Hundred Years War

The war began in a legal argument. When the direct Capetian line failed, the French magnates passed over Edward III of England, whose claim came through his mother, in favour of Philip of Valois, and in 1337 Edward answered by claiming the French crown outright. What followed was less a war than a century of intermittent campaigns, punctuated by the English victories at Crecy in 1346, Poitiers in 1356 and Agincourt in 1415, by long truces, and by the plague that killed more people than the fighting ever did.

The church was inside the quarrel from the start. The popes had moved to Avignon in 1309 and sat, for the whole first phase of the war, in a city on the edge of the French sphere, so English opinion treated papal mediation as French diplomacy under another name and the parliament of the 1350s legislated against papal appointments and appeals. When the Western Schism opened in 1378 the obediences fell out along the war's lines, France and its allies for Avignon, England and its allies for Rome, and Christendom spent forty years with two and then three claimants to Peter's chair while the armies moved below.

Both crowns dressed the fighting in holy language, each side's preachers assuring it that God favoured its cause, and Jonathan Sumption's narrative history traces how thoroughly the machinery of religion, from sermons to processions to the taxation of the clergy, was harnessed to the war effort in both kingdoms.

In 1429 a peasant girl from Domremy in eastern France presented herself to the disinherited dauphin and said that voices, which she named as Michael, Catherine and Margaret, had sent her to raise the siege of Orleans and see him crowned. Both happened within months: Orleans was relieved in May and Charles VII was anointed at Reims in July, in the cathedral where French kings received the holy ampulla. Joan was captured at Compiegne in 1430, sold to the English, and tried at Rouen in 1431 by a court of French churchmen under Bishop Pierre Cauchon, on charges that centred on her voices, her refusal to submit their judgement to the church, and her wearing of male clothing. She was burned in the market square on 30 May 1431, nineteen years old.

The record of that trial, and of the nullification proceedings that Charles VII's government and Joan's family obtained in 1456, survives in unusual fullness, and Regine Pernoud built her account of Joan directly from the two sets of testimony. The 1456 court annulled the verdict and named the trial fraudulent.

Her afterlife outran the war. She became a figure of French national feeling in the nineteenth century, was beatified in 1909 and canonised in 1920, and is now a patron saint of France, claimed simultaneously as a saint, a national symbol and a case study in how a religious tribunal could be used as an instrument of war.