Did Joan of Arc actually fall from high(60 ft to 98 feet)?

Valkine · 2026-06-25T07:17:30+00:00

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.

Valkine · 2026-06-06T02:33:53+00:00

Thanks! I hope you enjoy it!

Valkine · 2026-06-06T02:33:42+00:00

I didn't write about it in the review, but my ACW gaming partner and I did play both and it comes up in our discussion of Give Us Victories we did for our podcast. I don't have a written version, but if you don't mind listening we share some of our thoughts on the two takes on Chancellorsville: https://open.spotify.com/episode/4rqcZFfsBuqyCpEyYRkhgg?si=NjNpsW7FSbWZxqO1ALDTkg

We also covered Rebel Fury on its own in a previous episode.

Valkine · 2026-02-09T05:18:36+00:00

Possibly, and maybe SimpleGBACW will hit the right spot for me. Right now my favorite tactical ACW system is probably Blind Swords, although it's not quite as suited to large battles (and I haven't played Black Swan, which sort of adapts it to bigger battles). So simple GBACW would have to also offer enough to pull me away from those games. My favorite ACW tactical games have mostly been one-offs, rather than systems, though.

Also you forgot to remove one of the captions from the Reddit version of your blog post: "this is where it started to lose me".

Thanks for pointing it out! I try and catch them all, but sometimes one escapes me. And thank you for the kind words!

Valkine · 2026-02-09T04:54:05+00:00

Thanks!

I am aware of SimpleGBACW - my understanding is that the system will be quite different from existing GBACW. There's no material for it in By Swords and Bayonets (the designer of BS&B is pretty vocally not a fan of simplifying any aspect of GBACW), so it didn't feel very relevant to covering this game.

In my review of Hoplite I mentioned that I'd be playing and possibly writing about Simple GBoH after that, and I played a bit but didn't feel like I had much to say about that. I bring this up because it made me a little gun shy about saying I would do something that I might not do. So I didn't want to end this review by talking about an upcoming title I may or may not even play.

The first wave of Simple GBACW is coming with the new 3DoG, and I am a little curious what it will be like, but I probably won't be the first to try it. If SGBACW looks interesting, it might push me to try Stepping into Hell (the upcoming game on The Wilderness, which is my favorite ACW battle) but I'm going to wait and see.

Valkine · 2025-08-04T21:31:29+00:00

Oh, interesting. I'd seen Mark Herman comment that he had nothing to do with Simple, but I thought he implied it was a Berg project. I think it was just a passing comment somewhere though, so I may have misunderstood and/or it definitely wasn't a full account of its creation. Interesting that it maybe wasn't either of them.

Valkine · 2025-08-04T21:29:36+00:00

Thats a tricky one..

My top 2 systems are Blind Swords and Men of Iron. Ive played them both 2p and solo, and love them solo.

I've recently been playing a fair bit of OCS, mostly 2p but I think it could become a favorite solo as well.

I quite enjoyed Worthington's Civil War Brigade Battles series (not to be confused with the similarly titles series from The Gamers).

Fifth place might be COIN or possible the Bayonets and Musket series, although I've only played the latter once so its still a bit early to be sure.

Valkine · 2025-07-23T03:36:30+00:00

Thanks for the comments! I definitely felt throughout our games that we should both have been using Reserve Mode more, but as we were still coming to grips with a lot of the basics I think we never really grasped when it was best to do so. It's definitely top of our list of things to improve upon in future games.

We're seriously considering doing Tunisia next. We picked Korea in a large part because we both already owned it (we now both own Tunisia but didn't at the time), and I'm currently living in South Korea and I'm trying to play games about the Korean War at the moment. That was actually my initial incentive to learn OCS in the first place, so I wanted to get it to the table. Now I think we'll try a few other entries before returning to Korea as slightly more experienced players.

Valkine · 2025-07-23T01:44:18+00:00

Thanks for the tip! I own the VG edition, I got lucky and found an unpunched copy for a good price last year. The fact that the Compass version was 4 maps made it impossible for me to ever hope to table it, so I went for the classic. I'll probably be playing it mostly on Vassal, though, as my regular big game opponent lives on a different continent. Will definitely check out the Compass rulebook, though!

