How Was Joan of Arc Captured? | The Hundred Years' War

Joan of Arc was captured on 23 May 1430 at the siege of Compiègne, a town on the river Oise in the Vermandois, about 80 kilometres north-east of Paris. She was pulled from her horse by a Burgundian archer as she tried to re-enter the town at the end of a sortie. She was held by the Burgundians for five months, sold to the English in November 1430 for 10,000 livres tournois, transferred to Rouen, tried for heresy, and burned at the stake on 30 May 1431. The capture was a political turning point, and the circumstances — particularly the question of whether the garrison of Compiègne betrayed her — have been argued over for six centuries. The standard modern treatment in English is Régine Pernoud’s Joan of Arc: Her Story; the contemporary source is the Procès de Jeanne d’Arc.

The position in May 1430

By the spring of 1430 the French position in the Île-de-France and the Vermandois had begun to retreat. The coronation of Charles VII at Reims on 17 July 1429 had been the political high-water mark. The failure at Paris on 8 September 1429, the failure at La Charité-sur-Loire in November, the loss of Lagny in April 1430, the slow tightening of the Burgundian ring around the still-loyal towns north of the Loire — all of it suggested that the gains of 1429 were not going to be consolidated. Compiègne was one of the northernmost loyal towns. The Burgundians, allied with the English by the Treaty of Troyes, had begun the siege in May 1430.

Joan reached Compiègne in May 1430 with a small force, probably no more than 400 men-at-arms and a few hundred archers. The garrison of the town, under the command of Guillaume de Flavy, was perhaps 1,000 men. The position was not strong; the fortifications had been weakened by an English siege in the previous year, and the Burgundian lines were closing in.

The sortie of 23 May 1430

On the afternoon of 23 May, Joan led a sortie out of the town. The French drove the Burgundians from the outer works, and the engagement at first went well. As the French pursued the Burgundians through the lines, however, the garrison drew back behind the walls, and the Burgundian forces — reinforced from the rear — closed the gate behind the French advance. Joan and the rearguard of her force were cut off in the open ground between the French and Burgundian lines. She was pulled from her horse by a Burgundian archer of the retinue of John of Luxembourg, the count of Luxembourg, who commanded the Burgundian force. The archer’s name, recorded in the Chronique de la Pucelle, was Lyonnel de Bournonville.

The capture was made on the field outside the walls, not inside the town. Joan was taken first to the Burgundian camp, then to the castle of Beaurevoir, and held there until November 1430.

The question of betrayal

The accusation that the garrison of Compiègne, under Guillaume de Flavy, had deliberately failed to support the sortie and had allowed Joan to be captured is recorded in the contemporary French chronicles. The most famous version is that of Jean Jouvénal des Ursins, who in his Histoire de Charles VI writes that Flavy had warned Joan not to make the sortie and had closed the gates deliberately. The Chronique de la Pucelle makes a similar accusation. The rehabilitation proceedings of 1450–1456 took the accusation seriously enough to summon witnesses from Compiègne.

The historical evidence is inconclusive. The garrison was small, the sortie was rash, and the closing of the gates was, in the circumstances, a reasonable military precaution. Flavy was a loyal captain of Charles VII and a participant in the post-Joan reconquest. The accusation of deliberate betrayal has been the subject of a long and unresolved historiographical debate, summarised in the contributions to the Cambridge Companion to Joan of Arc (ed. M. D. Bailey, 2023) and in Kelly DeVries’s Joan of Arc: A Military Leader (1999). The honest answer is that the betrayal cannot be proved and cannot be ruled out.

The sale to the English

Joan was held at Beaurevoir from June to November 1430. John of Luxembourg, who had custody of her, was pressed by the English government, in particular by the regent John, Duke of Bedford, to hand her over. The negotiations were conducted through the Bastard of Wandomme, on the Burgundian side, and Thomas de Monglas, on the English side. The price, paid in November 1430, was 10,000 livres tournois, plus an annual pension to John of Luxembourg of 300 livres. The sale was a substantial political event, treated at length in the contemporary chronicles and in Monstrelet’s Chroniques. The English, who had been urging for months that Joan be turned over to a “tribunal of the Church,” were desperate to obtain her; the Burgundians, who had the political liability of holding her, were equally eager to be paid.

The sale was followed by Joan’s transfer to Rouen, where she arrived on 23 December 1430 and was held in the castle under English guard.

The consequences

The capture of Joan was, for the French cause, a serious blow. The political figure who had been the most potent single symbol of the French reconquest was now in English hands. The English had planned a trial from the moment of the sale; the trial opened on 21 February 1431 and ended, with Joan’s execution, on 30 May 1431. The English expected the execution to end the political legend. The opposite happened. The execution made Joan a martyr, and the French cause was strengthened in the long run by the execution it had failed to prevent.

The sale was also, in the longer English view, a tactical success and a strategic disaster. The execution of a 19-year-old peasant girl, however just the legal form, was a piece of bad political theatre that the English government came to regret. By the time the English were ready to negotiate seriously, at the Congress of Arras in 1435, Joan’s memory had become a French rallying point. The execution was the moment at which the moral high ground of the war definitively passed to the French.

The historiographical argument

The question of whether Joan should have fought at all at Compiègne is the subject of a long historical argument. The military position was poor, the sortie was hasty, and the political consequence of her capture was enormous. The defenders of the sortie, including Pernoud, argue that Joan was a young and impetuous commander who followed her religious and military instincts; the critics, including some of the contributors to the Cambridge Companion, argue that Joan’s political judgement, in the months after the coronation, became increasingly erratic. The capture was, in either reading, the moment at which the post-Joan phase of the war began.

Legacy

Joan’s capture, trial, and execution are the three episodes of her life that have most captured the historical imagination. The capture is the hinge: the moment at which the military heroine became the prisoner, and at which the political question — what to do with her — became an English one. The English answer, the trial and the execution, settled nothing. Joan’s canonisation by Pope Benedict XV on 16 May 1920 ratified the verdict of the rehabilitation of 1456 and made her, in the Catholic calendar, a saint of France.