Falstaff and Me
Jonathan Sumption’s Hundred Years War
by Paul Bailey
or,
I Can’t Believe I Read the Whole Thing
in which I discuss what I learned from having read way too many pages of Jonathan Sumption’s magnum opus, whose final volume, Triumph and Illusion, was released this August. Disclaimer: I am not a historian. This is a personal essay about my own take-away, not an expert peer review or debate.
Introduction: Misremembered
People call the Korean War the “Forgotten War,” but American history has plenty of other candidates for that nickname, such as the quasi-war with France, the Barbary Wars, and countless micro-wars, from Grenada to Yugoslavia. My favorite pick is the War of 1812, which ironically is as famous as it is forgotten. Everyone knows it existed and knows who the belligerents were, but no one talks about it. The British don’t talk about it because it was a footnote to a bigger war they were fighting at the time. We Americans don’t talk about it because we got our butts kicked by Canadians, and that is just embarrassing. The Canadians don’t talk about it, because they kicked our butts and they’re politely sorry about that, eh. Technically nobody won, therefore nobody lost, but since not winning is as good as losing to some, Americans are content to skip over it in history class. For probably the same reason, thousands of books can be found about the American Civil War (how can you lose a war if you fight yourself?) but hardly anything can be found on the War of 1812. When Americans do discuss the war, it is either (1) a mention of the Battle of New Orleans, where we were the butt-kickers for a change, or (2) a disingenuous narrative spin that insists we really did win, because we would be different today had it not been for the war.
The subject of this post is the Hundred Years War, not the War of 1812, but I see many parallels between them, or rather how they are perceived centuries later. Everyone knows that the Hundred Years War happened. Everyone knows that during the war England had some of the most spectacular battle victories of the age, but few in the English-speaking world like to point out that England decisively lost the war. When they do bring it up, they sugarcoat it by mentioning that the war transformed England into the great nation that it has become, so really they won, right? Finally, just as with the War of 1812, my main obstacle to learning anything about the Hundred Years War was the scarcity of good popular history books on the subject, at least in English. And like any good casual history buff, I do want a popular history, not a long bibliography of scholarly articles. Nor will I get on a plane to Bologne or some damn place, put on white gloves, and read a crumbling Latin codex just to say I know the material. Do a YouTube search of “CGP Grey” and “Staten Island,” and you will see what I am not.
In case you think I am exaggerating the scarcity of good popular history books on the War, let me clarify the “good” and “popular” part of “good popular history book.” In my opinion, the golden standard for a single-volume popular history book about a specific event or era is James McPherson’s book on the American Civil War, Battle Cry of Freedom. But there is popular and then there is pop. In a time when someone like Bill O’Reilly can write a best-selling “history book,” and when even some incurious influencer with a hobby and a side hustle can self-publish one as an e-book on Amazon, close scrutiny of a nonfiction writer’s credentials is in order. I look for something that was written for the general reader but by a trustworthy historian; however, I am lazy enough to be satisfied if the spine has publisher names like “Belknap Harvard” or “[Anything] University Press.”
I first tried reading Conquest: The English Kingdom of France, 1417-1450 by Juliet Barker (which only covers the Lancastrian Phase, but whatever), and after that I tried The Hundred Years War: The English in France, 1337-1453 by Desmond Seward. I could not finish either book. I didn’t have a problem with the authors’ credentials as historians (and in fact Barker’s book more than satisfied my publisher rule of thumb). The problem is that neither author wrote like a serious historian. Just because your book is not a peer-reviewed journal article does not mean it has to be sensationalist. Both books had boring titles, which is promising, but the language inside their covers had a yellow tabloid quality, which I instinctively distrust. Barker, in particular, might have titled her book Rouen Babylon.
I could only find two other single-volume books that seemed to span the general subject of the war, as opposed to single battles or biographies, and both books had the non-distinct title The Hundred Years War. One was by Christopher Allmand and the other was by by Anne Curry. But surely their target audience consists of grad students, not casual history buffs. Each book’s narrative section was no more detailed than an encyclopedia article, leaving their remaining space to focus instead on the different themes of the war — the preferred approach by academics. This is interesting stuff, but I can only process it if I am already familiar with the actual narrative of the war first.
What remains is Jonathan Sumption’s book series: at five volumes, three thousand-ish pages, and taking four decades to complete, even Sima Qian would be impressed. One must wonder how Sumption found time for a meal, much less a law career.
I know that all this must sound like a pointless digression, but I feel like I need to justify why I read something so long, when my original motivation was merely a typical history buff’s curiosity about a time and place. That motivation somehow transformed into an obsession, not about the war, but about just finding an all-in-one, single-volume popular history book about it. I mean, really? Is the Hundred Years War so irrelevant nowadays that there is just no demand for this? So little demand that the only historian willing to write a decent narrative is clearly a madman to have written one so long, and on his free time after work, too! Who would take the time to actually read all that? Especially after having already sunk plenty of time into reading two and two halves of other books on the same subject, as I have? A weirdo, that’s who. Use it for the book’s tag line: It takes a weirdo to read a madman. Why am I like this? No one is making me read this, so why am I doing it? Why do I even care at all about a historical event which happened six centuries ago, which is so long forgotten by now that names like Guesclin and Xaintrailles sound like brands of drain cleaner, and “William de la Pole” sounds like a burlesque stage name? Is it the sunk cost fallacy? Am I in blood stepp’d in so far that yadda yadda yadda?