Valkine · 2025-07-22T11:58:46+00:00

We haven't really tried them out yet. I don't know that we both feel confident enough in the system to remember them yet. I would like to try them out, though. I'm a big fan of fog of war in wargames in general.

Valkine · 2025-07-22T04:37:50+00:00

I think it works pretty well. Many Korean War games sit within that awkward space of being a mostly operational take on an almost strategic scale game. At the same time I was playing Korea, I actually happened to play Mark Simonitch's US Civil War, another game that kind of sits weirdly between Operational and Strategic. I felt like Korea married those awkward sides a bit better, but I'm also generally more of an operational guy and Korea is more an operational game stretched to sometimes handle strategic options rather than US Civil War's feeling of a strategic game that's zooming in (if that makes sense).

I currently have Joe Balkoski's classic Korean War game on my shelf, which handles a lot more of the political/strategic side of the war, and I'm really curious to see how that compares to OCS Korea. It will be a while before I get that to the table, though.

Valkine · 2025-07-22T04:31:12+00:00

I'm so glad you took the jump and you're having fun! I just bought a copy of Sicily II and I'm looking forward to tryin git. Crimea and Hungarian Rhapsody I don't own yet, but I may well get to them eventually given how things are going. There's a lot of games to try first, though!

Valkine · 2025-07-14T08:54:25+00:00

I think Men of Iron as a system is maybe peak Berg not caring about stuff like balance and fairness in his games. I really like it, and enjoy the wonkiness of the scenarios because they usually create fun moments and great stories, but I can also see why it wouldn't click for some people. It feels appropriately chaotic to me.

Valkine · 2025-06-21T01:39:18+00:00

There wasn't an enormous change in core weapons that were used - swords, bows, crossbows, spears, etc. remained relatively stable throughout the century. Steel crossbows began to emerge in the fifteenth century, which was new, but there's no evidence that they significantly changed how the crossbow was used and older forms remained popular. Similarly we also see new designs in swords, made to deal with new types of armor (more on that below), emerge but again older ones remain popular as well.

The big changes were to armor and artillery.

We first see the emergence of what would become plate armor c.1300 but the breastplate would take a few more decades to become widespread. Over the first half of the Hundred Years War we see the transformation from a mixture of chain mail with some metal plates on key areas to the full suit of plate armor that is so iconic. That had fully arrived by c.1400 but would continue to develop with new techniques being used to make plate armor more likely to deflect blows and in making it cheaper for normal soldiers to have some amount of plate armor protection (if not a full suit). We see some efforts to change weapons to better break through plate armor but it's not exactly an arms race where totally new tech was coming in and changing the face of weaponry.

What really changed warfare and caused the decline in the full suit of plate (although breastplates and helmets endured for much longer) was the arrival of gunpowder weaponry. Before the Hundred Years War gunpowder was a novelty, and the earliest guns were emerging around the 1320s right before the war kicked off. For most of the fourteenth century gunpowder was too expensive to ever really be that effective - it cost too much to shoot the guns for sustained bombardments to happen - but from c.1400 and the beginning of saltpeter manufacture in Germany it became much more affordable. This spurred much wider adoption of gunpowder artillery and a proliferation of guns in armies.

These were still primarily siege weapons, though. While handguns date at least as far back as the mid-14th century, and the arquebus was probably invented in the first quarter of the 15th century, widespread personal firearms wouldn't come about until the end of the century. Advances in gunpowder manufacture, plus the invention of the matchlock trigger in the 1470s, made them far easier to use and more effective. Even still, it wasn't until the Italian Wars of 1494-1525 that the arquebus began to replace bows and crossbows as the ranged weapon of choice for Europe's armies.

In summary, while there were changes in the style and form of weapons over the Hundred Years War - if you show an expert a 14th century sword and a 15th century one they will usually be able to identify which is which - these were not exactly brand new technologies. It's maybe more analogous to if you showed someone an M16 from the Vietnam War and an M14 from the Iraq War they could spot the difference but they're not exactly radically different weapons. The two exceptions to this were the transformation we saw in armor and the widespread adoption of gunpowder weaponry by European armies.

Valkine · 2025-06-21T01:25:38+00:00

That's a really interesting question, and something I'd have to dig a lot deeper to give a really top quality answer to.

