Why did the prosecutors of the ‘Maid of Orléans’ focus so much attention on an old sword, lost and broken?

For a modern audience Jeanne d’Arc (Joan of Arc) is a figure of female power, a mystic inspired by divine voices, leading French knights to victory over the English, beneath a sacred banner.

At her side was a sword, miraculously recovered from beneath the altar of the chapel of Sainte-Catherine-de-Fierbois, twenty miles south of Tours in central France: the very sword that Charles Martel, grandfather of Charlemagne, the great defender of France against Islam and founder of the French royal line, had carried at the battle of Tours in 732 and gifted to the chapel in gratitude for his great victory.

This myth however is just that, a myth. First given prominence by the seventeenth-century French poet Jean Chapelain in his poem La Pucelle, ou la France Delivrée (‘The Maid or France Delivered’), it is part of the tradition that grew up after Joan’s execution that saw her as a great national heroine.

According to Chapelain, Charles Martel had buried the sword behind the altar in order that it should be there for Joan to find and carry in her own victories against a foreign invader. Other myths arose suggesting an even more ancient original owner, Alexander the Great.

Ascribing swords a pedigree in this manner may seem very medieval, but it is predominantly a feature of the early medieval period (generally accepted as lying between the fifth and eleventh centuries), and particularly of the Norse sagas, in which swords have names and powers, and histories that are longer than those of the sagas’ heroes. By the high middle ages (from the eleventh century to the fourteenth), the sword had lost some of this mystique, but for Joan’s contemporaries it was still an important symbol.

A Gift from God?

Whilst the French royal chronicler Jean Chartier did not connect the sword with Charles Martel, he was in no doubt as to its importance. In his account of Charles VII’s reign, written less than 30 years after Joan’s execution in 1431, he has La Pucelle tell the king to send to the church of Saint Catherine for a sword, lying amongst many scraps of metal, its blade decorated with five crosses. Divine revelation had told her it would be there and that by means of the sword she would expel the enemies of France and lead the king to be anointed and crowned in the city of Reims.

For Chartier, Joan’s victories came from her possession of the sword. The final proof of this came after the battle of Patay (fought in June 1429) when Joan broke the sword whilst using it to beat some of her soldiers whom she found sleeping with prostitutes. Although the king ordered its repair, the sword could not be mended - a clear sign of the sword’s divine provenance. Chartier concludes his story of Joan with the words ‘and it is well known that after this sword was broken, Joan did not prosper in arms for the profit of the King or otherwise, as she had done before’.

There is much in Chartier’s account that smacks of chivalric romance. The sword waiting for its rightful wielder has echoes of Excalibur or the Sword in the Stone (they were not always the same sword - but that is a matter for another post), whilst the breaking of the sword is reminiscent of the ‘dolorous stroke’ in Le Queste del Sant Graal (‘The Quest for the Holy Grail’). In this version of the tale, the Fisher King receives a wound from a sword, which breaks because the blow is unrighteous, and as a consequence his realm is laid waste. The trope was a central theme in John Boorman’s Arthurian epic Excalibur, with the line ‘The king without a sword! The land without a king!’ It was also used by Tolkien in The Lord of the Rings. Narsil, the sword of Elendil, High King of Gondor, was broken when the king was killed by Sauron, to be re-forged centuries later as Andúril for Aragorn, Elendil’s heir and the returning king of Gondor.

For Chartier Joan’s sword was both proof of the divine origin of her mission and a conduit for the divine providence that gave her victory. This divine origin was to be a key matter at her trial.

The sword in Joan’s own words

Contrary to Chartier’s account, Joan made no mention of the sword being the source of her victory. Indeed, during her trial she was at great pains to avoid suggesting it. When her accusers asked her whether the hope of victory was founded more in her standard or in herself she replied that victory ‘was founded in the Lord and no one else’. On the subject of her sword she said merely that she had sent to the church of Sainte-Catherine-de-Fierbois to ask if she might have a sword, the blade decorated with five crosses, that her voices had told her was buried within the church. Such a sword, covered in rust, had been discovered behind the altar. She said that when the priests had rubbed the blade the rust had come off easily, and they had given her the sword along with a scabbard of crimson velvet. The men of Tours, the town in which she was residing at the time, gave her another scabbard decorated in gold leaf, but she had a third one made, of sturdy leather. She had carried the sword from that time until the siege of Paris, but preferred her standard four times as much as her sword and always carried the latter into battle, in order to avoid killing anyone. After departing Lagny she carried a sword won in battle from a Burgundian knight; a war sword, ‘good for giving hard clouts and strong blows’.