Well, whatever. I finished the first four volumes just in time for the fifth and final volume to be released, and then I read that too, bringing me to the end of my Hundred Years War “journey” (to appropriate an annoying influencer term). If I can think of five thousand words to say about Wagner’s Ring or a Cartoon Network Show (elsewhere on this blog), then I definitely have things to say about these books, so here we go.
The rest of this post will use “book” to refer to the entire series, and “volume” to refer to individual volumes of the series. Do not misinterpret my tendency to discuss Volume Five more than the others as an indication that it is the superior volume. It so happens that Volume Five is the only one I can still remember anything about, because these volumes are so freaking long.
Basic Impressions
Before we start, can we agree that Jonathan Sumption is an excellent writer? This is the main qualifier against any criticism I make about the book going forward, so it needs to be always kept mind. Every sentence is lucid and easy to read, no matter how long some get. He isn’t ostentatious — the problem which made me put down Barker’s and Seward’s books — but he isn’t dry either. He has a way of maintaining a neutral tone without ever sounding disinterested. The most charged his language ever got was when he called Isabella of France “formidable and evil” (vol. 1 ch. 3), but this is an extreme example. His commentary on certain people is usually not directed at the people themselves, but rather at their posthumous perceptions, such that someone may be “underappreciated” or “misunderstood.” While I would not go so far as to call the book a page-turner, reading it was no chore. I would not have made it through all five volumes otherwise.
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Sumption seems to be a true believer in narratives over themes. “Although narrative history has not always been fashionable,” he wrote in the preface to Volume One, “the facts sometimes explain themselves better than any analysis of them could possibly do.” How strange, then, that Sumption’s book demonstrates so well the superiority of a thematic approach to studying and writing about history, as opposed to a narrative approach.
As a non-historian, I do not know which approach is easier to write, but I do know now that a narrative is not always the easier approach to read. I did not do a count, but it sure felt like three quarters of the book tediously discussed things that were going to happen but then never did, viz., dead-end summits where the parties could not come to an agreement, and planned military expeditions that fizzled out before they could get moving. Almost all such expedition failures were due to rulers’ never-ending struggle to secure money to pay for them. These facts did eventually “explain themselves,” but in the same way that I can tell how many days are in a year by waiting and observing for 365 days instead of just looking it up. How money was a problem, and how it was dealt with differently over the coarse of the war, is a “theme” that could have been examined in a single dedicated chapter, thereby eliminating the need for the million and one examples that pervaded the entire book series. Sumption would not have to abandon narrative altogether, but by isolating just a few of these themes to their own chapters or sections, he could have reduced the book from five volumes to a single volume of perhaps eight or nine hundred pages.
If thematic analysis is better, even in popular-history texts, then what is the problem people have with it? Probably the rhetoric used by many historians, which rubs a lot people the wrong way. More than just preferring to analyze themes, their aversion to narratives smacks of belief, which is anathema to scientism. They place an emphasis on glacially-changing trends, to such a point that many historians disbelieve in things like cause and effect, or seminal events that delimit Before and After. They insist that such and such cataclysmic event did not alter the course of history, which was heading in that direction anyway; or such and such historical figures, despite their remarkable strangeness, are no more than the product of their environment. Biographers, who tend to be more widely read by the lay public, have the opposite problem but worse, pretending that our world was created ex nihilo by the genius of the one person they are writing about. I suspect that many historians, then, do not disbelieve in cause and effect, rather they are reactionary to the popular tendency to over-dramatize things, and their rhetoric reflects this. But rhetoric has consequences, and this is a systemic error.
Another cause of historians’ rhetoric may derive from the dearth of source material, and medievalists may have the hardest time with it. The further back you go, into ancient and prehistoric times, the more research becomes the purview of archaeologists, geologists, and geneticists, rather than historians; the more recent you get, into modern times, the surviving paper trail is such an embarrassment of riches for historians that they can keep publishing new research all the way to the grave. But regarding the Middle Ages, most manuscripts that still survive have been archived, catalogued, and written about repeatedly by generations of historians. What’s a newer medievalist to do?
When a discipline has been beaten to death, its disciples must grasp for relevance. Isaac Newton’s fourth rule of philosophical reasoning states that if a theory satisfies the evidence, do not change it until new evidence arises that contradicts it. Of course you can change the theory if a new theory either more accurately reflects the old evidence or it is simpler than the old theory (thereby satisfying Newton’s first rule* as well: do not overcomplicate your theory). But some who lack the genius for improving a theory in this way prefer to simply be contrarians, thereby violating Rule Four. Rather than debunk old myths and clarify history, they replace those old myths with opposing new myths, and thus muddy up history even more. They make claims like “theory X was made in a time when people had Y values,” which may be true, but it does not necessarily mean that the old theory does not still fit the evidence**.
[*Since history is not an exact science like chemistry or physics, only Newton’s first and fourth rules of philosophical reasoning apply.]
[**In fairness, good researchers say this too; contrarians are merely the ones who use it as a weak excuse. Most do follow up the claim with proof that the theory needs an update. As a history book ages, it tells us less about the time it covers and more about the time of its writing. Do not read Gibbon to understand ancient Rome; read Gibbon to understand the eighteenth century.]
