“Joan was dressed in a man’s clothes, to wit tunic, hood and gippon (a short robe worn by men) and other man’s clothes, attire which on our order she had formerly left off and had taken women’s clothes: therefore did we question her to know when and for what cause she had again put on man’s attire.”
JOAN: I not long since resumed man’s attire and left off woman’s attire.
Question: Why have you assumed this male attire and who made you take it?
JOAN: I have taken it of my own will. I have taken it because it is more licit and fitting to have man’s clothes since I am with men than to have woman’s clothes. I have resumed it because what had been promised me has not been observed, to wit that I should go to mass and should receive the Body of Christ and should be taken out of irons.
PIERRE CAUCHON: Have you not made abjuration and promised especially not to resume man’s clothes?
JOAN: I would rather die than remain in irons; but if it be permitted me to go to mass and I be taken out of irons and that I be put in a pleasant (gracieuse) prison, and that I have women, I will be good and will do what the Church wishes. (The item “have women” is down in the French Minute but not in the official text of the proceedings.)
CAUCHON: Since that Thursday, have you heard the voices of Saints Catherine and Margaret?
JOAN: Yes.
CAUCHON: What did they tell you?
JOAN: God has sent to me by Saints Catherine and Margaret great pity for the mighty betrayal to which I consented in making abjuration and revocation to save my life, and that I was damning myself to save my life.
(Here the clerk has noted in the margin, responsio mortifera, mortal (fatal) answer.)
JOAN: Before Thursday my voices had told me what I was going to do that day, and what I then did. My voices told me, when I was on the scaffold and the tribune before the people, that I should reply boldly to that preacher who was then preaching. He was a false preacher and he said I had done many things which I have not done. If I said that God had not sent me, I should damn myself; it is true that God sent me. My voices have since told me that I did a great injury in confessing that I had not done well in what I had done. All that I said and revoked that Thursday, I did only because of fear of the fire.
CAUCHON: Do you believe that the voices which come to you are those of Saints Catherine and Margaret?
JOAN: Yes, and that they are from God.
CAUCHON: And the crown which you mentioned?
JOAN: In all, I told you the truth at the trial, as best I could.
CAUCHON: You said, upon the scaffold and the tribune, before us, judges, and before others and before the people, when you made abjuration, that it was falsely (lyingly) that you had boasted that those voices were the voices of Saints Catherine and Margaret.
JOAN: I did not mean to do and say so. I did not say or mean to revoke my apparitions, to wit that they were Saints Catherine and Margaret. And all I have done I did for fear of the fire and I revoked nothing but it (the revocation) was against the truth. I would rather make my penitence once and for all, that is to say die, than to suffer any longer the pain of being in prison. I have never done anything against God and against the faith, whatever I may have been made to revoke; and for what was contained in the cédule of abjuration, I did not understand it. I did not mean to revoke anything unless provided it pleased God. If the judges wish it I will resume woman’s clothes; for the rest, I will do nothing about it.
“That heard,” continues the record, “we went away from her to proceed thereafter according to law* and reason.” (C.395–399)
Isambart de la Pierre, who was present at this exchange, adds an epilogue which, needless to say, does not appear in the official record: “Before all present,” he says, “when she was reputed heretic, obstinate and relapsed, she answered publicly: ‘If you, my lords of the Church, had kept and guarded me in your prisons, peradventure would it not be so with me.’ After the issue and end of this session and instance the lord Bishop of Beauvais said to the English who awaited without: ‘Farewell, it is done.’ ” (R.268)
In one of his depositions at the Trial of Rehabilitation Martin Ladvenu also recalled the bishop’s attitude at the time; and in that attitude saw, in his opinion, proof of the bishop’s partisanship: “The first (sign): When the bishop offered himself as judge, he commanded that Joan be kept in a secular prison and in the hands of her mortal enemies, although he could very well have had her detained and guarded in an ecclesiastical prison. As it was, he permitted, from the beginning of the trial until the consummation, that she be tormented and treated cruelly in a secular prison. Moreover, at the first session and instance, the said bishop required and asked the advice of the whole court to know which was the most fitting, to keep her in a secular prison or in the prisons of the Church. Whereupon it was decided that it was more decent to keep her in the ecclesiastical prisons than the others. Then answered this bishop that he would not do that for fear of displeasing the English.
