Joan of Arc: Under the influence (Daft Essays 3)

A COLD START AND A HOT END

 Saintly voices drive medieval teenager to death by fire

 Rewind  604 years to 1412.  It’s a bitterly cold January night. We’re in a remote village called Domremy a few miles from Nancy in  war-torn northern France

Overview

La Belle France is at war with herself. Shooting herself in la pied, you could say. Two branches of the royal family are at loggerheads.  In one corner is The Duke of Burgundy. He wants to sell out to England which is in predatory mood, champing at the bit to get across what Shakespeare called ‘the narrow seas’ to conquer France.

On the other side are Count Bernard VII of Armagnac and his mate Duke Charles of Orleans. Duke Charles reckons that another Charles – Charles of Ponthieu, last heir of the ruling Valois dynasty, should be king, not that arrogant upstart  with the funny haircut, Henry V of England.  So of course he doesn’t see eye to eye with Burgundy.

That’s a potted version of the big picture.

Underview

Cut to the little picture at Domremy.  We’re inside a flimsy, drafty wooden hut. A humble shepherd’s wife named  Isabelle d’Arc is straining in childbirth – no anaesthetic, hospitals or mod cons in those days.  But she’s doing OK. Then hey presto, and against all the unhygienic odds Madame d’Arc pops out a bouncy daughter.

It’s a happy moment but it’s just as well that that weary Isabelle and her delighted husband Jacquescan’t foresee the trouble and heartbreak that this little miss is soon going to cause them.

Who should be king?

Before la petite Jeanne – Joan to you and me – is out of diapers King Henry Fifth of England has stormed France and wiped the floor with the  faction-ridden French army at the battle of Agincourt in 1415. He’s back two years later to grab  a lot more French territory.   By 1420 Henry has done a deal with the wily, eye-to-the-main-chance Duke of Burgundy.  Henry and his descendants will be kings of France after the death of Charles VI. Henry and Charles VI’s daughter Katherine are spliced to seal the deal.

Little Joan meanwhile is growing up fast back home in the sheep-full Barrois region of what is now Lorraine.  She’s pretty clever and a bit precocious. She knows what’s going on around her. But she doesn’t like it. So Mademoiselle d’Arc asks lots of awkward questions and soon comes to the conclusion that as far as she’s concerned there’s no contest. Charles of Ponthieu should be king.

Under the influence

By the time she’s 12 she’s under the influence of visions and voices in her head. Two early Christian martyrs, St Catherine and St Margaret, are busy telling Joan what’s what. And St Michael the Archangel – Biblically famous for commanding heaven’s armies against Satan no less – often chips in too.

‘Go see the local commander at Vaucoleurs and get him to take you to the royal court for a chat with Duke Charles,’ the saintly trio instruct her.  At age 14 in 1428 she obeys. But it’s a while before anyone takes any notice of this earnest, illiterate peasant girl and her visions.

Ninth grader commands the army

Then Charles finds himself in dire straits. He keeps losing battles, he’s got no money, he’s rapidly being driven back by his enemies. You could say he’s kind of desperate.  On her third attempt Joanie, dressed for the occasion in men’s clothes gets through – the unlikely answer to a beleaguered military leader’s prayers.  In the US today she’d be a ninth grader.

There’s something about Joanie’s tales of voices and visions that convinces Charles (well, he hasn’t much to lose) and he puts her in charge of fighting the English.  Joan d’Arc has, miraculously, a natural gift for human resource management. So she gets on and wins lots of battles, including the famous battle of Orleans in 1425. After that they called her the ‘Maid of Orleans.’

She didn’t need a life coach

Had she lived in our own times, and someone taught her to read and write, young Jeanne could obviously have knocked off a few best selling management text books – She could have thanked Saints Catherine, Margaret and Michael in the acknowledgements.

As it is, she reforms the troops by expelling the hookers from the camp. She insists that her soldiers go the church and attend confession. The men under 15 year old Miss d’Arc’s command are also required to give up swearing and to refrain from looting or harassing the civilian population.  Some little dame, this Joan.

Hot feet

But it can’t last and a hot, painful death awaits her at Rouen.  By 1429 Burgundy has more or less kicked the Armangac /Orleans faction out of the ring and is wheeling and dealing with the English right, left and centre. Joan is taken prisoner by the Burgundians and handed over to the English (in exchange for the mediaval equivalent of megabucks). They try her for heresy.

‘Your voices are demons. You are possessed by devils,’ her accusers say.  Have they forgotten that these voices always told Joan to go to church and to hang on tightly to her virginity?  Wise counsellors, saints. Poor Joan is also charged with cross – dressing and that’s heretical too.

So, still under the influence, she meets a fiery end when they tie her to a stake and light the fire beneath her on 30 May 1431. She’s nineteen and a half.

Heavenly ending

There’s a postscript to this sad tale of what listening to saints can do for you.  In 1920 on May 16, nearly five centuries after her death, Joan of Arc was canonised as a saint by Pope Benedict XV.  A case of if you can’t beat them join them?