Few researchers of any merit fall into that trap. The more honest temptation is to conduct increasingly abstruse inquiries into certain “themes” to analyze history from. Just how did the Hundred Years War affect the consumption of vegetables by children between the ages of 6 and 12 in the western Anjou region during the 1390s? Doesn’t that question keep you up at night? Then again, how abstruse is too abstruse? It’s hard to draw a line on that. Researchers who deep-dive into narrow subjects provide the rest of us with the tools to connect those seemingly unrelated narrow subjects together, or weave them into a bigger picture, without having to do the more esoteric research ourselves. Fun fact: Sir Andre Geim was awarded the satirical Ig Nobel Prize for levitating a frog, only to be awarded the actual Nobel Prize a decade later. You just never know when seemingly useless information will become useful.
Relax. I am not trying to discredit an entire profession, which is populated by far more accomplished people than me. But I am poking fun at it because, let’s be honest, academia begs to be made fun of at times. If I want to discredit anything in academia, it would be those AI-generated research papers that sneak past the peer reviews, or articles that clutter up search results with meaningless titles like “Intersections and Transformations of Modality During the Hundred Years War.” Great! Now I have to read the abstract just to know what the damn article is even about!
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Every non-fiction writer has a personal bias, regardless of their subject, whether they have an agenda or not. What is Sumption’s? After reading this book, I am convinced that he really wanted to convince the reader that the pen is mightier than the sword. That he was a barrister and a UK Supreme Court justice might explain it, but the evidence is in the text. His terse narrative of the Battle of Sluys set the standard for all five volumes: He would rush over some of the most famous and dramatic battles of the Middle Ages, but go into great detail (suspicious detail, in fact, more on that later) about more diplomatic meetings, summits, assemblies of Estates General, Parliaments, and war councils, than I could possibly remember.
He extended this to individual people as well. He was, for example, far more interested in the bureaucratic Duke of Bedford than his warlike older brother, Henry V. He did not outright say this, but you could tell just by the amount of ink spent on each person. He dwelt at length on anyone he deemed politically astute, such as Yolande of Aragon, Regnault de Chartres, or Henry Beaufort. He did the same for diplomatic ogres and man‐children as well, such as John the Fearless or Henry Duke of Gloucester, as if to serve a cautionary tale about the dangers of political tactlessness. He was also, within certain boundaries, sympathetic towards certain figures that other historians have bad-mouthed for centuries, such as Georges de la Trémoille and Dauphin Louis (older brother of Charles VII), who both failed at making peace, yet still put more effort into it than most of their contemporaries. And finally, thank god, he did not dwell on over-hyped exotics like Gilles de Rais.
In addition to emphasizing some overlooked figures, Sumption had a tendency to skew and slant the narratives of the more famous figures, giving one side of a story more weight than another. Although I agree with his point that Joan of Arc’s true contribution to the war was psychological rather than tactical, I think he pressed it too far. He exaggerated the significance of her role in the bloodless March to Reims, and exaggerated the insignificance of her role in her earlier more violent campaigns. The truth in both cases is probably somewhere in the middle. The way he described the surrender of Troyes in 1429, you would misperceive that Joan was the greatest poker player that ever lived, coolly faking out the enemy and her king alike with the bluff of the century. This is incorrect. Joan was probably not bluffing. She believed her pair of deuces would trump the enemy’s full house, and was so confident about it that she was about to play it. The people of Troyes were as stupid as they were cowardly: they could see her far weaker hand as well as she could, but they folded anyway. (Don’t laugh.) Sumption got his facts right, but he had a slightly misleading way of telling it. Why? Probably because the March to Reims was the most nonviolent part of Joan’s campaign, in which the surrender of Troyes was achieved by something other than by brute force.
There was one amusing exception to all this, Sumption’s defense of England’s walk-out of the Congress of Arras. Had they accepted France’s offer, they might still have Normandy and Guyenne to this day, but because they walked out, they lost even that. Sumption could have easily dismissed this as hawkish pigheadedness, but instead, he cited all the good reasons for refusing the offer, mainly that it would be a return to the centuries-long problem inherent with their king being a vassal to another king. “English medieval diplomats were dedicated students of history,” he said. “The lesson was not lost on them” (vol. 5 ch. 9). If the Academy Awards tend to favor movies about Hollywood, I suppose historians tend to favor other historians.
Except for his prefaces, which tended to be more editorial than the main body of the text, Sumption never admitted to having any personal bias. Some people may have a problem with that, but I do not. I appreciate the amount of attention that Sumption gave to the kind of stuff that the medieval-warfare geeks and the weapons-and-armor bros overlook. His chapter on Jacqueline of Bavaria (vol. 5 ch. 4) shakes off the perception of an insular war, which one may get by default when reading only about events occurring near the fields of battle. It also demonstrates that political manoeuvring far away could have just as dramatic an impact as the actual battles themselves. The Hundred Years War was less often the romantic sacrificial chess of Morphy, and more often the positional chess of Steinitz. This focus on the political chess game of war, biased or not, is beyond criticism. Some of Sumption’s slanting of narratives to emphasize politics over combat deserve a tiny bit of criticism, though they would have been harmless if he had stated it as a sort of thesis, and let his presentation of the history be his argument. Many writers do this. He did not, but should we still care? Frankly no. Most history writing, popular or scholarly, is a matter of either opinion or context, no matter how “fact-based” it tries to be.