“The second sign is that, the day when the bishop with some others declared her a heretic, recidivist and backslider into her misdeeds, because she had within the prison resumed male attire, coming out of the prison, he perceived the Earl of Warwick and a multitude of English about him, to whom, laughing, he said aloud, intelligibly: ‘Farewell, farewell, it is done, farewell’ or words to that effect.”* (R.266)
Cauchon wasted no time in bringing Joan to trial for her “relapse”. After the interrogation set out above, on May 28th, he summoned the principal assessors to meet on the 29th, and gave them a brief exposé of the state of her case: after the solemn preaching and admonitions addressed to her, Joan had renounced the error of her ways and signed an abjuration with her own hand. . . . However, at the suggestion of the devil she had started saying again that her voices and spirits had come to her, and having rejected woman’s clothes, had resumed the wearing of male attire. Which was why he was now asking the assessors to give their opinion on what should now be done.
The first asked to speak happened to be Master Nicolas de Venderès, the man who had drawn up the false abjuration document, the one which was not read to Joan. As may well be imagined, his opinion was clear: Joan must be held to be a heretic and without further delay handed over to the secular arm, “with a recommendation to be gentle with her”. This was a conventional formula (employed by Inquisition courts) and everyone knew what it implied.
But Giles de Duremort, abbot of Fécamp, asked next to give his opinion, introduced a request which must have made Cauchon uneasy. “It seems to me,” he said, “that she is a relapsed heretic and that the word of God should be preached to her; that the cédule which was read to her shall be read to her again and explained; that done, the judges will have to declare her a heretic and abandon her to secular justice.”
Of the forty assessors listed as giving their opinion in the text of the proceedings, after the first two had spoken, only two were for passing sentence at once: Denis Gastinel—a canon of Rouen who was, as we have seen, in receipt of regular payments from the English crown; and Jean Pinchon, archdeacon of Jouy-en-Josas, with canonical stalls in Paris and Rouen. All the rest, including those who had shown themselves most implacable to Joan, rallied to the abbot of Fécamp’s opinion, some going further—Isambart de la Pierre, for example—and insisting that it should be made perfectly clear to Joan that the matter was one of life or death for her. Thus, of forty-two, thirty-nine demanded that more light be thrown, in the first place, on the abjuration question.
Whereupon—we are still quoting the official proceedings—“Having heard the opinion of each one, we, the judges, thanked them and thereafter concluded that the said Joan be proceeded against as a relapsed heretic according to law and reason.” (C.408)
The assessors having only a consultative voice, it is perfectly obvious that Cauchon was not going to hamper himself with a formality which would be doubly awkward for him, since the cédule which had been put into the file of the proceedings w
as not the one which had been read to Joan.
During the afternoon of the same day a missive was sent, by the notaries, to all the assessors, informing them that Joan, having fallen again into the errors which she had abjured, would be taken the next day to the Old Market Place in Rouen, at eight o’clock in the forenoon, to be declared “relapsed, heretic and excommunicate”.
COMMENTARY
The reader will already have formed some idea of the manner in which the proceedings of this trial were drawn up, from the texts quoted in this chapter. While Joan was being questioned, the notaries wrote down her answers; and they were also responsible for the record or minute of each session with such details as the list of persons present, the place in which the court was sitting, and so forth. The notaries also added to the dossier all other papers involved in the proceedings, assignations and convocations addressed to the assessors, letters from people who were implicated in some way or other, these ranging from the King of England when, for example, he entrusted judging Joan, a prisoner-of-war, to Pierre Cauchon, down to the usher Jean Massieu, charged with the task of producing the prisoner to the court whenever it sat in public, and of returning her to her cell thereafter.
