Joan of Arc Pt 2: Reims and Rouen
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‘Coronation of Charles VII in Reims in the presence of Joan of Arc’ by E.-Lenepveu
Part two of three episodes in honour of the Winter Solstice, exploring faith and the story of Joan of Arc. In this episode we pick up the story part two of the story of Joan of Arc, as written and told by Kate Lawrence as part of her oral storytelling show ‘Fantastic Feminist Folktales’.
References:
Transcripts:
Word: Ep 8 Joan of Arc Pt 2
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Transcript for the podcast Tide to the Moon
Episode 8: Joan of Arc - Pt 2 Reims and Rouen
MUSIC
Welcome to Tide to the Moon, a podcast about yearning and learning to live with the rhythms of nature. I’m Kate Lawrence and I am your host.
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This is episode two in a special three part series for the Winter Solstice here in the southern hemisphere and summer if you are listening in the northern hemisphere.
The series is focussed on the story of Joan of Arc. In the last episode I gave some background as to how I came to perform this story and we heard part one of the Story of Joan of Arc, and now in this episodes we’ll hear the rest of the story.
Or if you’re listening to this after 21 June 2022, you can listen to the whole story in one play in the bonus episode published on the Winter Solstice
But whatever the case, here is a praisee of where we are up to in Joan’s story.
Joan begins hearing voices from God at the age of 13 and by the time she’s 17, Joans’ voices are insistent that she lead Charles to be crowned King and the army to rid France of the English, because at this time the English are pushing hard with their plans to conquer France and they have the town of Orleans surrounded,
Joan goes to the nearby Armagnac town, near where she lives, and manages to get support to make the 500km trek across the enemy country to the royal court of Charles, seen by the Armagnacs as the rightful King of France. She makes the journey safely to the Royal Court, but Charles is unsure whether to trust her, so he sends her to be questioned by the religious clerics in Poitiers. They decide she might be legit but they want a sign from God to be sure. So they set her the task of leading the army to free the town of Orleans.
In great drama and style Joan does just that, and we pick up the story after the siege is over and the English have retreated.
MUSIC
Joan returns to the Royal court of Chinon a hero.
But she's not finished. She has a mission to rid the whole of France of the English, and see the Dauphin crowned the rightful King in Reims.
Reims is a town 400 km north from Chinon, in the middle of enemy territory.
And it is at the cathedral of Reims where every king of France since Clovis the first King of the Francs, has been crowned and annointed with the sacred oil.
And so Joan starts to persuade Charles to go on this journey with her, but he is as averse to risk danger and Joan is ready for it.
‘Mmm, I’m not so sure about this, it’s a bit risky isn’t it…. Why don’t we just wait until we win the war, or, I don’t know, there is an agreement made and I can go protected…’
But he is also deeply insecure about his position and he desperately wants to be given the legitimacy of being crowned.
So eventually, Joan with her vision and her persuasion convinces him and they set off on this 400 km journey.
And town after town after town after town, open their gates to Joan the Maid and her vision to see the Dauphin crowned the rightful king of France.
So they get to Reims and its a small affair, but the archbishop of Reims annoints Charles with the sacred oil and Joan stands beside him with her banner tall, and he is crowned King.
At this height in Joan's favour with the king, the King declares that Domremy, Joan's home village, will be exempt from taxes in perpetuity. And so for 350 years the people of Domremy don’t pay tax until the French Revolution.
But the King is still the dilly dallying, risk averse diplomat that he always was and he heads back Chinon, even though Joan wants to fight. She wants to rid France of the English, that’s her God given mission, that is the direction from her voices.
But she has to obey her King and go back with him
But she is vocal about her frustrations, very vocal, and she’s becoming a problem that won’t quietly go away, and she borders on usurping royal power. So they send her out to this squirmish and after that renegade and to deal with this mercenary to keep her occupied. And finally she was sent to Compiègne. Compeigne in an Armagnac town under attack from the Burgundians. She knows what to do, it's like Orleans, charge in and God will deliver!
But this time, she is surrounded. And they press in, there is no way to escape, and she is yanked off her horse hard onto the ground. They stand over her and whoop with triumph.
As a knight should, Joan immediately surrenders herself to the nearest Burgundian captain.
And then The English run their hands with glee,
“At last we have caught Armagnac whore, and that means that God is not the side of the Armagnacs, but is on the side of the English and the Burgundians!
And we will prove she is a witch and a heretic and that will prove that Charles is not the rightful king of France at all.”
The Armagnacs, for their part, decide that the very fact that Charles has been crowned King at Reims and anointed with the sacred oil is proof positive that he is the rightful king of France.And nothing that Joan did or didn't do, and nothing the English prove or don’t prove alters that fact.
Charles the VII did not once, then or ever offer a ransom or enter into any negotiations for the release of the woman who turned the tide of war against the English and saw him crowned King.
So the English then set out to conduct the most meticulous and rigorous trial that the Middle Ages would see. They were going to leave no stone unturned to make sure that everything is strictly lawful in the trial, and they will prove without a shadow of a doubt that this woman is a witch and a heretic.