To illustrate what I mean, consider this thought experiment: While most history buffs’ choice of primary-source reading is the exciting stuff, like Pisan or Froissart, actual historians will read parish registers, financial ledgers, wills, watch logs, and so on — the kind of stuff the rest of us cannot read for more than twelve seconds before going cross-eyed. This gives a historian a more statistical overview of history, painting a more accurate picture of the reality of the time they are studying. But is it really more accurate? For a snapshot, yes; for a narrative… not necessarily. A population’s perceptions and attitudes do not always reflect the physical reality. To borrow an engineering term, society has phase lag. Since a future is determined not only by the current physical reality but also by people’s decisions, historians would be mistaken to disregard those exciting Chronicles, no matter how full of hot air and propaganda they are.
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There is a better reason to doubt Sumption’s credibility, although it is only a doubt, nothing more. He simply went into too much detail — more detail than he could possibly have known. I have no doubt that he did his research. His bibliography at the end of each volume is impressive. He was a fellow at Magdalen College before he got into law. This is not just some dude who likes history and talks about it without authority. But I cannot overlook that he described many events in greater detail than any contemporaneous report did. Of the countless war councils and summits he described, in many cases we do not even know who all showed up, much less do any minutes survive. Yet he described them as if a stenographer had been present. He told us who argued what point, how testy the atmosphere got, at one point this guy interrupted angrily, at another point that guy made such and such proposal, but it was thrown out in favor of another proposal, and so on.
This kind of guesswork and embellishment would be fine if it was a historical novel, but it never takes that tone, nor does Sumption say anything about it in any of his volumes’ prefaces. Nor can any of his embellishments be easily checked, becase his citations are so sparse that he might as well have not cited anything at all. Instead of following up one thing, you have to follow up on the entire work, by reading every source in his massive bibliography.
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While Sumption at least tried to argue the case for narrative history over the analysis of themes, his never explained or excused his quaintly traditional spelling of proper nouns. He would write Owen Glendower instead of Owain Glyndŵr, Saintrailles instead of Xaintrailles, and so on. He sometimes zigzagged between John and Jean, even when discussing the same person. Since he made no apology, this can only be a troll. I kind of love this. It targets people who spell Confucius’s name as Kong Fuzi even when writing non-academically to readers who have only ever seen the older spelling; or speakers who put on airs by forgoing foreign cities’ anglicized names in favor of their local pronunciations, even when speaking entirely in English.
Troll on, Lord Sumption, troll on. But if you really wanted to push their buttons, you should have gone all the way. Write Orleance instead of Orléans, Montacute instead of Montagu… Give them the Holinshed spelling. And then, to truly break them, refer to the region between Normandy and Maine as Alensoan.
Curses and Illusions
Volume Four, Cursed Kings, is the best of the five volumes because of its choice where to focus its narrative. Its powerful story of Charles VI’s family is the stuff of Shakespearean tragedy, and not just because Shakespeare happened to write plays about this time and place. Perhaps Sumption did not intend to focus the narrative on the French royal family, but the back cover description (US paperback version) seems to confirm it: “Cursed Kings tells the story of the destruction of France by the madness of its king and the greed and violence of his family. … [They] fought over the spoils of the kingdom under the vacant gaze of the mad King Charles VI…” This brief description almost concurs with one of the two familiar storylines. For the English-speaking world, the familiar storyline is a myth propagated by Shakespeare that France fell because they swooned over Henry V’s virility. The alternative is that France fell due to the madness of Charles VI and the duplicity of his queen, Isabeau of Bavaria.
Cursed Kings rejects the former storyline and accepts the latter, but with a very important amendment: the tragedy is that, regardless of the king’s madness, it did not have to happen. The text never explicitly stated this opinion, but once again, “the facts sometimes explain themselves.” Charles VI had a family and council filled with competent, capable, and charismatic leaders, and he had a nation that still deeply revered him in spite of his weakness. Things could have turned out so differently. But no matter how capable his family members were, they were too busy looking out for number one, too greedy to quit while they were ahead, too greedy to compromise, too suspicious of each other, too quick to justify each other’s suspicion, and, to drive the point home, too greedy, too greedy, and too greedy. They were also way too greedy. The narrative of these events is so flat that you would think, if this was a fictional novel, Sumption must be some sort of cruel author-god mercilessly looking down on his creation’s self-destruction with depraved indifference, doing nothing to intervene. Well, now I’m exaggerating, but parts of the book enraged me, to read of such unnecessary ruin.
Enraged over the actions of people who have been dead for more than six hundred years! Perhaps this is because it remains relevant. In the narrative we see what seems all-too-familiar. Partisans rush into their corners, while sane people in the center get shouted down by the demagogues and are forced to choose a side. The instigators’ worst flaws are as immutable as any Greek play’s hamartia. The worst instigators on both sides, especially John the Fearless and Bernard of Armagnac, not only take too long to get their comeuppance, but they receive it in the form of vengeance or mob violence, not justice, and thus they are survived by the lawlessness and destruction they helped create.
With respect to mutability and self-reflection, John the Fearless must have been especially dense. In 1413 he employed demagoguery that he knew, or should have known, would provoke a violent uprising. The result was an untameable beast so far beyond his control that he quickly learned to regret it… and quickly unlearned it again, for he did the same exact thing five years later. The violence eventually settled down, but the damage was done. To Sumption, this second rebellion was the final death knell of medieval Paris. Invoking “Jean Gerson’s quivering jeremaiad against the ‘once great city, stained with blood and evil,’” he wrote that “[f]or the rest of his life Charles VII preferred to govern France from the castles of Berry and the Loire Valley, as most of his successors would do until the seventeenth century” (vol. 4 ch. 13). Paris would one day achieve and even surpass its former international prestige, but for the time being it was to remain merely a shadow of the city it had been at the end of the fourteenth century.
