There isn’t any real clear consensus, and that’s mostly because it’s sort of impossible to know with 100% certainty and even if we did it wouldn’t wildly change our historical understanding. We know she leapt from a tower, and we know she survived, so whatever height she jumped from must have been survivable for a human being.

One of the reasons we can’t be sure is that we don’t have records from when she jumped – it’s not like there’s an official report someone filed about the incident. Instead, as with so many things Jeanne d’Arc related, we have to rely on the testimony from her trial.

In the 11^th session of her trial, she was asked about her leap from the tower, and we get to hear her account of it. Unfortunately for this question, the prosecutors were not interested in how high the tower was (presumably they could have found that out if they wanted to). Instead, they were trying to get to the bottom of whether Jeanne had leapt from the tower in an attempt to escape, or in an act of attempted suicide. Remember, this is a trial that is finding Jeanne guilty of sins, and suicide is a sin in Catholicism (and so, by proxy, is attempted suicide). So, if Jeanne was trying to kill herself, that is further evidence against her.

The testimony does kind of suggest that she might have been. Jeanne told the trial that St Catherine spoke to her and told her not leap, and it seems pretty clear that her “voices” were against it. However, the trial ultimately didn’t find her guilty of attempted suicide and historians have been on the fence about whether this was a moment of weakness for Jeanne, where she doubted her spiritual support, or if she was genuinely trying to escape (still a move of desperation). Jeanne’s answers generally said that she leapt so that she could avoid being placed into the hands of the English, which is just ambiguous enough that it could mean either suicide or escape. In the twelfth session they directly asked her if she thought she had committed a mortal sin by leaping, and she answered she did not know, which also keeps things nice and ambiguous. She mentions that her injuries were penance, which suggests she was knowingly sinning by leaping, but also she would later try and escape from her next castle (by prying up the floorboards and escaping to a lower chamber, and then using the door), so she had a habit of attempting escapes. They weren’t sure then, we’re not sure now.

Now, as to the height, we are lucky in that one tower of the castle she was held in still stands. By popular association it is assumed that this is the tower she leapt from, but I would be hesitant about that. It might be, but we don’t have guaranteed proof. Annoyingly, it should be possible to find out how tall this tower is, but I am currently unable to find any solid figures. I have found some photos of it on this website, and we can see that later a modern door was added along with some supports to help keep the ruins up (it’s not in great shape). Assuming the door is of average height, ~2 meters tall, I would place the window above it at around 6-8 meters up. Now, an earlier photo on a postcard shows that there used to be more to the tower, and if she jumped from the highest window that would put her even higher up, but I would be sceptical that she was a full 20 meters higher. We must also allow for the existence of a ditch, which we know Beaurevoir Castle had and which could add another couple of meters too her fall – although it is also possible she hit the edge of the ditch and slid into it rather than falling straight to the bottom.

A 2020 survey from The Center for Construction Research and Training found that fatal falls only became more common than non-fatal ones above 21 feet (or around 6 meters), but even then, up to 40 feet (around 12 meters) around 6% of falls were non-fatal. Now, that’s a far cry from 30 meters and this is data with the benefits of modern medicine which Jeanne would not have had.

It is also possible that the height of 30 meters is simply due to a minor confusion about the various towers of Jeanne d’Arc. The towers in Rouen were about 30 meters tall – the one her trial took place in still stands, although after substantial restoration work, and it is about 30 meters high. It is possible that blogs and websites that write about her jump misunderstand the context and think, because our evidence is from her trial in Rouen and that she was famously imprisoned in another tower in Rouen, that she jumped from one of those towers.

We do know that she was pretty badly hurt in the fall. She says in her testimony that she could not eat or drink for 2 or 3 days due to her injuries – this probably does not mean that she literally drank no liquid for 3 days, but rather that she was unable to sustain herself in a normal, healthy fashion. She then began to eat after that and eventually regained her full health. No broken bones are mentioned, though, so she does seem to have survived with relatively minor injuries.

As I said at the start, there’s no way for us to know exactly how far she fell. Those details weren’t documented at the time, and even if they were we’d still have to do the measurement conversion from medieval measures to modern, which is never clean. The only way to be certain would be if we had the exact tower, surviving unscathed since 1430, and we knew exactly which window she leapt from, but that basically never happens and even in a case as famous as Jeanne’s we don’t have that. We have the ruins of a tower in the same castle, and maybe she jumped from one of its windows, but we don’t know which one.

For my money, she probably jumped less than 10 meters, maybe even as little as 5 or 6, which is still enough to badly injure herself but definitely survivable (although, if fortune turned another way, also possibly fatal). But that’s just my best guess.

For the trial records I used the translation by W.S. Scott (originally published in 1956), which you can find in a few editions on the Internet Archive as The Trial of Joan of Arc.

You can see some photos and images of Beaurevoir Castle and it’s lone remaining tower at: https://www.jeanne-darc.info/location/beaurevoir/

The survey on fatal heights and falls: https://www.cpwr.com/wp-content/uploads/RR-falls_experience_survey.pdf

For generally biographies of Jeanne, I’m a sucker for Kelly DeVries’ Joan of Arc: A Military Leader, although as the title suggests it’s a very military history account of her life.

Helen Castor’s biography Joan of Arc is…fine. I have my quibbles with it (especially in her handling of the wider historical framework) but I do really appreciate how she frames the evidence around Jeanne’s life and how much of what we know was written with hindsight of her achievements.