It takes them 8 months to bring the trial to a public hearing and then Joan of Arc 19, illiterate, faces public interrogation by between 40 and 70 men
Most are double her age. All are vastly more powerful and educated- they are - lawyers, theologians, judges, clerics. She might be illiterate, but she's deeply grounded in her faith and articulate. In 6 long sessions, stretched out over 2 weeks, they don’t what they want from her.
And so they adjourn and decide they'll continue the hearings in her prison cell. Naturally they can't fit 70 men in there, but they can cram about a dozen of them into that dark dank cold cell, where she's shackled hand and foot.
And there, soft and hard, cajoling and menacing, they duck and weave and trip and trick
try to break her resolve like hounds fox with the scent of fox in their nostrils, they barrage her. And finally she gives them something that they seize upon. She talks of an angel walking upstairs with a crown for the king. And they all know, all those lawyers and bishops know that visions from God are ethereal. They don't walk upstairs and they don't carry things. Vision like that are the work of the devil. But they want more. They want Joan to submit to the church. And so they leave her languishing for another two weeks.
They come back and by this stage she's sick, she's been in prison for ten months. Two months under intense interrogation. She's comforted by the voices of St. Catherine and St. Margaret. But she’s said way more than she ever wanted to about her vision, the voices and her relationship with God.
They leave again and come back another two weeks later and take her out to a room full of implements of torture: Jagged metal teeth, Beds of barbs, Racks and screws. And she says: Truly if you were to tear me limb from limb, if you were to separate my soul from my body I would tell you no more.
They leave, but although her words are defiant, like a leaking tap, a drip is seeping through her heart.
The next time they come they take her to a scaffold over the graves in the cemetery of Rouen and there is the executioner and a sea of men who berate and cajole, to convince and persuade her. And finally the bishop says:
You leave the church no choice, but to abandon you to the secular power to be burned at the stake in the purifying fires!
And a wave of terror steels through her she speaks: I submit, I wish to obey the church and her judges.
They take her back to her cell. She bows her head, they shave her hair, and give her women's clothes.
But three days later, the judges are called back and when they come she's agitated, she's distressed. But they see none of that. All they see is that she's back in men's clothes.
And she says: It is only right and proper that I wear men's clothes if I am to live among men! And what of the promise that I would have mass, and I would be removed from these shackles. I would rather die than live in irons.
Bishop: Have you heard the voices of St. Catherine and St. Margaret?
Joan: Yes.
Bishop: And what did they say?
Joan: They said I have done a great evil, that I have dammed myself to save my life.
She was declared a relapsed heretic and sentenced to burn at the stake.
The next day, as she had been wanting to for so long, Brother Martin came and heard her confession. And he administered the Sacrament of the Eucharist.
And then they put a tall white hat on her shaved head, that said Relapsed heretic, apostate, adulter.
They put her in a cart and they jerked her through the streets of Rouen to the pyre and the marketplace. And there she endured more lectures.
Bishop: You Joan the Maid have fallen. You have returned to your sin like a dog to its vomit. Hardened heretics must be separated less the pernicious vipers lodge in the bosom of the holy mother church.
The English soldiers lifted her slender body to the stake. And they tied her to it.
And then they moved back and the executioner lit the pyre. And Joan’s eyes fixed on the crucifix that someone held high in the crowd for her. And her lips moved in ceaseless prayer.
Jesus Mary of God.
Jesus Mary mother of God.
Jesus Mary mother of God.
Jesus! Jesus! Jesus! Jesus!
They say her head slumped in unconsciousness before the flames reached her.
And then once the flames had died down, the executioner raked back the fire so that all could see and satisfy themselves that she was a woman.
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Joan of Arc's public life was for two years, the first year she was a soldier. The second year she was a prisoner.
Her courage, her faith and vision in the face of unfathomable differences in power: in gender, rank, education and age, will always be extraordinary and inspiring.The power of her imagination enabled her to envision a France that wasn’t in living memory. A France free of the invading English. And she saw clearly the means and the need to have the Dauphin crowned the rightful king of France.
Her youthful, impetuous, abstinent, glorious life draws for me a desire to honour and support the willful visionary compelling young women of today.
Unlike them Joan did not have the luxury of time and of maturing.
Her sins cascaded around her. She her heard voices. She fought like a soldier. She dressed like a man. She cowed before no one. But most heinous of all she refused to submit to the church. And claimed for herself direct communication with God. A particularly Pagan view of the divine.
The Roman Catholic Church spent the next 400 years with trials and torture, persecution and murder, mostly directed at women. To make sure that no one else claimed a direct line to God.
And the legacy of that violence, over all those years is with us still today. But so too is the legacy of Joan of Arc.
MUSICNext episode of Tide to the Moon will complete the Joan of Arc trilogy with how I went about crafting this story as an oral story, and how I make sense of Joan’s story for my own life.
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Theme music by Danya from Audio Jungle.
This podcast is a production of Story Ground, and me, Kate Lawrence and is made on the traditional lands of the Gunum Willam Balluk,
at the foot of Mt Macedon, 65 km north west of Melbourne, Australia.