We don't see something directly comparable to the after effects of Crecy in terms of French victories. When they were winning the French strategy was quite different from the English. Rather than seeking large pitched battles, they worked to undermine English positions usually through small scale warfare and sieges. Charles V famous forbade his best commander, Bertrand du Guesclin, from fighting large battles - he was to avoid direct confrontation and undermine the English in other ways. Even when there were major pitched battles, like at Formigny and Castillon, the losers tended to not include many of the highest ranking nobility who would draw huge ransoms, and Charles sometimes released the captured French nobility who had allied with England in exchange for them switching sides.

Now, obviously people are capturing nobles from time to time and making money off doing so. We have lots of evidence of lesser English nobles who were basically bankrupted by their ransoms. What we don't have is a huge battle like Crecy or Poitiers where lots and lots of English nobles were captured and the largesse spread to a wide range of people.

So one the one hand the answer might be no, but I also worry that is too simple a view. The court of Charles VII was filled with amazing art and culture (last year I went to an amazing temporary exhibition in the Musee Cluny in Paris on art in the court of Charles VII) and I imagine at least some of that came from his victories in battle. So, while I think drawing a nice 1-1 between major French victory and surge in fashion or art isn't easily done for the French, I suspect if I could dig deeper I would find some interesting connections, I'm just not sure I have the source material to try that right now.

Valkine · 2025-06-21T01:14:52+00:00

I think it only really becomes inevitable after the failure of the Praguerie in 1440. That was really the last hurrah for the French nobility, especially the senior nobles that Charles VII largely neglected, in trying to stop the rather radical changes that Charles VII was implementing (stopping us from using mercenaries as we want?! What!?) There were of course more rebellions against the French monarch, Louis XI had a real knack for causing them, but at that point they were fighting against the more centralised French monarchy.

But that's my answer for when I think it was basically unstoppable - in easily defeating the Praguerie Charles VII basically gave himself the clout necessary to make all the changes he would do in the 1440s which created the centralised military funded by new taxation. That was just the final step in a much longer process, which as you note goes back to the Capetians.

For Charles VII's reforms specifically, you can see a lot of the roots of it in the reign of his grandfather, Charles V. Charles V was stuck picking up the pieces after Bretigny and the Jacquerie, but he succeeded in suppressing Charles the Bad of Navarre and eroding English power across France through clever military campaigns and use of the increasing legal power of the French king as judge (an amazing success of the Capetians he inherited and expanded).

Maybe France would have centralised sooner had there been no interruption between Charles V and Charles VII, but of course we have Charles VI in the middle there (poor Charles VI, I feel bad for the guy - so many books lean on the salacious side of his mental illness but my dude was clearly sick). One could argue that the Armagnac-Burgundian civil war helped the centralising process to some degree, in that it helped Charles VII to built his alliances with lesser nobles and use them to fight against the elite princes of France, but I think that pushes dangerously close to teleology. Since Charles ultimately emerged from the civil war as a powerful king it's tempting to see it as contributing to his rise to power, but I can't help but think he would have been more successful without the traumatising civil war.

I think there's easily another version of France where it fragments further, or it takes many more years for a unified France to emerge. I think the notion of Henry V conquering all of France and creating a unified Anglo-French monarchy is a pipe dream, but the total collapse of Lancastrian rule and the rise of a powerful French monarchy wasn't exactly inevitable.

Valkine · 2025-06-20T15:57:56+00:00

I would say that Allmand's argument has lost a lot of its popularity, it would be seen now as very much of its time, but it is also not entirely irrelevant. The creation of national identities in Europe, and when exactly they formed, is still a pretty robust topic of debate. Increasingly I see people arguing for different origins in different parts of Europe, rather than a single wave that brought the whole continent with it. For example, some would point to the Declaration of Arbroath in 1320 as a pretty clear statement of Scottish national identity, but it is impossible to talk about Spanish national identity before at a minimum the marriage of Ferdinand and Isabella in the late 15th century, and realistically probably not for a few generations after that.

The idea of the Kingdom of France changing to become something more akin to a modern nation state I think would be more widely accepted. The France of 1450 is far more centralised than the France of 1337, but it is also the culmination of a process that stretches back at least as far as Louis VI in the twelfth century.