Sumption painted a more sympathetic portrait of Isabeau, depicting her as a foreigner out of her depth just trying to keep things from spiralling out of hand. I already mentioned Sumption’s defense of her second son, Louis. One of the greatest what-ifs of history is how differently things would have turned out had Louis lived to succeed his father as king. Instead he fell ill and died in 1415 at the age of eighteen.
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After the Valois tragedy came the Lancastrian tragedy — not the Wars of the Roses (which is outside the scope of Sumption’s book), but rather the tragedy that the Hundred Years War continued, even after many of Henry VI’s ministers knew that it could no longer be won. This was partly because of an inability to convince people of the reality of the situation, partly because they felt honor bound not to surrender their claim to the throne of France while the king was still in his minority, and partly because not all the princes could even agree on how bad the situation actually was. (It’s hard not to detect a note of judgment in Sumption’s tone whenever he mentioned Humphrey Duke of Gloucester.) So they had no choice but to continue wasting lives, money, and national honor for a lost cause. “Caught between an uncompromising public, unbending financial realities, and an impossible diplomatic situation, Henry’s ministers were forced to go on rolling the stone of Sisyphus” (vol. 5 ch. 11).
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Sumption’s final volume, Triumph and Illusion, provides no explanation for its title. The “Triumph” is obvious enough: the war ended, and one side won. But what is the “Illusion?”
The first and most obvious illusion was that England could ever win the war. Even the French believed it. Sumption conveyed this well when he described the Armagnacs’ despair during their low point. Although the Battle of the Herrings did not really change the situation, it was the last straw, a loss that cut their hearts out. The mystique of English invincibility cast a powerful spell over the French, and it wasn’t broken until the capture of the boulevard at Saint Loup — a victory which instantly and permanently shattered this illusion. To mark this small skirmish during the Siege of Orléans as the turning point of the whole war is a flagrant exaggeration, but the siege overall serves as a useful microcosm for at least the Lancastrian Phase of the war: The English attacked Orléans with insufficient resources, and despite setbacks, they spent months making slow and steady progress towards their goal. At Saint Loup, the French were initially driven back yet again from a fight they had no business losing. They were rallied to victory by Joan of Arc (whose illusions were the opposite of everyone else’s), only then to discover how thinly spread, how beatable, the English actually were. For both the siege and the war overall, the remaining narrative mostly involved what chess players call overloading: the English struggled to defend too much with too little.
Although the English and their French allies should not have attacked Orléans, the Champagne cities’ overreaction to the approach of Charles VII and his army was just as irrational. They had no reason to give in as easily as they did. The destruction of England’s army at Patay made them extremely vulnerable, but Charles VII then made a tactical error by going to Reims instead of Normandy. Worse, he didn’t take heavy siege equipment with him. Of the key cities in Charles’s path, only Auxerre was a certain victory for the French, should the two sides commit to a fight. Neither Auxerre nor the other cities needed to win, or even hold out to any extremity. Even the bare minimum resistance to still have been considered honorable would have slowed Charles down enough. The limits imposed by time, money, and supplies would have forced him to turn back without being crowned, and the war’s ensuing stalemate might have resulted in two French kingdoms divided by the Loire, wherein Henry VI and his heirs would hold even Paris. Instead, due to their uncertainty over Joan of Arc’s putative supernatural endowments and Charles VII’s divine right to be king, the key cities of Auxerre, Troyes, and Reims caved in without a fight, and that led to a chain reaction all over the region. This second illusion — the belief that to fight Joan and the king was to fight against divine will, against the inevitable — looks like a paradox when paired with the first: the English could not have won, but they should not have lost, either.
While going to Reims was a tactical error, it strategically made all the difference, not only because it brought the war to Philip the Good’s doorstep, but also because of the third illusion, which remained in place for the remainder of the war: the mystique of investment. Legally, Charles VII was already king and didn’t need a coronation, but such hair-splitting bluster didn’t mean much to common people. His coronation, on the other hand, did mean much. It ticked off all the legitimacy checkboxes that Henry VI’s coronation in Paris two years later did not. It included more peers of France, its anointment included the oil of Clovis (or at least people believed that), and it took place at Reims, the traditional site for the occasion. This was deep inside territory that the enemy had held for years. That Charles could go there unopposed for his coronation made one thing clear: Charles was no longer the pretender king, Henry was.
Charles VII’s coronation removed the last hope of propagating the fourth illusion, which in truth no one ever held at all: Henry V and later the Duke of Bedford tried to transform the war from a conflict between England and France to a conflict between France and its factious dissenters. But many French cities outside Normandy who declared for Henry VI only did so because of the alliance between England and Burgundy. Their loyalty was to Philip the Good, not Henry VI. The Treaty of Troyes had always been merely tolerated as a means for peace, which it failed to achieve. The longer the war lasted, the more Henry’s ministers relied on English troops and money, and the more they gave up on the pretense of their administration being “French.”
