by Ed West
The “Northerners,” as the rebels were informally called, raised an army in the spring and headed to Northampton, and civil war was only averted when Archbishop of Canterbury Stephen Langton brought the two sides together at Runnymede on June 15, drawing up a series of sixty-three clauses by which the sovereign would agree to rule; it later became known as the Great Charter of Liberties, or Magna Carta, to distinguish it from another charter about forests.16
There are a number of differences between Martin’s world and ours, one of the main ones being the way in which kings rule without any sort of assembly (which probably makes for a better narrative). After Magna Carta was issued, however, rulers were always constrained by law and the reign of John’s son saw the first meetings to be informally known as Parliament; under his grandson Edward Longshanks, knights first sat in Parliament, establishing what was then called simply the Commons—later the House of Commons. This was not the case in much of the world, but in most European countries similar bodies also developed at some point later; the Hungarian Diet was in use since at least the 1290s, and the first Swedish Riksdag met in 1435, although the world’s oldest parliament is the Icelandic Althing, which dates to 930. However, MPs played little part in the everyday running of the realm, which was done by the “king’s council” or “secret council.”
True to form, King John reneged on the deal, claiming it was signed under duress, and civil war broke out. The barons had invited over Prince Louis of France, who claimed the throne though his marriage to Henry II’s granddaughter Blancha. While Louis occupied London, John died of dysentery in Newark, Nottinghamshire, most likely caused by his gluttony.
Louis soon controlled most of the south-east, including London, and the fate of John’s son Henry, just nine, looked bleak. At least two-thirds of the barons were actively with the invader, and the House of Plantagenet would have fallen were it not for one man—William Marshal, now almost seventy.
Before dying, John had entrusted Marshal with the kingdom and asked him to take care of his son. Marshal, despite the odds being stacked against the boy, swore to do so and while others around him thought of deserting young Henry, he ordered that he be summoned to him and on the road near Gloucester they met. Marshal lifted him up and then vowed to see Henry as king even if he had to carry the boy king “on his shoulders” from island to island: Henry was crowned at Gloucester Cathedral and from their base in the south-west the loyalists launched an attack on the invaders as they besieged Lincoln. There Marshal led the fighting with such enthusiasm that he had to be restrained from charging into battle without his armor.
The loyalists won and soon after at the Battle of Sandwich Louis’s French force was beaten by an English fleet half the size but “aggressive and well skilled in naval warfare.” The crossbowmen and archers were lethally effective and quicklime was thrown into the eyes of French sailors, blinding them.
The battle seemed to have turned, but in order to bring back many of the rebels to Henry’s cause, some of whom were unhappy with French involvement, Marshal reissued Magna Carta in 1216 and oversaw its definitive edition the following year; previously an unsuccessful peace treaty, Magna Carta therefore become enshrined in English law as a protection against such evils as being imprisoned “without lawful judgment.”17 He ruled as regent until his death in 1219.
And yet his house did not last long, with all five of his sons dying young, and without heir, supposedly the result of a curse issued by an Irish priest. William’s son Gilbert Marshal was killed in a tournament; he was showing off his horsemanship skills when his bridle broke and he fell from the saddle and, catching a foot in the stirrup, was dragged across a field to his death. Afterwards there was a big brawl in which one of Gilbert’s retainers was slain and several on both sides injured. Likewise, Geoffrey de Mandeville, one of the leading opponents of King John who brought about Magna Carta, was killed in 1216 in a tournament, when “the knights attacked each other with spears and lances, galloping their horses towards each other.”18
Ironically, like any nun-ravisher who later joins the Church, William Marshal ended up banning tournaments which were seen as “a danger to the kingdom and spoliation of the poor.” Tourneys were finally killed off for good when Henri II of France was fatally wounded after being splintered in the eye during one event in 1559.