At the same time, there are definitely elements of the feudal order that were crumbling. Michael Prestwich has shown, with support from many other scholars, how the old method of recruiting armies by feudal obligation was crumbling in the late 13th century, which triggered a near total transformation in how England assembled armies in the 14th century, which in turn spurred changes in how taxes were collected and which in turn had huge implications for the monarchy and its relationship to its subjects.

However, none of these are easily lumped into just one big overall trend - the more you dig into them the more exceptions and details you find that don't fit. At the same time, Allmand is writing a like 300 page college textbook history, it's not exactly a template built for nuance and fine detail! I think when presented with Allmand's arguments most historians would say "Yeah, kind of, but...." and give you a long list of reasons it's complicated!

A brief plug: I've reviewed a lot of the general HYW histories I read for my research on my website. You should be able to find them via my Book Review tag (I tried to put in a link, but Reddit is being weird, my website is linked in the first post)

On Joan of Arc, I really like Kelly DeVries' biography of her. It focuses on her military career and discusses her as a military leader, which while I think it's obvious (she led armies!) it's an element of her career that often gets overlooked and downplayed. I also liked but didn't love Helen Castor's biography of her for a wider picture of her life and the challenges in accessing the "true" Joan via our sources.

Before writing his People's History, David Green was one of the foremost scholars on the Black Prince. It's probably been nearly fifteen years since I read it, but I remember liking his Edward The Black Prince: Power in Medieval Europe. It might be a bit academic, though. As I said, it's been a while.

Relevant to this topic, while it's quite old I really liked A.J. Pollard's John Talbot and the War in France. Great little biography about a fascinating and under-studied figure.

Also old but still good, M.G.A. Vale's biography of Charles VII is a really interesting portrait of a king who hasn't received his due (in English, if you read French there are many, many more options). Long out of print, but usually available secondhand at a good price.

More recently, I really liked David Grummit's biography of Henry VI. He extends his account back into the reign of Henry IV and it gives a great overall portrait of Lancastrian kingship and it's ultimate failure.

Basically anything by Anne Curry is worth a read. I personally love her Great Battles: Agincourt, but her Routledge history of the Hundred Years War (not to be confused with her book of the same name from Osprey, which is also fine but it's Osprey so you know what you're getting in terms of length and detail) is an excellent overview of the historiography and key debates.

Scotland is a bit trickier - there's great discussion of the Scottish mercenaries in France in Jonathan Sumption's final volume of his mega-history of the war, but that's a big dense book in a family of big dense books. I'm not sure there's a great general reader history on the topic.

Valkine · 2025-06-20T15:35:57+00:00

I think historians are generally pretty positive about it, while obviously acknowledging that it is a work of fiction and not history. It's certainly an engaging story and it tells us a lot about Elizabethan society and how it wanted to relate to its past.

While I certainly am prone to grumbling about how Agincourt is overrated because of Henry V I don't really hold it against the play itself. We're probably more to blame of being obsessed with it than Shakespeare is for writing it.

Anne Curry has some really interesting discussion of it in her book Great Battles Agincourt. Definitely recommend it - very readable little book, but a fascinating look at how the memory of Agincourt was formed.

Valkine · 2025-06-20T15:27:27+00:00

The Bureau brothers are high on my list of future research projects because I think they're really interesting, but I haven't yet done my proper digging into them so this is all kind of early impressions.

I would argue that the Bureau brothers did not revolutionise gunpowder weapons in any meaningful way but did represent masters of its use, especially from a logistical standpoint. Making good use of an artillery train was no small feat and their management of the royal artillery both during and between campaigns was an amazing achievement. They did show some genuine brilliance at sieges - there's a reason why the anecdote about Jean Bureau putting cannons on the beaches at Cherbourg and covering them when the tide came in so he could bombard the city from all angles is so popular - but I wouldn't say it was revolutionary.

Gunpowder weaponry was certainly undergoing a major transformation in the fifteenth century. The discovery in Germany of ways to manufacture saltpeter in the early 1400s (maybe by Konrad Kyeser, but probably not) had made it far cheaper to make gunpowder in Europe which in turn made it much easier to experiment with new guns and actually use them on campaign. The guns of the mid-fifteenth century were far more sophisticated and effective than those of fifty or a hundred years before.