Shortly after the war ended, Pope Pius II wryly commented that arming a young peasant girl and making her shoulder such lofty expectations during their most desperate hour could not have been “difficult to manage for the French, who believe everything that they hear.” But that illustrates the point. The English could not have won, yet they were deluded into trying anyway. The French kept losing battles until their fear of failure crippled them, and by then they too believed the English were going to win. Joan of Arc had the opposite illusion, believing that she could not lose, and she convinced enough of the right people about this to have changed Charles VII’s outlook entirely, without actually changing his numbers, coffers, or resources. Joan’s strange epic was driven less by people acting upon physical reality and more by people acting upon their beliefs. It’s a testament to the power of mind over matter, even when the fortunes of war are involved.
A Long Digression on Joan of Arc’s Historiography
Sumption’s tendency towards embellishment and guesswork extended to historical figures’ personal qualities as well. His sketch of Joan of Arc is instructive of my point, so it deserves its own long digression. But first, let me qualify: Sumption’s book is a history of a century-long conflict, not a biography about someone who took part in only one year of it. So this digression has little to do with my thoughts on the book; I am just indulging my fascination with knowing the unknowable — in this case, judging the truth of a past that we can see only through the discrete filter of words, and untrustworthy words at that. I have chosen Joan of Arc for this thought experiment partly because she is an extraordinary figure, but mainly because I have read more primary source material on her than on her contemporaries, since most of it is conveniently bundled into two long trial documents.
Sumption rightly explained that although Joan of Arc is one of the most well-documented persons of her time, the primary documentation is “treacherous” and “intensely political” (vol. 5 ch. 6). Not a word of it was objective, and every word of it came with a heavy dose of agenda. Many popular-history writers who encounter this problem don their critical reading hats and prepend some apologetic paragraph explaining that they made their own judgment call about what truth can be extracted from the sources, since the real truth cannot be known for certain. Sumption, on the other hand, seems to have ignored the primary sources almost entirely, in favor of more lateral research.
The idea is this: Joan of Arc was not the first female peasant to use mysticism as a way of wielding influence, nor would she be the last. Since Joan’s contemporary witnesses are unreliable, we instead look at the other mystics that we assume resemble her. Therefore Joan must have been histrionic, trance-like, and anorexic — almost identical to Falconetti’s famous portrayal in the 1928 movie La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc — even though it contradicts almost all of what her contemporaries, friend or foe, said about her.
Sumption described Joan’s judges as trying to “fit her into conventional legal and religious categories” (vol. 5 ch. 6), yet he was himself trying to fit her into conventional historiographical categories. Many mystics were anorexic, as a show of religious devotion perhaps, therefore Joan must have been anorexic too… But then, how many of those other female mystics, anorexic or not, would also show their religious devotion by dressing indecently in form-fitting men’s clothes? Or expensive men’s clothes for that matter? (Joan was reputed to dress gaudily.) She was too much the only one of her kind for us to justify her characterization as the summary average of Every Mystic Ever, some kind of Ur-Mystic. “Mystic” just happens to be the least bad label anyone can attach to her. The fallacy is saying “(1) She bears some resemblance to other mystics, therefore we shall call her a mystic. (2) Because we now call her a mystic, we can learn other things about her.”
Unfortunately, the alternative to Sumption’s approach — navigating the treacherous minefield of Joan of Arc’s patently unreliable source material — is no better. But they are some of the most fascinating exercises in critical reading, so let’s try it anyway. (An abridged English translation of most of the sources are available in a single-volume collection, Joan of Arc: La Pucelle, by Craig Taylor. An almost-unabridged English translation of just the condemnation trial, The Trial of Joan of Arc by Daniel Hobbins, comes with an excellent introduction.)
To understand the nature of Joan’s charisma, disregard her deeds, and consider only what the source material can tell us about her character — her personality and disposition. Sumption dismissed this too, but an argument could be made that the sources are truer in this regard. Since (we shall see) a brick-wall counterargument will stop us before we can satisfactorily arrive at the truth, I will not dive too deeply into this or try to be too historiographically rigorous, otherwise this will turn into a dissertation. I will loosely appropriate what biblical scholars call the Criterion of Multiple Attestation and the Criterion of Embarrassment. To my knowledge medievalists do not use these, but since almost all direct evidence concerning Joan of Arc is textual, I find it handy.
The Criterion of Embarrassment is a way to determine the credibility of something based on whether or not the author would prefer to say it. Joan’s insubordinate behavior is a good example, since we have not only her condemnation trial, but also accounts from people who would prefer not to speak of such unflattering things. (Our modern tendency to admire defiance against authority would be out of place in the fifteenth century.) Perceval de Cagny was more candid than others about the friction between Joan and the king, using expressions like “out of spite” to describe some of her actions and gestures towards him. We know that during the last leg of her campaign she rode with a band of Italian mercenaries, but Cagny was the one who basically admitted that she had gone rogue, stealing away from court without the king’s leave and heading north to fight the war on her own terms. Cagny was a servant in the household of Joan’s best friend the Duke of Alençon, so I do not think he would mention this unless it was already known at the time to be true.
