What Was the Loire Campaign?
The Loire Campaign was the series of French military operations in the Loire valley between the lifting of the Siege of Orléans on 8 May 1429 and the coronation of Charles VII at Reims on 17 July 1429. Conducted by the Dauphin’s forces under the direction of Joan of Arc and the Bastard of Orléans, the campaign cleared the English from the Loire between Orléans and the Norman frontier, won four substantial engagements, and made the coronation possible. The campaign was the political and military foundation of the French reconquest that would end at Castillon in 1453.
The campaign is sometimes called the “Joan of Arc campaign,” but the name is misleading. Joan was present at every major engagement, and her political role — the legitimisation of the Dauphin’s cause — was decisive; but the tactical direction of the campaign was the work of the experienced French captains, and the larger strategy was the work of the Dauphin’s council at Bourges. The campaign is best understood as a coordinated operation by the Orléanais and the southern French forces, conducted under the political authority of the Dauphin and the military authority of Dunois.
Background: the state of France in early 1429
The English position in France in early 1429 looked nearly impregnable. Henry V’s conquest of Normandy (1417–1419) and the Treaty of Troyes (1420) had given the English crown the legal and political basis for the control of northern France. The English regent, John, Duke of Bedford, governed from Rouen with a strong army, a competent administration, and the support of the Burgundian faction. The Dauphin Charles, the disinherited heir of Charles VI, held a rump kingdom centred on Bourges and the Auvergne. His legitimacy was questioned; his military position was weak; his finances were exhausted.
The English had begun the siege of Orléans in October 1428, after the fall of the key Loire bridgehead of Jargeau. The town was the key to the Loire valley: the last major French-held city between the English north and the French south. The English commander, the Earl of Salisbury, was killed in November 1428, but the siege was continued by his successors, William de la Pole, Earl of Suffolk, and Lord Talbot. The English had constructed a ring of bastilles (fortified outposts) around the town on the left bank, but they had failed to take the bridge of Orléans and to seal the town completely. The French garrison under Dunois was holding out, and the Dauphin’s council was trying to raise a relief force.
The lifting of the siege
Joan of Arc arrived at Orléans on 29 April 1429, with a small force of perhaps 200–300 men. The relief force from Blois, under the Duke of Bourbon and the Bastard of Orléans, joined her on 4 May. The French attacked the English bastilles on the left bank of the Loire one by one: the bastille of Saint-Loup fell on 4 May, that of the Augustins on 6 May, that of Saint-Jean-le-Blanc on the same day. The English under Suffolk, having lost command of the open ground south of the town, withdrew to the right bank and abandoned the siege on 8 May. The town was relieved.
The lifting of the siege was the immediate military turning point of the war. The English had been besieging a major French city for seven months; the relief had been conducted in five days. The English position in the Loire collapsed, and the political effect in France was electric. Dunois, in his evidence at the rehabilitation trial of 1456, said that the lifting of the siege was the moment at which the French began to believe that they could win the war.
Jargeau, Meung, and Beaugency (11–17 June)
The French did not pause. On 11 June 1429 the army, reinforced by additional contingents, appeared before Jargeau, on the north bank of the Loire, and besieged the English garrison under Suffolk. The assault of 12 June was successful: the town was taken, and Suffolk was captured. John Talbot, who would later be Earl of Shrewsbury, was the military commander of the English garrison; he escaped the field and made his way to the army of Lord Scales at Meung-sur-Loire.
The French turned east, crossed the Loire, and on 15 June took Meung-sur-Loire after a short siege. Lord Scales withdrew upstream to Beaugency. The French followed, took Beaugency on 16–17 June, and prepared to give battle to the English relief force that was approaching from the north.
Patay (18 June 1429)
The English relief force, perhaps 4,000–5,000 strong, was commanded by Lord Talbot and Sir John Fastolf. Talbot, the more aggressive of the two, was determined to give battle; Fastolf, the more experienced, advised caution. Talbot overruled him, and the English army deployed near the village of Patay, in the Beauce, on the morning of 18 June.
The French army, perhaps 6,000 strong, was commanded by Dunois, with Joan present. The French advanced quickly, before the English could deploy. The English longbowmen, on whom the Agincourt generation had relied, were caught in the open by the French cavalry advance. The battle was decided in less than an hour. The English army was routed; Lord Talbot was captured on the field, having been wounded and pulled from his horse. Fastolf, who had withdrawn his contingent when the battle was lost, escaped to the north with the remnants of the army.
Patay is sometimes called the French Agincourt. The comparison is exact in the moral sense: a substantial English force destroyed in a single day, with high-value prisoners taken. The comparison is misleading in the tactical sense: the English were not caught in the mud, and the longbow did not decide the day. The decision was made by the French cavalry advance, and the longbow failed to stop it.
Talbot was ransomed in 1429 or 1430; he was back in English service by 1430, and he spent the next two decades as the most experienced English captain in France. His later death at Castillon in 1453, at the age of nearly seventy, was the last English casualty of the war.
The march on Reims
The victories of the Loire campaign opened the way for the French to march on Reims, the traditional city of French coronations, in the teeth of English-held territory. The march began in late June. The French army, perhaps 12,000 strong and reinforced by additional volunteers, marched through Auxerre, Troyes (which opened its gates), and Châlons. The English garrisons along the route did not attempt to give battle; the English field armies had been destroyed at Patay and were not in a position to intervene.
The coronation of Charles VII took place at Reims on 17 July 1429. The ceremony, performed by the archbishop of Reims in the cathedral of Notre-Dame, made Charles the legitimate King of France in the eyes of his own party. The political effect was enormous. The Dauphin of Bourges was now the crowned King of France, and the English regent at Rouen was, in the eyes of the French, a usurper.
The aftermath
The campaign of 1429 was followed by a long period of consolidation. The French tried to take Paris in September 1429, failed, and withdrew. The English counter-attacked in the winter of 1429–1430; Joan’s capture at Compiègne on 23 May 1430 ended her active career. The Congress of Arras of 1435 ended the war between France and Burgundy. The reconquest of Normandy in 1449 and of Gascony in 1451–1453 was the long consequence of the campaign of 1429.
The campaign is treated at length in Jonathan Sumption’s Cursed Kings (2015). Anne Curry’s Agincourt: A New History (2005) and The Battle of Agincourt: An Anatomy (2020) place it in the larger context of the Lancastrian war effort. The Procès de Jeanne d’Arc, the trial and rehabilitation records, is the indispensable primary source. The site treats the siege of Orléans, the Loire campaign, and the Joan of Arc cluster at length.