Poitiers

They sent her to Poitiers because Poitiers was where the Parlement of the Valois kingdom sat, and where a cluster of masters could be assembled who were not the University of Paris. Paris, in English hands, would later judge her. In March 1429 she was judged by the other France. She lodged at the house of Master Jean Rabateau, advocate of the Parlement. For three weeks, more or less, they questioned her.1

The record is lost. That loss is the most serious hole in the 1429 documentation. We have what the examiners concluded, as it was later cited; we have witnesses from the room, notably Brother Seguin of the Order of Preachers, who remembered her with a mixture of professional caution and unwilling amusement; and we have the fact that she was not sent home. From these a historian can recover the shape of the test, not the transcript.2

They asked her, among other things, why they should believe her. She said they should lead her to Orléans. Seguin, who spoke with a Limousin accent, asked her in what tongue her voices spoke. She said, better than his. It is the only joke she is securely allowed in this volume, and it is a theological joke: the saints spoke French, and they spoke it more cleanly than a learned friar. They asked for a sign. She refused to produce one on command. The sign was the city.3

What they found

A statement of the Poitiers conclusions survives in later quotation. The masters found no evil in her. They found her a good Christian and a virgin — the matrons’ examination belongs here as well as later — and they advised the king that he ought not to prevent her from going to Orléans with a given escort, because to reject her without cause would be to resist the Holy Spirit, should her mission be of God. The proof was to be in the event. This is not canonization. It is the discretio spirituum of 1429, written as policy.4

Jacques Gelu, Archbishop of Embrun, wrote a treatise in the same weeks or shortly after: take care, test, and if no evil, use her. Jean Gerson, from Lyon, dying that year, wrote a short piece on the Maid of Orléans that allowed, with scholastic caution, that God might save France by a woman. The learned debate was not unanimous and was not naive. It was the Church of the Valois obedience doing its job in a panic.5

Joan submitted to this. The same girl who would not give Cauchon her secret gave Poitiers her person. The difference is not small. She distinguished, all her life, between the Church that examined her in order to let her obey God, and the Church that examined her in order to deliver her to the English. A Catholic reading that erases that distinction in the name of a flat obedience does not do her justice, and does not do justice to 1456, when the Church itself said Rouen had been a false process.

The letter of 22 March

On Tuesday of Holy Week, 22 March 1429, she dictated a letter to the King of England, to Bedford, and to the captains before Orléans. Copies survive in several traditions, including the Journal du siège and the Rouen instrument. At her trial she confirmed the substance and denied some phrases as the clerk’s. She said, in particular, that “hand over to the Maid” should have been “hand over to the king,” and she distanced herself from corps pour corps and from the title chef de guerre as written. The voice is still hers.6

King of England, and you, Duke of Bedford, who call yourself regent of the kingdom of France; you, William de la Pole, Earl of Suffolk; John, Lord of Talbot; and you, Thomas, Lord Scales, who call yourselves lieutenants of the said duke of Bedford, do right by the King of Heaven. Surrender to the Maid who is sent here by God, the King of Heaven, the keys of all the good towns which you have taken and violated in France. She is come here by God’s will to reclaim the blood royal. She is very ready to make peace, if you are willing to grant her satisfaction by abandoning France and paying for what you have held. And you, archers, men-at-war, gentlemen and others who are before the town of Orléans, go away into your own country, in God’s name. And if you do not do so, expect tidings from the Maid, who will come to see you shortly, to your very great harm.

This is not a saint’s mildness. It is a declaration of war under a heavenly commission, offering peace on the condition of restitution. Medieval letters of defiance did that. Hers names the King of Heaven as her principal and Charles as the true heir. It also names the men she will meet in the field: Suffolk, Talbot, Scales, Bedford. She had not yet seen their faces.

From Poitiers she was sent back toward Chinon and then to Tours, to be armed. The theologians had not given her an army. They had given the king permission to let God, if God were in this, do what the girl said God would do. The next sign was not a document. It was a city on the Loire that had been waiting since October.