For Multiple Attestation, we have to disregard the rehabilitation trial, which took place too long after Joan’s death, and consider only independent sources. We may use the original condemnation trial along with various straggling sources, in particular letters written by Regnault de Chartres and Guy de Laval during Joan’s lifetime. I assume Cagny did not actually read Joan’s trial document, so his chronicles might also be considered independent. Regarding her character, these sources are markedly consistent. Guy’s letter presents her tacky flamboyance and her tendency to talk big. Regnault’s letter and Cagny’s chronicle present her apparent pride and obstinacy. The condemnation trial presents her sauciness, her mental sharpness, her crudely empirical thought process, and her tendency to forget that she, not her ego, was the one on trial (her unwise remarks about the cleverer of her two escape attempts naturally remind me of a Scooby-Doo villain saying “I would have gotten away with it too…”). All indicate energy, brassy unselfconsciousness, and a fearlessness that might have been informed more by delusion than by courage.
The rehabilitation trial corroborates all this, but more strongly so, because few witnesses were intentionally asked to describe Joan’s personality. (Note, however, that few of the interrogators’ questions survive, so we have mostly only responses.) Most of the witnesses described events or deeds and gave anecdotes, from which the emergence of her personality is an accidental byproduct. There is a remarkable consistency even among these unintended accounts. Of particular interest in the retrial is Jean de Dunois’s testimony, because he seemed to admire the same personality traits about Joan that Regnault de Chartres could not stand. (Dunois might have been biting his lip for the king’s sake, but I don’t want to get too deep in these weeds.)
Putting it all together, the source material presents her as unshy, tart, talkative when serious, laconic when not, and not at all phased by the high status of anyone she spoke to. It was not beneath her to verbally roast someone, or even ridicule her own interrogators for asking what she thought was a stupid question. One cannot say whether her dry wit was meant as playful cheekiness or just plain disrespect, but we do know that, even among allies, not everyone received it the same way. This does not match the ecstatic, Margery Kempe-style charisma that we popularly associate with mystics. Instead, it is the sort of abrasive charisma that walks a fine line between galvanizing some, like Dunois and Alençon, both in their twenties at the time, and offending others, like Regnault de Chartres, an admirable but probably humorless elder statesman. Characterizing her this way connects the dots better than the earlier Ur‐Mystic description did; histrionic and ecstatic behavior may win over huddled masses, but it probably would not win over so much of the military nobility the way Joan did, even in a century when such behavior would have been perceived as either demonic or transcendental.
Why do historians reject this? Perhaps the more scientistically minded have a prejudice to overlook the broad diversity of personalities among the religiously devoted, and therefore characterize them all as irrational zealots without any distinguishable traits. But considering the close relation between history and anthropology, I doubt this is the case. There are more legitimate counterarguments to the critical reading I have done so far. Let me offer three of my own.
First, Joan of Arc’s two trials were sponsored by people with opposite intentions. One wants you to believe she was bloodthirsty and violent, and the other wants you to believe she was heroic and valiant. Ironically, exaggerations in both trials reinforce each other rather than cancel each other out, because both trials basically exaggerate the same thing. Suppose you want to know more about Bill, so you ask around. His friend tells you “Bill is confident,” while his enemy tells you “Bill is arrogant.” Which do you believe? Both, of course. Their accounts are colored differently, but otherwise identical. This gives us plenty of reason to suspect that Joan’s two trials accidentally conspire to make her seem more forward, brash, and mentally present than she really was. It isn’t enough to assume the opposite is true — you still need to follow the evidence rather than invent things — but it is enough to be very skeptical.
Second, the rehabilitation trial seemed less a case of Church scholars making propaganda to manipulate the masses and more a case of vice-versa. The witnesses probably did not know that the judges’ verdict was a foregone conclusion. With the notable exception of Jean Pasquerel, they knew better than to say things like “I saw the sky open up and God smote her enemies with fireballs” or “I saw her raise an army of Christian zombies” or “she turned me into a newt but I got better,” otherwise the judges would smell their b.s. from a mile away and quickly know to disregard the entire testimony. Instead the witnesses hedged their claims of miracles, implying them instead of asserting them, such that an unconvinced judge could still explain them rationally and not discredit the testimony. A judge could attribute Joan’s changing of wind direction to coincidence, and he could attribute the soldiers’ stated sexual indifference towards her to their confusion over her masculine attire and lifestyle. A critical enough mind would see the intent behind this, disregard both the rational and the irrational interpretations, and declare the entire story to be tainted.
The third counterargument is a more subtle variation of the second: The trial witnesses’ testimonies seem so lifelike. Their amazing-but-technically-plausible stories are flavored with the kind of mundane details that medieval chroniclers would never think to include. Who wouldn’t want to believe Jean d’Aulon’s account of Joan standing her ground alone before the walls of Saint Pierre le Moûtier while her army retreated and left her behind? or his account of her tussle with a Basque soldier in a ditch, accidentally resulting in the capture of a boulevard? or Alençon’s account of her playful trash talk at his timidity before the battle of Jargeau? or her page’s account of her panicked rush to gear up after waking up late for her first battle? or her own unintentionally funny account of how she empirically figured out Catherine de la Rochelle was a fraud? These accounts breathe the illusion of life into their subject with the vividness of a Dutch painting. Even the overarching narrative of Joan’s yearlong campaign is suspiciously story-like, with its threefold character arc: rise, hubris, downfall. Perhaps because they are busy reacting against the nineteenth-century patriotic image of Joan, modern historians overlook this quality when warning the casual reader about the sources’ political nature. Of course the sources are political, anyone can see that. But they are also frankly entertaining. Few things can disarm and manipulate an otherwise critical mind more seductively than entertainment value. Regine Pernoud fell for it. Astonishingly, so did Mark Twain. For the purposes of this exercise, so did I to some extent.