Marshal’s fame might not have outlived his lifetime but luckily, in February 1861, a French scholar by the name of Paul Meyer was browsing through the index of Sotheby’s auction house in Covent Garden when his curiosity was piqued by something listed as a “Norman-French chronicle on English Affairs (in Verse)” written “by an Anglo-Norman scribe.” What it turned out to be was a biographical poem about Marshal’s life, written soon after his death, which otherwise had been forgotten and may have remained so; Meyer failed to buy it and spent the next twenty years tracking it down, succeeding eventually, and so saving the greatest of knight’s tales.19
*In this case very similar to Olenna Tyrell, the elderly matriarch.
*Eleanor’s daughter Marie of Champagne would later commission Lancelot, the Knight of the Cart by Chretien of Troyes. This poem was the first to mention the love affair between Lancelot and Lady Guinevere.
29
THE WITCH
When the sun rises in the west, sets in the east, when the seas go dry and the mountains blow in the wind like leaves.
—MIRRI MAZ DUUR
Female military leaders were rare. Female military leaders who dressed as men were even rarer. At the Battle of Roosebeke in November 29, 1382 against the French, Flemish leader Philip van Artevelde had been trampled to death by his own soldiers alongside his banner-bearer, one “Big Margot,” although not much else is known of her.
Women in combat were not unknown, especially as battle evolved to rely less on brute strength, and there were female commanders. After the Bohemian Hussite rebellion, some 156 women were taken prisoner, and a fifteenth century German chronicle depicts a woman handgunner and two halberdiers, a halberd being a long, two-handed pole. There was even an order of knighthood for females, the Catalonian Order of the Hatchet, established to honor the women who defended the town of Tortosa in 1149. The Muslims had besieged the Spanish city and the men considered surrendering, “which the women hearing of, to prevent the disaster threatening their city, themselves, and children, put on men’s clothes, and by a resolute sally, forced the Moors to raise the siege.”1
In England, some sixty-eight women were appointed to the Order of the Garter from 1358, although they weren’t “companions,” and the custom was abandoned in 1488, the next one being in 1901.2 Females were not allowed to become full companions until 1987. Women who achieved damehood might have inheritance rights over their husband’s wealth or the privilege to attend certain assemblies.
The Hundred Years’ War had already seen Joanna of Flanders, who rallied Breton forces for her husband Jean Montfort. When the town of Hennebont was besieged by pro-French forces,
the countess of Montfort was seen in full armor, mounted on a swift horse and riding through the town, street by street, urging the people to defend the town well. She made the women of the town, ladies and others, dismantle the carriageways and carry the stones to the battlements for throwing at their enemies. And she had bombards and pots full of quick lime brought to keep the enemy busy.”3
In Westeros Lady Maege Mormont of Bear Island, brother of Lord Commander Jeor (who doesn’t like her much) is described fighting in “full armor and brandishing arms,”4 while her young daughter is equally belligerent. The crusades also empowered many aristocratic women who were left in charge of protecting the home while the men were off fighting. Much further back there was also Artemisia, queen of Halicarnassus who appears in Heredotus; she fought in the Persian Wars, for the Persians, and personally commanded the five ships she sent to the Battle of Salamis in 480 BC.*
Female warriors brandishing swords are even more common in fables. The Amazons were legendary ancient women
fighters who cut off their right breasts and wore trousers, and the Greek hero Achilles fell in love with their Queen Penthesilea just as he killed her, which is unfortunate timing to say the least. Later romantic fiction was full of female knights like Brienne of Tarth. There was Britomart, a virgin knight who appears in Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene in the Elizabethan area, and her forerunner, Bradamante, in the Italian epics Orlando Innamorato and Orlando Furioso. Both women are in love with noble-born knights, and Britomart actually rescues hers from an enchanteress.5
However female warriors were so unusual that when one now emerged, during France’s darkest hour, no one entirely knew how to respond. Jehanne d’Arc was just seventeen and illiterate when she first appeared on the scene; the “Pucelle” or Maid came from Domremy in Lorraine, north-east France, and had been receiving divine voices since the age of thirteen, convinced that they were from God and not the Devil because they appeared on her right shoulder. Despite her youth, sex, and social station she nevertheless inspired men to fight for her, and was feared as a witch by her enemies.
