St. Joan lays down her armour at Saint-Denis and is marched south

SAINT-DENIS, France, September 1429 AD — Saint Joan of Arc gave up her armour this month. In the abbey church at Saint-Denis, a few miles north of the Paris wall where a crossbow bolt went through her thigh on September 8, she laid a suit of white armour and a sword on the altar and left them there. Within days the lords of the royal army had her on the road south, away from the city, and she did not want to go.

St. Joan is seventeen. In May she broke the English siege of Orléans, and on July 17, 1429 AD she stood beside Charles VII at Reims with her standard in her hand while he was anointed King of France. She wanted the capital next, and she pressed the king and his princes daily to attack it.

His counsellors wanted terms instead. While the army was still in the field, they were negotiating with Philip the Good, Duke of Burgundy. Last month they signed a four-month truce with him, and its stated purpose was to stop the royal army going any further. Several towns went to the duke, and a peace conference was promised for the spring. For those four months the king’s army was barred from attacking, and the army was the king’s, not hers.

She had not waited for the negotiators. On August 23 she and her field commander, Jean, Duke of Alençon, marched a force of soldiers out of Compiègne without orders and rode for Paris. They left the king behind. They reached Saint-Denis three days later and sent skirmishers up to the gates. The king followed and found the town almost empty, its richer inhabitants gone into Paris for safety, and quartered his men at Aubervilliers, at Montmartre and in the villages around the capital.

The assault went in on September 8, the feast of the Nativity of Our Lady. The army marched on the gate of Saint-Honoré with scaling ladders and bundles of brushwood, the infantry went down into the ditches, and the attack began at ten in the morning and lasted four or five hours. The armed men of Paris held the wall, and with them were four hundred soldiers the Duke of Burgundy had sent into the city and Louis de Luxembourg, bishop of Thérouenne and chancellor to the English king Henry VI. St. Joan went down into the dry outer ditch in her white armour, crossed it and came up on the bank under the wall. She was pushing her lance into the water of the inner moat, looking for a place shallow enough for her men to cross, when the bolt hit her in the thigh. She would not leave the bank, and they carried her off it while she was still calling for another assault. On September 10 the king ordered the retreat. The wound healed in five days, she would tell the court at Rouen.

The church she brought the armour to was the burial place of the kings of France.

In the days after the retreat she carried the armour and the sword into that church and laid them on the altar. Her judges at Rouen would press her on what she had given and why. It was “a whole suit of white armor, in French un blanc harnoys [a white suit of armour], fitting for a man-at-arms, with the sword she won before Paris,” St. Joan answered. She had made the offering out of devotion, she said, as soldiers do when they are wounded. She had been wounded before Paris, and she gave the arms to Saint Denis because his name is the war-cry of France. She had not meant them to be worshipped.

The sword she left on the altar was not the one from Fierbois. In the spring, before Orléans, she had sent a man to the church of Sainte-Catherine-de-Fierbois for a sword buried behind the altar there. She loved that sword, she would tell the court, because it had been found in the church of St. Catherine. She had carried it every day from the day it was brought to her.

She had been living in the town since the end of August, while the army lay in the villages around Paris. Twice at Saint-Denis she stood godmother at the font. She was glad to give the boys the name Charles, for her king, and the girls the name Jeanne, she would tell the court.

She meant to stay there. Her voice had told her to remain at Saint-Denis, she would tell the court, and she wished to remain. But “against her will the lords took her away,” St. Joan said.

On September 13 the troops began the march back to the Loire, and she went with them, carrying the sword from Fierbois and leaving the white armour on the altar behind her. If she had not been wounded at all, she would tell the court, she would never have left Saint-Denis.