So which approach is better: a critical reading of primary sources, or a comparative study of some overall themes related to the material? In the specific case of Joan of Arc’s character, I preferred the former approach, while Sumption (an actual historian, let me reiterate) seemed to prefer the latter. Both approaches result in unavoidable guesswork, and the truth can never be known. But this is all a digression of my own interest. None of it contradicts Sumption’s statement in the book about what really matters concerning Joan of Arc: her “main contribution to victory was the morale of the Dauphin’s troops. She persuaded them that victory was within their grasp” (vol. 5 ch. 6).
Charles VII and What We Call Victorious
The most fascinating historical figure of the war is King Charles VII, and the most fascinating thing about him is how successful he was while still being so outwardly unimpressive and, in many ways, unlikeable. He was by every posthumous account a pathetic runt who had no charisma and who at every turn was crippled by indecisiveness. (His portrait by Fouquet doesn’t help his case.) And yet he was the one who decisively won the Hundred Years War. It forces one to rethink leadership virtues.
Charles VII did have virtues, but they were boring virtues. At least one epic ballad was written about him (Vigiles du roi Charles VII), but who would ever write an epic ballad specifically about his prudence, his mastery of realpolitik, and his patient tendency to forgo victory by force in favor of glacial and far less dramatic improvements? When discussing the great qualities of leaders — specifically male leaders — even six hundred years later we tend to only talk about macho qualities. This is unfortunate, because it distorts people’s understanding both of virtue and masculinity.
There is a popular narrative in storytelling (which I touched upon a bit in my post on Wagner’s Ring), that of the valiant masculine warrior who was undermined or betrayed by a petty effeminate bureaucrat. In popular myth, Charles VII has fallen victim to this narrative. Joan of Arc, the David to Charles’s Saul, fills the “masculine” role in this narrative. She was a warrior and Charles was not; she had charisma and Charles had none; she was a hawk who claimed that “peace can only be found at the end of a lance,” and Charles was a dove who always sought the peaceful alternative to fighting. Charles had a petty side, intentionally sabotaging his own commanders and ministers at times to prevent them from outshining him. He did this to Joan of Arc, both at Paris and during her campaign against Perrinet Gressart; to Jacques Cœur; and even to his own son Louis (who was also more traditionally “manly” than Charles). Or so goes the popular narrative. The narrative asks “what if?” If only Joan had been given more support from the king’s court, then perhaps would the French have won? Yes, never mind the blatant way this question overlooks that the French did win.
I always disliked this line of thinking. It resonates just a little too well with fascist sentiments. In Charles’s case, it’s also a cherry-picking fallacy. It overstates his indecisiveness during his early years, his diplomatic gullibility during his middle years, and his sensualist idleness during his later years, as if his entire life can be judged by these temporary traits. I mentioned mutability earlier, how some important people like John the Fearless and Bernard of Armagnac lacked it. Charles was not one of them. A better narrative might point out that the rash murder of John the Fearless backfired against Charles so badly that it traumatized him and put him into an overcautious funk. He eventually crawled out of it, but he never lost the lesson about making impulsive decisions. It’s true that Charles was easily bamboozled by Burgundians negotiating in bad faith, but this too was something that improved with him over the years. Philip the Good may have gotten the longer end of the stick from the Treaty of Arras, but Charles got what mattered. Between Charles and the English, who had the last laugh?
The reason I bring all this up is to praise Sumption’s neutral tone regarding Charles VII. It is a narrative history, but it isn’t a narrative, not in the pop-sociology sense. By avoiding commentary and by flatly reporting what happened, Sumption inevitably placed Charles under a better light, because Charles did win the war, and he often did it in a less violent way.
Being less violent may have been necessary. Suppose — and this is a fantasy, given the improbable odds — that Charles had been more supportive of Joan of Arc during the Siege of Paris, and further suppose that he captured Paris as a result, after an extremely bloody battle. How long would he have held it, given its large and hostile population? The Parisians had twice before successfully rid themselves of Armagnac leadership using mob violence. Instead, Charles waited until after the Treaty of Arras, in which he formally reconciled with Philip the Good, the object of the city’s loyalty. He then waited a little longer, giving time for the city’s frustrations with the English to germinate. When the time was right, he negotiated his way into Paris. His preference to capture cities this way, his tendency to pardon old enemies, and his caution against overplaying his hand (unlike the partisans of his earlier years) were all fundamental to keeping the momentum of the war going in his favor, as well as gradually ending the cycle of retribution between Burgundians and Armagnacs. Charles’s nationalization of routiers and prohibition of patis also helped tremendously. Many of the upper nobility were blind to the need for this, but clearly the masses were not, otherwise the Praguerie of 1440 would not have been suppressed so easily. Perhaps these military reforms accelerated the demise of chivalry, but let’s not pretend that chivalry was ever a good thing. Charles VII may not have been overtly pious like Louis IX, but he healed the bad blood between France’s warring factions as effectively as Louis’s inquisitions did after the Albigensian Crusade.
Final Thoughts
So many castles and so little electricity. I once watched three John Ford westerns, followed it up with three Akira Kurosawa samurai movies, and finished it off with Peter Jackson’s three Lord of the Rings movies, all in a single week. As much as I enjoyed those movies, I spent the next week listening to nothing but tacky synth-pop music, just to remind myself that technology exists. After reading Sumption’s books, I will need to do that again.