The whole formed a stout file which was not to be arranged in formal order, as we can tell from the texts, until after Joan’s death. By “arranged in formal order” we mean what follows: all the questions and answers were translated into Latin and the diverse papers, after classification according to the actual order of the proceedings, were copied into a register which the notaries were then called upon to “authenticate”. This authentication consisted in signing the bottom of every page to attest the conformity of the text with their own notes, and to prevent the addition of any document or writing whatsoever, contrary to juridical custom. At the end of the file they placed their “sign manual”, that is a signature accompanied by a flourish which was personal to each clerk, a copy of which was deposed at the Officiality, the seat of the archbishopric’s ecclesiastical court, exactly as, nowadays, we depose a copy of our signature at the bank when opening an account.
This formality, it should be noted, assumed its full import in the case of the proceedings of the trial of condemnation, when it came to the matter of those Posthumous Informations (Chapter 8) which Cauchon wanted to integrate into the file itself. For the simple fact of their not being included in the authenticated pages and of their being filed after the signs manual of the notaries, is a proof of their misleading character: the notaries were able to plead the illegality of what was proposed to them in refusing, out of professional honesty, to carry out Cauchon’s orders. The bishop was obliged to resign himself to having the Posthumous Informations put into the file only outside the limits of the authenticated proceedings. He was able to substitute a bogus cédule for the real one, by doing it without the knowledge of the notaries at a time when the file was composed of loose leaves not yet copied into the register; but he was not able to do likewise with those “informations” which had nothing whatever to do with the declarations properly heard or received by the court in session.
We know from the depositions of Guillaume Manchon that there were five authenticated copies of the proceedings of the Trial of Condemnation. Three were for the Inquisitor, one for the King of England, and one for Cauchon. Of these five, three have come down to us. One, the most carefully produced, written on parchment, is now in the library of the National Assembly; a facsimile reproduction of this was made, thanks to J. Marchand, the chief librarian, and published in 1956. The two others are in the Bibliothèque Nationale (Fonds Latin 5965 and 5966). Several copies of the original five were made, but they have not the value as juridical instruments given to the remaining three originals by the notaries’ signatures.
It was this official and authentic text of the Trial of Condemnation in Latin which was published by the scholar Jules Quicherat, forming the first volume of that important work which anyone wishing to know about Joan will always have to refer to (Procès de condamnation et de réhabilitation de Jeanne d’Arc, dite la Pucelle, Paris 1841–1849). The publication of this work marks the beginning of any real knowledge of Joan of Arc, in her person and in the events of her life. For it is self-evident that, so long as the documents in the two cases remained in MS. only, then only those few scholars who had access to them, and who knew both mediaeval Latin and palaeography, could be exactly informed as to Joan’s answers, and what the people who knew her really said about her when they gave evidence. Until Quicherat published his great book, the story of Joan could only be followed in the works of chroniclers, whose information, gathered at second-hand, could not have the same value as a direct reading of the questions and answers at the trials. In point of fact only one scholar, in the seventeenth century, had both the idea and the occasion to read the MSS. of the trial proceedings. This was Edmond Richer, whose work was not published in his lifetime and was not, in fact, to be published until the twentieth century (1911–12) by Canon P. H. Dunand. In its MS. form, however, Richer’s work served as the basis for Lenglet-Dufresnoy’s Histoire de Jeanne d’Arc, vierge, heroine et martyre d’Etat, suscitée par la Providence pour rétablir le monarchie françoise, which appeared in 1753; but the abbé Lenglet-Dufresnoy made but indifferent use of it.
All this explains, of course, the errors, nonsense, and in general the want of exact knowledge of Joan, which were the rule until the nineteenth century. We have dealt elsewhere with this aspect of the matter (see our Jeanne d’Arc, Ed. du Seuil, 1959), and a more thorough treatment of the same subject will be found in a scholarly work by Pierre Marot (Memorial de la Réhabilitation), published in 1956 (see Commentary to Chapter 10).
Before Quicherat only one scholar, Clement L’Averdy, had had the idea of publishing Extraits des manuscrits des procès; but his publication, which appeared in 1790, was incomplete and remained little known.
In our own time we have at our disposal a publication of the highest order in which to study the Trial of Condemnation; this we owe to Pierre Tisset and Yvonne Lanhers; it appears under the aegis of the Société de l’Histoire de France, and replaces Quicherat, now unobtainable excepting in the major libraries. This re-edition gives not only the Latin text of the proceedings, but also that of the “French Minute”.