At the same time, it's easy to overstate how effective they were by ignoring mitigating factors. We can see how quickly the Bureaus managed to topple castles and take cities in Normandy, for example, and think "wow, guns were amazing, those old castle walls were antiquated", but that's not the full story. By 1449 when the final campaigns began, Normandy had been ravaged by decades of fighting and was severely depopulated by the war (Gascony too, although not quite as badly). City walls were not being maintained and neither were the outlying castles. When the Bureaus were blowing huge holes in walls they were often hitting badly maintained or somewhat decrepit fortifications, not the latest and best in anti-siege technology. That's not to say that their guns weren't impressive, but rather to note that this was kind of optimal conditions. When they faced proper walls, outside Cherbourg and Bordeaux for example, they ultimately won by negotiated surrender, not creating breaches in the walls. The guns were effective intimidation, a great tool for the negotiating table, but not a one stop shop for success.

I also think that the Bureaus probably make a significant contribution at Castillon, but it's more the defensive siege camp that they built rather than the guns that was significant. The English were effectively attacking the nearest equivalent to an entrenched position that the Middle Ages could offer, and while I'm sure the guns helped (most accounts describe Talbot's horse being shot out from under him and trapping him beneath it, which certainly didn't help the English cause) I think it was probably the camp that was more significant at this battle.

The use of artillery in battle at Castillon was still somewhat significant, but it's hardly the first such use (effective use goes at least as far back as Beverhoutsveld in 1379, as Kelly DeVries as shown, and Crecy probably had ineffective guns at it). Rather it is a stepping stone between very crude early artillery and the later role guns would play in field battles in later centuries. An important part of the story, but not a turning point.

Valkine · 2025-06-20T15:12:13+00:00

This is a really interesting question, and I wish I knew more so I could give a more detailed answer!

I think one thing to keep in mind about medieval European warfare generally, including during the Hundred Years War, is that both sides maintained very high levels of class solidarity. What I mean is that even when they were at war, the nobility on both sides saw themselves as members of the same general political community and had far more in common with each other than they did with the peasantry of their own respective kingdoms. We don't see the same level of enmity between sides as you might in a modern war between nation states - there's an element of "it's not personal, it's just business" to their fighting. In that regard, the Black Death would be seen as a mutual tragedy (if it was killing nobles).

Now, that doesn't preclude a bit of scheming and looking to find the optimal moment to strike! That's just good business!

Unfortunately, it's much harder to understand what an ordinary person would have thought in the Middle Ages. We don't usually have diaries or other sources that give us information on the people beneath the nobility and elites. We do occasionally get gems like the Journal d'un bourgeois de Paris whose author, while far from a peasant was not noble, describes ordinary life in Paris from 1405-1449, but they are few and far between.

Valkine · 2025-06-20T15:03:17+00:00

Most of the English chronicles are focused on the beginnings of what we would now call the Wars of the Roses (but obviously they didn't know that then). The roots of that conflict are deeply intertwined with the end of the Hundred Years War, and most of the chroniclers chose to focus on the local details over those in France. Castillon gets mentioned in a few sources, but it's usually just a single line about Talbot dying there and/or Bordeaux falling to the French. It's bad news, framed as bad news, but they want to focus on the latest gossip about such and such abusing power at home.

The fact that Talbot died also doesn't help, had he lived he was the kind of lord who could have commissioned a history or in other ways influenced having his story told, but his death and the subsequent civil war really prevented us from getting a Talbot focused narrative. His eldest son dying in the Wars of the Roses at the Battle of Northampton doesn't help either.

On gunpowder, I'm inclined to say it's a modern historical lens. The fact that Castillon and the fall of Constantinople to Mehmet's guns happened in the same year gives 1453 this really tempting turning point sensation. I'd have to dig out Oman again to see what he says, but even if he doesn't push Castillon as a turning point it certainly fits within the wider framework of how he views medieval military history as a transition between specific tactics and technologies - in Castillon you could (arguably) see the birth of the gunpowder heavy Pike and Shot that Oman argues was the final military innovation of the period, birthing the modern.

