The Hundred Years War — Why Joan of Arc's Trial Reveals More Than Her Victories

The Hundred Years War is a misleading name. The conflict between England and France that historians conventionally date from 1337 to 1453 was not a continuous war but a series of campaigns separated by truces, punctuated by dynastic shifts, and complicated by internal French politics that make a simple England-versus-France framing inadequate. What it was, unambiguously, was one of the formative crucibles of both French and English national identity — and at its hinge moment, in 1429, stood a nineteen-year-old girl from Domremy who claimed to hear the voices of saints.

## The Dynastic Dispute

The war's origins lay in the tangled succession of the French throne. When Charles IV of France died in 1328 without a male heir, two claimants emerged: Philip of Valois (who became Philip VI) and Edward III of England, whose claim derived through his mother Isabella, the daughter of Philip IV. French law was interpreted to exclude the maternal line, and Philip VI took the throne. Edward initially accepted this, but the relationship deteriorated. In 1337, Philip confiscated the English-held Duchy of Gascony; Edward responded by renewing his claim to the French crown. The fighting that followed would, with interruptions, last more than a century.

## Crecy, Poitiers, Agincourt: The English Military Supremacy

The early phases of the war produced a series of humiliating French defeats. At Crecy in 1346, Edward III's longbowmen destroyed a French cavalry charge that outnumbered the English force significantly. At Poitiers in 1356, the Black Prince — Edward's son — captured the French king John II and held him for ransom. At Agincourt in 1415, Henry V, with an exhausted and disease-ridden army, defeated a French force perhaps three to five times larger, killing much of the French nobility in a single afternoon.

These victories had a military explanation: the English longbow, when deployed by trained archers in disciplined formations on defensible ground, was devastatingly effective against armoured cavalry. But they also had a political consequence. By the Treaty of Troyes in 1420, Henry V married the French princess Catherine and was recognised as heir to the French throne. France appeared to be on the verge of absorption.

## The Dauphin's Desperate Position in 1429

Henry V died in 1422, as did Charles VI of France weeks later. The infant Henry VI became, in English eyes, King of France and England. The Dauphin — the future Charles VII — controlled only the south and centre of France. Paris was in English hands. Most of northern France was under English or Burgundian control (the Duchy of Burgundy had allied with England after the assassination of Duke John the Fearless in 1419). Orleans, a city on the Loire River whose fall would have opened the path to the Dauphin's remaining territories, was under English siege by October 1428.

It was in this context that Joan of Arc arrived at Chinon in February 1429 and asked to be taken to the Dauphin. She was seventeen years old. She claimed that saints — Michael, Catherine, and Margaret — had commanded her to drive the English from France and see the Dauphin crowned at Reims. The Dauphin, desperate enough to consider almost anything, eventually gave her what she requested: a small army and the chance to relieve Orleans.

## Military Role Versus Symbolic Function

Historians have argued about whether Joan of Arc was a military genius or primarily a symbol. The debate somewhat misses the point — both were true, and the symbolic function was the military function. The siege of Orleans was lifted in nine days after Joan's arrival in late April 1429. She was wounded in the shoulder by an arrow during the assault on the fortress of Les Tourelles but reportedly continued fighting. The speed of the campaign's success was remarkable, and Joan was present at the key moments, riding under her distinctive white banner.

But the larger significance of Joan's intervention was psychological and dynastic. She transformed the Dauphin from an uninspired and legitimacy-challenged claimant into the Lord's anointed. The march to Reims and the coronation of Charles VII in July 1429, in the cathedral where French kings had been crowned since Clovis, was not merely ceremony. It cut the ideological ground from under the English claim. Whatever treaty rights Henry VI possessed, Charles VII now had the consecration that French political culture required of its kings.

## The Inquisition Trial and What It Reveals

Joan's capture by Burgundian forces in May 1430 and her subsequent trial are, paradoxically, the richest primary source we have about her. The trial transcripts — the Procès de condamnation — run to hundreds of pages of testimony. They reveal, among other things, a young woman of remarkable composure and intelligence under sustained hostile interrogation.

The trial was judicial theatre. Its conclusion was predetermined. Joan was tried for heresy and witchcraft, charges selected because they could be used to discredit the king she had crowned — if Joan's voices were demonic rather than divine, then Charles VII's coronation had been tainted by sorcery. She was burned at the stake in Rouen on 30 May 1431.

The transcript reveals her specific answers on clothing (she wore men's clothes as a practical military necessity, she said), on her voices (she described them with consistent detail across multiple sessions), and on the authority of the Church (she submitted to the Church, she said, but not if it contradicted God's commands). These answers are the answers of someone who understood exactly what trap was being set and navigated it as carefully as the circumstances allowed.

## The Rehabilitation Trial and Long-Term Legacy

Twenty-five years after her execution, in 1456, Pope Calixtus III authorised a rehabilitation trial that formally overturned the verdict. The trial interviewed dozens of witnesses who had known Joan — her childhood neighbours from Domremy, soldiers who had fought alongside her, clerics who had observed the original proceedings. It declared the 1431 trial null and void on procedural grounds.

The rehabilitation was not merely piety. Charles VII, who had done nothing to ransom or rescue Joan during her captivity and trial, now had a political interest in ensuring that his coronation was not permanently stained. The reversal of the verdict served the French monarchy's narrative of legitimate kingship.

Joan was beatified in 1909 and canonised in 1920. By then she had been claimed by French republicans, French royalists, French nationalists of every stripe, and the Catholic Church — a flexibility that tells us less about Joan than about the century's worth of need to possess her.

What the trial transcripts actually reveal is more interesting than any mythology. They show a specific individual — confident, theologically literate, strategically intelligent — navigating an institutional mechanism designed to destroy her. That she failed to escape it does not diminish what the transcripts record. That France emerged from the Hundred Years War with a sense of national identity distinct from England, grounded in the memory of a peasant girl who had seen its king crowned, is a historical fact that no amount of later myth-making entirely distorts.

The Hundred Years War — Why Joan of Arc's Trial Reveals More Than Her Victories

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