For in fact, while Joan was being questioned, the notary Guillaume Manchon was taking down her answers in French; he had kept for himself, among his personal papers, the MS. of the questions and answers in French (he refers to this MS. as the notula in gallico), and he handed this over to the judge at the Trial of Rehabilitation, on December 12, 1455, when this last trial was opening. Now of this French Minute, which has unfortunately disappeared, copies were made, and these are to be found notably in two of the MSS.; the so-called Urfé MS., preserved in the Bibliothèque Nationale (Fonds Latin 8838), and another which is now kept at the Bibliothèque d’Orléans and bears the number 518. It is probably in this French text that the least attenuated echo of Joan’s own language is to be found, a language full of freshness and which is well worth reading in the original text despite the difficulties which that may entail for us.
Excellent translations of the Trial of Condemnation have been made, among others those of Pierre Champion (Paris, 1920–21, 2 vols.), which had both Latin text and translation; and of Robert Brasillach, which happily combines a translation of the Latin with the text of the French Minute (Paris, Gallimard, 1939, and often reprinted).
* Investigation by an examining magistrate preceding the trial in open court. There is no equivalent in English or United States legal proceedings.
* Her word is prud’homme. I give the only approximate equivalent.—E.H.
* I think she means “done because of my coming”.—E.H.
*Prude femme: it means, like prud’homme, a decent, sensible, well-mannered, ‘respectable’ person.—E.H.
*i.e ‘What is with in your knowledge’.
* G. B. Shaw’s translation of this magnificent answer, in Saint Joan: but
out of its proper context.
* C’est bon a savoir! Joan often used this phrase. I think it was a jeer—“Wouldn’t you just like to know!”
* Joan’s words are “bien irritée”; we might say “on tenterhooks to come to, etc.”
* bailler belles interlocutoires en notre proces.
† Rota: a court judging appeals to the Holy See.
* Anne of Burgundy, sister of Philippe the Good.
† Cardinal Beaufort, Bishop of Winchester.—E.H.
* There is no equivalent to the form of words Joan used here but the implication was not quite so downright. A modern equivalent might be “I cannot handle myself differently.”—E.H.
* See Pernoud, R., Jeanne d’Arc prisonnière, Revue de Paris, June, 1960.
* i.e., goddams the nickname for English soldiers.
† Led into scandalous conduct.—E.H.
* It could mean only “smiling”.—E.H.
* Or “according to right and reason”.—E.H.
* Farewell, farewell are in English in the text. The words I have translated literally by farewell are faîtes bonne chère.—E.H.
8
DEATH
On Wednesday, May 30th, in the morning there came to Joan in her cell Brother Martin Ladvenu, chosen by Cauchon to inform her of the fate in store for her. A young Brother of Ladvenu’s convent, Brother Jean Toutmouillé, went with him and he has left us an account of the scene:
“The day that Joan was abandoned to secular justice and delivered up to be burned, I went in the morning to the prison with Brother Martin Ladvenu, whom the Bishop of Beauvais had sent to her to announce her imminent death and to induce in her true contrition and penitence, and also to hear her confession. The which the said Ladvenu did very thoroughly and charitably. And when he announced to the poor woman the death which she must die that day, that so had her judges ordained, and understood and heard the hard and cruel death which was almost upon her, she began to cry out grievously and pitiably pulled and tore out her hair. ‘Alas! Do they treat me thus horribly and cruelly, so that my body, clean and whole, which was never corrupted, must be this day consumed and reduced to ashes! Ah! I had rather seven times be decapitated than to be thus burned. Alas! Had I been in the ecclesiastical prison to which I submitted myself, and been guarded by men of the Church and not by my enemies and adversaries, it had not so wretchedly happened to me as now it has! Ah! I appeal before God, the Great Judge, from the great wrongs and grievances (ingravances) being done to me.’ And she complained marvellously in that place of the oppressions and violences which had been done to her in the prison by the gaolers and by others who had been let in against her.
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