Joan of Arc was “called by angels” to devote her life to the Dauphin Charles, son of the mad king, who until then had retreated into apathy and defeatism. Joan was a highly unusual figure, devoted to the man she saw as the rightful king, an almost sexless woman who wore armor and fought fiercely.6 She faced sexual mockery throughout, from the time that one of the Dauphin’s soldiers upon her arrival suggested she needed a good seeing to. She also faced the far more terrifying prospect of rape.
Convinced of the messages she was hearing, the young girl had smuggled herself to the court of the Dauphin at Chinon, where Charles’s men had interrogated her and, persuaded by her sheer force of will, allowed her to help in the now desperate struggle on the Loire. The girl rode to Orléans on a white horse, with an army of several thousand soldiers and some priests, carrying a sword that some believed had once belonged to Charles Martel. Partly inspired by her supreme confidence, the French relieved Orléans and the English retreated up the Loire, dumping their cannons and heavy weapons in their haste to escape the resurgent resistance. On October 27, Salisbury was wounded by debris from stone cannonball fire across the river; when his attendants found him there was a bleeding, gaping hole where half his face had been. He died eight days later.
For the Maid it was the start of an extraordinary career of conquest, against the odds. It helped that there were numerous prophecies in the French countryside about a virgin who would be the country’s savior, while long before Geoffrey of Monmouth had predicted in his History of the Kings of Britain that “a virgin ascends the backs of the archers, and hides the flower of her virginity.”
Joan attracted devotion from her troops, who described how they strangely felt no desire for her, despite her sex and youth; the Duke of Alençon said he had seen her breasts which were beautiful but left him unaroused. Joan’s hose and breeches, tightly knotted with cords onto her doublet, allowed her to ride a horse more easily but also provided some protection against rape. She was now supported by a growing number of men who became convinced by her message; among them was Etinne de Vignolles, better known as La Hire, or “hedgehog,” one of the few men who really believed in her throughout the war and fought with her at Orléans. Almost everyone would recognize his image as he ended up being commemorated as the Jack of Hearts in traditional card games.
And on June 18, 1429 at the Battle at Patay, the French destroyed an English force, with Fastolf the only captain to survive. The following month Charles entered Reims and was crowned at the ancient coronation spot where kings of France had been ordained by God for close to a thousand years. Standing beside him was Joan, the simple peasant girl, as well as another supporter of hers, Gilles de Rais, one of the leading knights of the kingdom who had been appointed Marshal of France. After the ceremony the Maid knelt at Charles’s feet and wept, “Noble king, God’s will is done.”
Now an attempt by the English to crown the young Henry VI in Paris ended in disaster when the organizers cooked food so bad even the city’s poor and sick, traditionally given leftovers at coronations, complained about the quality.
And yet Joan had made a lot of enemies and her messianic character unnerved many. With her victories against the English, she now wrote an open letter to the Hussites of far-off Bohemia, warning them that if they did not submit to the Pope: “I shall destroy your empty and abominable superstition, and strop you of either your heresy or your lives.”7 Many of the French, even those bitterly opposed to the English, also viewed her as a heretic and, worse, a witch.
And so Joan of Arc, like Daenerys, went into the fire—except that in real life, alas, people don’t come out.
After a couple of military failures the Maid was captured by the Burgundians on May 23, 1430 and sold to the English, who handed her over to the Church authorities to be put on trial. Her central crime was heresy but her non-conformity to traditional gender roles also made her something unnatural and frightening to many, and the court heard that Joan had “disgracefully put on the clothing of the male sex, a shocking and vile monstrosity.”8 She was accused of seventy different offenses, put in a grim prison with just bread and water and told she must recant. This ordeal went for a total of ten months.
