The Ballad and Its Copyist
Eight stanzas of it survive, on three leaves at the back of a notary’s formulary from Rouen — a working book of legal precedents, the sort a clerk kept spare quires in and filled with whatever he wanted to keep. The ballad runs from folio 24 recto to folio 26 verso in one upright hand, ruled in lead, the stanza initials touched in red and nothing else decorated at all. At the foot of the last leaf the same hand has written Escript par moy G. Souef and a year that reads 1487 or 1489 depending on how badly you want the second figure to be an eight. Either way the copyist is working about a mile from the Vieux-Marché, fifty-odd years after the fire, in the town that lit it.
What he copied out is a shop. Not a forge and not an armoury: a shop, with a name over it — La Maison de Jeanne — where noblewomen were fitted for gowns that would turn a blade and knights came in for something with more line to it. Nothing supports this. Joan of Arc was born at Domrémy about 1412, left it at seventeen and was dead at nineteen, and the two years in between are among the best-attested of any life in her century. There is no shop in them.
The thing is worth printing anyway, because of all the trades a fifteenth-century balladeer had to choose from, he handed her the clothing trade. That is the one the court at Rouen convicted her of.
We are unusually well placed to check him. The trial of 1431 was taken down by three notaries working independently, in Middle French, and turned into Latin about four years afterwards; five copies were made and three still exist. Jules Quicherat printed the whole of it, condemnation and rehabilitation together, in five volumes from 1841, and the first is free to read. A farmer’s daughter from the Meuse has a heavier paper trail than most of the men who sat in judgement on her.
The Ballad of La Maison de Jeanne
Printed as the copybook has it, with the metre tidied where a line will not scan — except in the seventh, which is left exactly as he wrote it — and nothing else touched. The stanza breaks are his. Note the seventh: it is the only one that stops singing, and the only one in which nothing is invented.
In Orléans fair, where the battles did rage,
A maiden emerged, both warrior and sage.
And Joan of Arc, in her harness of white,
Brought a new dawn from the darkness of night.
The relief of Orléans, 29 April to 8 May 1429. She took a longbow arrow between the neck and the left shoulder at the Tourelles on 7 May and was back on the field before the fort fell that evening.
Yet tales oft untold, beyond spear and sword,
Speak of her craft in the trade she adored.
“La Maison de Jeanne,” her boutique of dreams,
Where armour met fashion in shimmering seams.
The premises, as the ballad has them. The nearest thing to a documented transaction in Joan's life runs the other way: a suit of plate armour ordered from a master armourer at Tours and paid for by the crown.
Chain mail and silk in a harmony fused,
Leather with lace that none could refuse,
Helmets adorned with a plume of bright hue,
A weave of the bold and the beautiful, too.
Mail, silk, leather, plume. Mail can be lined with silk; it cannot be fused to it. A complete harness of well-tempered steel ran fifteen to twenty-five kilograms, spread evenly enough over the body that the wearer could run and jump in it.
Then noblewomen came, seeking her art,
For gowns that could shield both body and heart.
And knights too admired her delicate skill,
For elegance paired with the strength of their will.
Every tall veiled cap in this plate is a hennin, which does not appear before about 1430 and is common only after mid-century. In 1428 a Carmelite friar was running a street campaign against it.
Each piece was bespoke, with care wrought and spun,
A tally of all that her courage had won.
In battle or court, her garments proclaimed
The power and grace her legend had named.
Bespoke, as the ballad insists. What the accounts actually record is one hundred livres tournois paid out for one complete harness in April 1429 — twenty sous to the livre, twelve deniers to the sou.
Her shop was a haven where strength met grace,
In every garment, her spirit had place.
And bold were the women who wore her design,
For Joan’s legacy, both fierce and divine.
Half-armour over a skirt is the ballad's compromise and nobody's practice. A Scottish statute of 1429 set out who might wear silk and marten at all, and made a metalsmith who broke it liable to death and forfeiture of goods.
At Rouen the charge was not the war she had won,
Nor the voices she kept, but the clothes she had on.
She abjured, and resumed, and resuming, they say,
Was relapse. And they burned her the thirtieth of May.
The Vieux-Marché at Rouen, 30 May 1431. She was about nineteen. Twenty-five years later a tribunal sitting at Notre-Dame heard 115 witnesses and struck the sentence out.
And so, in the annals where legends reside,
Let the ballad of Joan and her fashion abide.
A blend of the might and the beauty she wore,
A tale of a warrior, remembered evermore.
Beatified 18 April 1909, canonised 16 May 1920 — four hundred and sixty-four years after the annulment. The needle at her belt is the copyist's own contribution and appears in no other image of her.
The Stock a Shop Like That Would Carry
The premises are furnished out of the wrong decade. Every woman the ballad puts through the door has a hennin on — the tall cone with the veil floating off the point, the thing anybody draws when asked to draw a medieval lady. It arrives about 1430 and is not common until after the middle of the century, so at the date of the shop it is either brand new or not yet a hat. Recorded heights run from eleven to eighteen inches, with survivals above two feet five. And in 1428, the year the English sat down in front of Orléans, a Carmelite friar named Thomas Conecte was going through the towns preaching against it, setting street boys to chase women down the road shouting Au hennin! and offering an indulgence to anyone who knocked one off. The ballad’s most fashionable line of stock was, in its own decade, the target of an organised campaign.
What she would actually have had on the shelf is duller and much heavier. The houppelande, a full high-collared robe with flaring sleeves, floor-length on a woman and belted under the bust. For a man, a shirt, a close doublet and hose laced to it, frequently parti-coloured with a different colour to each leg. Long-toed poulaines, which in France had been banned outright rather than merely taxed. Figured silk over the top of all of it, for those permitted figured silk. The best surviving picture of the clientele is the calendar of the Très Riches Heures, 206 leaves and 131 miniatures now at Chantilly; its Limbourg brothers were all dead by 1416, more than a decade before the first hennin.