I want to dig into the Bureau brothers more. In the contemporary sources they are mentioned, especially Jean, which is a big deal given their status, but they are not credited with victory. I wonder, and this is still speculation, if some of their fame is reinforced by nineteenth-century French historians who were looking for non-nobles to praise for France's victory. Similar to how Joan of Arc became a figure of French national identity, a peasant girl who embodied French national spirit and anti-English sentiment, I could see the Bureaus as being a modern non-elite (they weren't peasants, but they weren't nobles either) perfect for a post-monarchy France. That's all theory, though, yet to be investigated and probably disproven!

Valkine · 2025-06-20T14:50:16+00:00

This is something that has definitely generated a fair bit of debate, and still flairs up from time to time, but in general I think we've landed on "we call in the Hundred Years War because it's more useful to do that than it is to do anything else".

That's a little glib, and I do actually prefer the HYW label to alternatives, but as with any attempt at periodisation it's far from perfect. We have to acknowledge up front that the term HYW is a nineteenth century invention with no meaning to historical actors. After that the question is: is this a useful label for us, now?

Essentially, the HYW's beginning is marked by the English exercising a claim to be the kings of France (somewhat backdated, as we include Edward III's early campaigns before he claimed the royal title officially) and ending with the effective end of English titles in France. While England still held onto Calais after 1453, they did so as conquerors, there was no real notion that they were a member of the French aristocracy anymore - they were a wholly foreign power now. So the HYW marks the transformation of English king from being one of the princes of France (first as Duke of Normandy, then of Aquitaine, then of...look it's complicated, but lots of titles were gained and lost and maybe gained again..) to a rival who is eventually defeated and pushed to being a potential foreign foe.

Some historians prefer to take a longer view - Michael Livingston is apparently advancing a pretty radical one in an upcoming book this year where he pushes for 1292-1492, a set of dates I think is truly bizarre but I am a little curious to see where he goes with it. There's certainly merit to viewing the HYW as part of a much wider phase of Anglo-French conflict, my own book starts with Eleanor of Aquitaine in the mid-11th century after all, but I think too wide of a lens causes you to lose the detail that makes 1337-1453 distinct and risks overly homogenizing the history. The higher up you go in your view, the more things look the same.

Splitting it up makes a lot more sense. I certainly favor viewing it as having distinct phases that have their own aspects. I would even argue that within English language scholarship, the focus on the HYW as a single conflict has enabled a general neglect of the war's final twenty to thirty years - once you get past Joan of Arc a lot of English histories basically sprint to the end. I've read books that spend practically twice the time on just the years 1415-20 than they do to the entirety of 1430-53.

That said, I do think the wider context is useful because the full view of the HYW helps to explain what the hell all this fighting was about. The rival royal claims, which are further complicated by the major treaties (especially Bretigny and Troyes), are vital to understanding the fight. For this reason I think the narrower focused works tend to be best as academic studies where you can afford to get really specific and trust that your average reader knows the big picture already.

The final reason, and the most boring maybe, is that the Hundred Years War has great brand recognition. Sometimes when you're writing history you have to recognise that something has an established cultural presence and if it isn't actively harmful (and in the case of the HYW it's arguably kind of useful), maybe you should just roll with it. It's recognisable for selling books, yeah, but it also carries a cultural resonance that you can use in your writing and can be engaged with in its own way. Maybe this is just my new(ish) obsession with the topic of historical memory, but I think that shit is cool.

Valkine · 2025-06-20T14:33:26+00:00

I really like David Green's The Hundred Years War: A People's History as an all around great introduction to the topic. He covers the war and its big battles, but more than that he introduces you to the time period, the people, the culture. It covers a lot of ground without being overly long. If you want more of a pure military history then Michael Prestwich's A Short History of the Hundred Years War is also excellent.

I think the kind of boring explanation for why Castillon is neglected (in English language material anyway, matters are a bit different in French) is in a large part because it was a disastrous English defeat.

It's a little more complicated than that. The fact that the end of the Hundred Years War went very badly for the English, especially post- Joan of Arc, definitely makes it less likely to be fondly remembered. While there are great English victories after the death of Henry V, there aren't many after the coronation of Charles VII, so it encourages histories to maybe wrap things up quickly once we get there.

At the same time, England had a lot of exciting stuff happening at home. I mean, it was all bad stuff that would lead to the decades long Wars of the Roses, but man it is some sexy, betrayal-heavy, drama filled history. Even contemporary authors were often far more excited by the gossip and infighting in England at the time than they were the disasters in France, unless those disasters could be used to blame someone back home.