Her inquisitors were not as interested in the miraculous discovery of the sword as they were in what she had done with it once she had it. Had she made any benediction over the sword or had it blessed? No, she had not, and would not have known how to do so. Had she placed the sword on an altar? No, as far as she knew it had not been placed on an altar in order that it should be more fortunate. Had she ever prayed for her sword to have better fortune? It was well known that she wished that her armour might be very fortunate. What was the meaning of the five crosses on the blade? She knew nothing of that.

For Joan, despite its miraculous discovery, the sword seems to have been no more than a tool, carried because she had adopted the garb and role of a man and a man-at-arms.

A magical blade?

The questions of her captors suggest that they thought the weapon to be something quite different. The blessing of swords was a common practice; indeed one of the earliest of Church benedictions was for the blessing of weapons. Swords were routinely placed on altars during coronations and the dubbing of knights. This represented the transfer of temporal authority from God, through the Church to the monarch or knight. And what warrior wouldn’t pray for his sword to be fortunate in battle? Nor were decorations on sword blades rare. Most makers would strike a mark somewhere to ‘sign’ their workmanship, and there are a large number of swords surviving from across the middle ages that bear a series of letters and symbols, whose meaning is obscure but seem to be abbreviated requests for divine and aid and protection in battle. Surely the five crosses on the blade of Joan’s sword were another version of this common practice.

For the authorities trying Joan the issue wasn’t that the sword might have been blessed, but that Joan might have done it herself. The use of charms and mystical invocations was widespread for a variety of purposes. They might serve to protect from illness or demonic possession, or to ensure the health of cattle or the richness of crops. They might even be used to protect the bearer from injury in combat. In 1355, Richard Shawell, acting as the professional champion for the Bishop of Salisbury in a trial by combat over the ownership of Sherborne Castle, was accused of illegally stuffiing his armour with charms.

The Church’s attitude towards these charms and amulets was ambivalent. They were a remnant of pagan belief, and of rural superstition, but at the same time their efficacy wasn’t to be doubted: a form of personal piety common throughout medieval society, and often produced by clergymen themselves. However, unless their production was carefully scrutinised, they could easily lead individuals into heterodoxy or even heresy, and conjure demons rather than act as prayers for the intercession of God. Most troubling was that the individual might come to consider that power came from the blessed object itself rather than the object acting as a focus for God’s power.

This is why the inquisitors at Joan’s trial asked their questions about whether she had placed the sword on an altar, or prayed for it to be more fortunate. They were looking for evidence that she had sought to bless the weapon herself. They wanted to know whether Joan, already guilty of ignoring the Church’s authority by not getting advice from her priest regarding the voices that spoke to her, was also guilty of idolatry: imbuing an inanimate object - her sword - with a power that was God’s alone.

A Sacred Standard?

If this was the direction of their questioning, Joan seems to have been wise to it. She was asked similar questions about her standard, made of white linen strewn with fleurs-de-lys, fringed in silk, and decorated with the image of two angels flanking God holding the world in his hands, and the names Jhesus Maria. Her inquisitors wanted to know whether her voices had told her that ‘she would secure victories by virtue of this standard’ and whether ‘the hope of victory was founded upon this standard or upon herself’, angling for a response that suggested that Joan believed the standard to have a power of its own. Joan’s response, that the hope of victory ‘was founded on the Lord and no one else’, was a neatly orthodox response.

The story of Joan is very much the story of the symbolism which surrounded her. As the young maid of a simple peasant family Joan’s sacred mission was easier to believe than if she had been a noblewoman, let alone a noble man. She was no threat to Charles, already beset by factions and rivals. In order that she should be able to lead men, however, she had to adopt the symbols of a military leader. Her standard and her sword, like the armour she wore into battle were the physical signs of that martial status, as harness, swords and standards were for all medieval military commanders. Their divine origins reflected that this status was not a normal one, but divinely ordained and supported. It was therefore natural for a medieval audience to weave a story tying the breakage and loss of this god-given sword to the collapse of Joan’s fortunes, and for her accusers to focus on these outward symbols as proof of her spiritual unorthodoxy. The more modern myth, making Joan only the latest bearer of a sword of ancient heroes, shifted the focus from the Maid as an agent of divine will to a national icon of resistance and freedom, more in keeping with the sense of nationhood of the post-medieval France.

Selected Readings:

• Primary source quotations come from Joan of Arc: La Pucelle, translated and annotated by Craig Taylor (Manchester, 2006)

• Kelly DeVries, Joan of Arc: Military Leader (Stroud, 2011)

• L. Marek, ‘The Blessing of Swords. A new look into inscriptions of the Benedictus – type’, Acta Militaria Mediaevalia, X (2014)

• Don Skemer, Binding Words: Textual Amulets in the Middle Ages (University Park, PA, 2006)

• Bonnie Wheeler, ‘Joan of Arc’s Sword in the Stone’, Fresh Verdicts on Joan of Arc, ed. Bonnie Wheeler & Charles T. Wood (Abingdon, 2014)