The qualifier on the silk is the business problem. Selling what you liked to whoever could pay was not a trade in the fifteenth century; it was an offence. Dress was statutory. A Scottish act of 1429 — the year of Orléans — set out silk, pine marten and beech marten by rank, forbade a commoner’s wife the long-tailed hood, and made a metalsmith who broke the rule liable to death and forfeiture of goods. England’s first comprehensive act came in April 1463, and the Act of Apparel of January 1483 reserved cloth of gold, sable, ermine and velvet upon velvet to knights and lords, letting damask and satin down as far as a yeoman on forty pounds a year. A boutique that fitted a mercer’s wife the way it fitted a duchess would have been shut and its stock seized.
Nor will the third stanza’s tailoring work. Chain mail and silk are not fused in harmony; mail can be lined with silk and that is the whole of the relationship. By about 1420 the complete plate harness existed, and it is not a garment with cloth in it — fifteen to twenty-five kilograms of tempered steel distributed over the entire body, which is precisely why a man wearing one can run, jump and remount.
And here the ballad blunders into something true. There was one garment in Joan’s life cut to her measure, and the record of it is a bill. In the month of April 1429, after Easter and by the king’s command, Hémon Raguier, treasurer of war, laid out 450 livres tournois on the Maid’s account, and one hundred of it went to the master armourer for ung harnois complet — one complete harness. Twenty-five went to Hauves Poulnoir, a painter living at Tours, for painting and supplying the cloth of one large standard and one small. The armourer is not named, and when the account came to be audited his hundred livres was struck out again: no receipt had ever been produced for it. She wore the harness into Orléans and on to Reims, where Charles VII was consecrated on 17 July 1429. After the assault on Paris failed she left the armour she had been wounded in at the abbey church of Saint-Denis as an offering, and said so under questioning at Rouen on 17 March 1431 — it was what soldiers did, she told them, when they had been hurt.
The other documented garment is better still for a fashion article. On 23 May 1430 she stayed with the rearguard of a sortie out of Compiègne, and a Burgundian crossbowman — “a rough and very sour man”, says the chronicler Georges Chastellain — took hold of the edge of her cloth-of-gold doublet and threw her from her horse. Cloth of gold is gold strip wound in a spiral round a silk core and woven in as weft, made at Venice, Genoa and Lucca; under the later English statutes its use was reserved to royalty and the higher nobility. The Maid of Orléans was captured in the most expensive fabric in Europe, cut as a man’s garment.
The Charge Was the Clothes
The trial opened at Rouen on 9 January 1431 under Pierre Cauchon, Bishop of Beauvais, who had been rector of the University of Paris in 1403 and was, by the record, well paid for the work. Seventy articles of accusation were drawn and then reduced to twelve. The visions are in the twelve, and the refusal to submit her words and deeds to the judgement of the church is in the twelve — and so, over and over, in the questioning and in the sentence, are the clothes.
On 24 May, in the cemetery of Saint-Ouen with the fire made ready, she abjured: renounced the visions and agreed to leave off men’s dress. She was put back in a secular prison under English guard. On 28 May she put the doublet and hose on again. That is the whole of the relapse — four days — and it is what took her to the stake. Not Orléans, not Reims, not the voices she had already been made to disown. A change of clothes.
Canon law had an answer ready and did not reach for it. Aquinas held that a woman in man’s clothing sins in the ordinary case, because dress should answer to a person’s estate, and then set out the exception in the same article: it “may be done sometimes without sin on account of some necessity, either in order to hide oneself from enemies, or through lack of other clothes, or for some similar motive.” That is a standard text of the schools, and Cauchon had run a university. What the record shows Joan offering instead was a trade — she would leave off men’s dress if she were allowed to hear Mass — and she was not. She was burned in the Vieux-Marché on 30 May 1431, aged about nineteen.
Twenty-five years later the case was opened again. Cardinal d’Estouteville ordered an investigation on 2 May 1452; Joan’s mother, Isabelle Romée, and her brothers Jean and Pierre petitioned Pope Callixtus III; the retrial began at Notre-Dame on 7 November 1455 and worked through some 115 witnesses — childhood neighbours, soldiers who had served under her, citizens of Orléans, and, with markedly less enthusiasm, men who had sat on the first bench. On 7 July 1456 it found the trial of 1431 tainted with fraud, calumny, iniquity and contradiction, and manifest errors of fact and of law, and pronounced it null, invalid, worthless, without effect and annihilated. It declined to say anything about whether she was a saint. That took another four hundred and sixty-four years: beatified 18 April 1909, canonised 16 May 1920.
Cauchon was not there to hear it. He had moved to the see of Lisieux in January 1432 and died in December 1442, and in 1931 workmen repairing the cathedral turned up his skeleton with its crozier and its ring beside it, and nothing above ground to say where he lay.
Which leaves the copyist. He gave her a shop, and it is a cheap joke, and it is very nearly the only joke the material allows: fifty-odd years after his own town burned a nineteen-year-old for a doublet and hose, a clerk with a spare quire wrote out a Joan of Arc whose clothes are the whole of her genius and in which nobody dies. He could not finish it that way. Between the sixth stanza and the eighth the same hand put in the seventh — the metre goes, the shop is not mentioned, and four plain lines say what was done and on what day. Then he picks the tune back up and closes on the legend, as ballads do. He knew what his town had done. He put it in the middle, where a man puts the thing he does not want to end on.
