Mystery Files TV - Rachel Gibbins - Ancient X Files TV - Edward Potts Cheyney - Winston Churchill - Mark Twain - Sentence Passed on Joan of Arc - Helen Castor TV -
France in the 1420s. A teenage girl claims she hears voices, words only she can hear. Her name is Joan of Arc. And she says they come from God. Joan embarks on her holy quest to defeat the English and see the French King crowned. Divine messenger, witch or warrior? Mystery Files: Joan of Arc, National Geographic 2010
Joan is said to have achieved a miracle here in Orleans. By ending the crushing siege and forcing the English into retreat. ibid.
Joan does not liberate the French as her legend suggests. The war continues for another twenty years. ibid.
She is a saint. She is a knight. She is a heretic. She is a witch. She is a feminist champion. She is a prophet. Dr Rachel Gibbins, University of Bristol
France’s national heroine and patron saint: an ancient record suggests a mystery surrounding her death. Potentially incriminated evidence has gone missing. Are hidden forces at work? Ancient X Files s2e11: Joan of Arc & New Jerusalem, National Geographic 2012
Joan was martyred on 30th May 1431. She was just nineteen. ibid.
A symbol of inspiration for the French. ibid.
At the turn of the last century someone may have been trying to suppress information that Joan survived. ibid.
To raise French resolve there was a move to make Joan a saint. ibid.
The tide turned and the war began to go against the English. This was due in great part to the influence of a young French peasant girl, Joan of Arc. Inspired by the belief that she had been given a mission by God to deliver France from its invaders and to place the Dauphin on the throne of his fathers, she appeared before him, secured his reluctant consent to allow her to lead some troops, inspired them with her own enthusiasm and confidence, and won a great success by driving away the English who were besieging Orleans. The Dauphin himself was then stirred to greater activity and under the persuasion of the Maid of Orleans, as she came to be called, made his way to Rheims, the ancient coronation city of the French kings, and was there crowned king of France. Joan now felt that she had fulfilled her mission and asked to be allowed to return to her home, but the Dauphin insisted that she should remain with the army. Some time after this she was captured by the English. After a trial which was planned to end in but one way she was burned as a witch in the market place of Rouen. Even one of the persecutors of the innocent French patriot girl wavered and turned away, crying, ‘God have mercy upon us; we have burned a saint.’ The movement of success which Joan had begun continued, and although the French frequently wasted their opportunities, yet on the whole the re-conquest of their native land went steadily on. The English were driven out of one province after another; their expeditions from England were more poorly equipped and more unsuccessful. Finally the long war came to a close in 1453 by the defeat of an English army near Bordeaux, and the loss of all their territory in France except Calais. Edward Potts Cheyney, A Short History of England, 1904
Joan was a being so uplifted from the ordinary run of mankind that she finds no equal in a thousand years. She embodied the natural goodness and valour of the human race in unexampled perfection. Unconquerable courage, infinite compassion, the virtue of the simple, the wisdom of the just, shone forth in her. She glorifies as she freed the soil from which she sprang. Winston Churchill, The Birth of Britain
Whatever thing men call great, look for it in Joan of Arc, and there you will find it. Mark Twain
We declare that you are fallen again into your former errors and under the sentence of excommunication which you originally incurred we decree that you are a relapsed heretic; and by this sentence which we deliver in writing and pronounce from this tribunal, we denounce you as a rotten member, which, so that you shall not infect the other members of Christ, must be cast out of the unity of the Church, cut off from her body, and given over to the secular power: we cast you off, separate and abandon you, praying this same secular power on this side of death and the mutilation of your limbs, to moderate its judgment towards you, and if true signs of repentance appear in you to permit the sacrament of penance to be administered to you. Sentence passed on Joan of Arc
On 8th 1429 the town of Orleans in France erupted in celebration. For seven long months it had been under siege by the English. But now after just four days of fighting the town had been liberated. And the people of Orleans knew they had witnessed a miracle ... Their liberator: she was a peasant girl and she was just seventeen: her name was Joan. Helen Castor, Joan of Arc: God’s Warrior, BBC 2015
She’d come, she said, with a message from God. ibid.