The bishop who tried to persuade her was dressed “in fur-lined episcopal robes, a man of about sixty, old enough to be her grandfather, smilingly kindly, chillingly” and said that he came in friendship.9 When she returned to face the court again, she was a “thinner, paler, and quieter” girl and her head had also now been shaved.
At the end of the trial, after being brought to a scaffold and told she would be burned there and then unless she submitted, she confessed her crimes and recanted her error, so she could be welcomed back and live the rest of her days in prison, eating the “bread of sorrow and drinking the water of affliction as she wept for her sins.”10 However just four days later, on May 28, she renounced her previous recantation and again donned men’s clothing, frightened of being raped by the guards. She was duly convicted and was consumed by the fire on May 31 in Rouen, and afterwards her charred corpse was left on display so that the townspeople might know that she was just a woman. She was nineteen. With this murder John Tressart, secretary to Henry VI in France, reflected: “We are lost, we have burnt a saint.”11
Charles VII, as he was now styled, had made no attempt to rescue his young supporter, who was deeply unpopular and unlamented in passing. Her later transformation into national saviour was a result of continuing devotion from the peasantry, despite official hostility, and the work of two influential figures.
Christine de Pizan was one of the most significant female writers of the medieval period. Born in 1364 in Italy, she served as court writer to Louis of Orléans and later Philippe of Burgundy, composing prose and poetry we well as offering marriage advice. She wrote forty-one books in total, having been widowed at a young age and needing to support her children as well as her mother and niece, among them The Book of the City of Ladies, set in a hypothetical city in which women’s views are taken seriously. The year before her death in 1430 her last work was a poem about Joan of Arc, which helped crystalise continual sympathy for the Maid among France’s downtrodden.
Joan’s memory was also much helped by Gilles de Rais, who having retired from politics devoted much of his time to his great passion, theater. French and English theater had its origin in religious mystery plays, first acted as far back as the eleventh century in monasteries, although by the this point plays were performed by troupes, moving from town to town and performing both secular and religious dramas. Theater at the time was, by later standards, very vulgar and also featured graphic scenes of violence, although by the period that the first theater houses appeared in Shakespeare’s time it had become considerably cleaner.
De Rais was obsessed with theater, and almost ruined his entire family with a hugely expensive play he wrote and produced on the Siege of Orléans, which appeared in 1435 and glo
rified Joan, now dead four years. The performance required 140 speaking parts and 500 extras, and 600 costumes were made for the spectacular, which were worn once and then disposed of, to be made again for the next show. He also provided spectators with unlimited supplies of food and drink, and unsurprisingly this venture virtually bankrupted him; so bad was his theater obsession that his family took legal action to stop him spending any more money.
And yet the real world contains more horror even than George R.R. Martin’s rich and fertile imagination. During the 1430s, a number of children had disappeared in de Rais’s native Machecoul on the southern edge of Britanny. One was a furrier’s apprentice who had been sent to the famous knight with a message but had never returned, having been kidnapped on the way back—or so de Rais had said.
Later, in 1440, the famous knight had gotten into an argument with a local priest in a church and tempers had become so inflamed that he had tried to grab the cleric. Local churchmen began to look into his activities and, searching his chateau, found something they were not expecting—bodies. Several bodies. As the secular authorities were called into investigate, the horror mounted, and de Rais confessed to his crimes. History’s first known serial killer, de Rais may have killed as many as 140 victims in total, aged between six and eighteen, the majority boys, and he was executed later that year. He became immortalized by the French folktale, Bluebeard, which was first published in Paris in 1697.
And yet only thirty years after Joan’s death, public opinion had shifted so much that a new trial was ordered of her original trial, where it was now ruled that she was inspired by God. She had become a national hero, and later a saint.
CIRCE
For her enemies, however, Joan was that ancient terror, a witch, a feature of European folklore since as far back as The Odyssey where a sorcesses called Circe turned men into animals and exerted a hold over them.
