and the light—always very bright—comes from the same side as the voice."

This statement is an irritating one. It leaves so much unsaid and we, more than five hundred years later, want to know every detail of this first hearing of her guiding voice. But, although she disappoints us here, she makes amends later when she is on trial for her life. Then, in answer to the questions of the prosecution, she gives, as fully as she can, an account of these visitations. Here is a summary of her account, assembled from her replies.

At first the voices urged her to be good and go to church. It was at this first hearing that she vowed to remain a virgin as long as it should please God. The third time she heard the voice she knew it was that of the archangel Michael and she saw him accompanied by many angels. She saw them with her bodily eyes. When they left, she wept and wished they had taken her with them. Later St. Catherine and St. Margaret habitually appeared. They addressed her as Joan the Maid, daughter of God—Jeanne la Pucelle, fille de Dieu. They wore beautiful crowns. St. Michael forewarned her that they would appear to her, and told her she must follow their counsel and that she must believe all they said, as they were speaking for God. She did not know if their hair was long, nor whether they bad arms or legs or, indeed, any human, physical features. When asked the foolish question: "How could they speak if they had no mouths?" she said, "I leave that to God." She was also asked if St. Michael was naked. She replied, "Do you think God has not the means to clothe him?" She touched St. Catherine and St. Margaret. They had a fragrant smell. The voices came to her usually when the church bells were rung. The sexton sometimes forgot to ring them punctually and she gave him little cakes she had baked herself to bribe him into strict regularity. As time went on, the voices ceased to give her general exhortations to lead a virtuous life and issued orders for precise action: "Daughter of God, you must leave this village and depart into France. You must lead the Dauphin to Rheims, where he may be rightfully crowned." She was also told that she would raise the siege of Orléans and that, through her, Charles would rule over the whole of France. If we believe her, at the time she was told about Orléans the town was not under attack, nor did it seem likely that it would be. But she did not disclose anything about Orléans until it was besieged, so we should not make too much of this apparent foreknowledge.

Here we have got to decide whether or not we believe in these voices. The Church lays no compulsion on us in this matter. Joan of Arc was canonized for the heroic sanctity of her life. Her voices were not mentioned during the examination of the career that led to her being raised to the altars. So we are free to accept the voices as Joan accepted them—real voices, the voices of an archangel and two saints, with their words inspired by God—or treat them as auditory hallucinations. Yet, even though we are free to choose, or rather, because we are free, we cannot, I think, maintain an attitude of detached neutrality. Our intelligence will nag away at us until we make up our minds either for or against.

Let us first of all see why Joan should say she saw those particular three—St. Michael, St. Catherine, and St. Margaret. We must try to understand the medieval mind. To that mind, angels were not theological abstractions. An angel was—as indeed he is—a created being of supernatural power, charged by God with duties toward the members of the human race. That we should believe and no doubt do, but I should be surprised if, to many of us, angels play as real a part in life as they did to the men and women of the Middle Ages. To them, angels were almost tangible presences. They were always at hand, ready and eager to help all who called on them, and they had the power to do so. And the archangel Michael was the greatest of them all, the prince of the heavenly hosts. Holy Scripture calls him the "guardian angel of the people of God," and the Fathers are unanimous in hailing him as the protector of the Church, whi...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Copyright Page
• CONTENTS
• 1. The Girl
• 2. She Sets Out
• 3. The King
• 4. The Victory
• 5. The Capture
• 6. The Trial and the Fire
• 7. The Vindication
• 8. The Saint