‘You spotted snakes with double tongues’ Shakespeare called adders in A Midsummer Night’s Dream with their ‘enamelled skin, weed enough to wrap a fairy in.’ Clearly the Bard of Stratford  thought they were alluring  exotic creatures and had seen plenty of them in the Warwickshire countryside. They often come out to hunt by scent on warm summer nights so perhaps he’d noticed them during his alleged boyhood poaching excursions?

Alas the adder (viperus berus) is now much less common than it was in Shakespeare’s 16^th and early 17^th century. Pesticides and pollution have done their worst. And the poor beast doesn’t enjoy a very friendly public image, so for a long time many people killed any adder they saw.  Even so, the adder is our commonest reptile. There are thought to be about half a million adders in Britain from Scotland to Cornwall, although not in Ireland.  The story about 5^th century St Patrick having cast the snakes out of Ireland is nice but scientifically it’s more likely that The Emerald Isle is just too wet to sustain them.

I waited over forty years for my first glimpse of a live adder in its natural habitat.  And then, as luck would have it I saw two within a few weeks of each other – although they were at opposite ends of England.  The first was at Keilder Water in the Northumberland National Park on a cool August day. It was about two o’clock in the afternoon and there was a bit a watery sunshine as I walked along a streamside path. And there stretched out in front of me as straight as ruler was Mr  – or more probably Mrs – Adder.  They’re famously deaf (‘the deaf adder that stoppeth up her ears’ as Psalm 58 elegantly puts it) so it didn’t hear me coming. About eighteen inches long it was reddish brown in colour with a bright zigzag line running dramatically along its back.

It was in no hurry to move – they are sluggish creatures by nature – so it allowed my husband to move in with a camera about two feet above its head before turning with slow reluctance and sliding off into the undergrowth and making us feel guilty for disturbing its sunbathing. For that’s what it was doing.  Reptiles have variable body temperature. Unlike mammals they have no inbuilt ‘thermostat’. So they are very inactive until they’ve absorbed enough warmth from the sun to get them going. Only then are they able to hunt the small mammals, lizards, birds and eggs that they live on.

My second adder was at Bedgebury Pinetum, near Tonbridge in Kent in very different weather.  It was as blisteringly hot as Sicily and the adder had gone into the lake for a cooling swim.  Reptiles need warmth but they can’t afford to overheat.  It was swimming happily along, its tiny delicate head held aloft and its muscular  body spiralling along behind to provide the forward momentum. It was a lovely sight.

Adders are viviparous, which means that, instead of depositing them, the female retains her eggs inside the body until they are ready to hatch. Because the eggs are protected the adder can live and breed in northern climates which have only a short summer season.   Mating takes place in May or June. Then an average of ten young are ‘born’ to each female in midsummer. For centuries people mistakenly thought the adder ate her young in time of danger – which added to the animal’s bad press. This myth probably arose because living young had been found inside the bodies of recently killed female adders.

So what about the danger? The truth is there isn’t much.  Only 14 people died of adder bite in Britain during the entire 20th century which means you’re about as likely to die a Cleopatra-esque death as you are to be hit by a meteorite. No adder goes looking for human beings to bite and it will attack only if you’re silly enough to pick it  up or provoke it.  There have been cases of people being bitten after accidentally stepping or sitting on an adder while out in the countryside, and of course if this happens it will hurt a lot and the victim must be taken to hospital for treatment immediately. Children, the elderly and the already sick are more likely to be dangerously affected by the venom, which works on the nervous system, rather than adults in reasonable health.

Actually, the mechanism of the bite is interesting.  Two hollow fangs are fixed to a pair of rotating jaw bones and levered instantly into position as the animal strikes. Muscular contraction squeezes the poison along ducts into the fangs. It all goes into the victim or enemy as neatly as a jab at the doctor’s. Not a drop is wasted.

Fortunately I have  no personal experience of this, although a teacher friend in Kent tells a chilling story of something that happened during a very hot summer a few year ago. . ‘An innocent little boy in my class brought me a live adder in the brown paper bag he’d brought his packed lunch to school in,‘ she recalls.  He’d found the snake on the edge of the school site in the long grass during the dinner hour.  So he picked it up, popped it in the paper bag and brought it into school to show me.  It was a miracle that neither he nor I were stung.’ After that all the children in all the schools in the borough were warned that, although this is a every interesting creature, on no account must it be touched. Just fetch your teacher and show him or her where you saw the animal, they were told.

Interfering with adders is obviously foolish.  It’s also illegal.  The Wildlife and Countryside Act of 1981 gave legal protection to a wide range of animals and plants.  Under Section 9 and Schedule 5 of the Act it is against the law  to kill, injure, take, possess or sell an adder.  Neither may you damage or destroy its place of shelter or protection.

So enjoy ‘your’ adder if you’re lucky enough to spot one, but treat it with respect.  ‘It is the bright day that brings forth the adder,’ Shakespeare makes Brutus say in Julius Caesar. Absolutely.