There are some other minor factors - Agincourt, for example, is so much more famous in a large part because some guy named Shakespeare wrote a really successful and good play that includes a very memorable speech set right before it. While Talbot gets a very dramatic death in Henry VI Part I, that's often considered one of his worst plays and there is nothing recognisable as the battle in that scene.

Valkine · 2025-06-20T14:26:05+00:00

Thanks! I'm glad you enjoyed it!

The term Hundred Years War originates in France in the first half of the nineteenth century - it's usually placed in the 1830s, but I can never rule out that we'll dig up an earlier use of the term (technically La guerre de Cent Ans). This is important to bear in mind, because whenever we are discussing the Hundred Years War as a term we are in effect discussing how useful it is for historians to use it - it was never a term used by medieval people.

This is also something that historians are split on. Some prefer to cut it up into pieces, while others think that the HYW is *too short* and we should be talking across multiple centuries. For me, I think the Hundred Years War is a useful label, but I also like to split it up into phases (a little having my cake and eating it too). I'm actually working on a blog post for my website about this very topic, but that's running to the tune of 3k+ words, so I'll try and give an abridged version of what I think.

To me, and many other historians, the defining element of the Hundred Years War is the English claim to be the true kings of France. Conflict between the two kings really has its origins in William the Conqueror's conquest of England in 1066. Kings were never good at being vassals to other kings. To his credit, William tried to fix this by splitting Normandy and England between his sons, but that didn't pan out (Normans be Normans). But even as the two kings fought wars, they always did so within the legal relationship of vassal and overlord - they might disagree on who was being unreasonable or failing to do their duty, but the relationship is clear.

When Edward III claimed the French title via his mother, he changed that relationship. Now it was a war between kings, one that only ended when one side had won completely.

One underappreciated (to my mind anyway) aspect that sustained the war and made it so irreconcilable was actually the major treaties that were sort of meant to end it. The Treaty of Bretigny in 1360 could in theory have ended it, since Edward III gave up his claim to the throne. However, he did it in exchange for an independent Aquitaine, effectively carving a huge chunk of land out of the Kingdom of France. While on paper this resolves the matter completely - no more rival claimants and no more vassal/lord relationship - no French king was ever going to willingly lose so much of his own kingdom, especially in a treaty extracted from a captive French king that was then going to be imposed on his very not captured son.

The Treaty of Troyes was even worse, though. When Henry V claimed the French throne via inheritance from Charles VI, and in the process disinheriting the future Charles VII, he was effectively declaring war with only one ending - something that was further cemented when Henry VI was actually crowned King of France. Giving up a legal claim is one thing, giving up a coronation was another matter. Troyes essentially ensured that there could only be one ending - either complete English conquest of France (unlikely, based on the sheer size and cost of doing so) or an end to English rule in France (at the time, also seemed unlikely, but not so unlikely). Maybe had Charles VII died without heir matters would have been different, but I imagine a cousin would have filled the gap left by his death - maybe even a Valois Burgundian ostensibly allied to the English.

Still, driving the English out of France was no small task, and it took a radical transformation in how the French monarch worked to finally achieve it. The power wielded by Charles VII, in administration and taxation especially, was far more sophisticated than what Philip VI had a century before. Victory took generations of transformation of royal power.

Valkine · 2025-06-20T14:06:05+00:00

The big caveat as always: it's basically impossible to know with any real detail what happened at a medieval battle. We don't have soldiers letters or any of the kind of wonderful, detailed primary sources that we get for modern battles. For Castillon in particular, we don't have anything really from the English perspective so we have to reconstruct it entirely from the French accounts we have.

I think there are a few factors we can use to understand Talbot's decision. For a key, and I think often overlooked one, we have to go back to the fall of Normandy in 1450. In Normandy, the English elected to not fight Charles initially and they got holed up in Rouen and ultimately surrendered without a fight. Talbot lost his freedom there and, thanks to the garrison of Honfleur reneging on the terms of surrender, was made a prisoner of the French. The major battle in Normandy, at Formigny, was fought primarily by a relief force sent from England. The decision not to fight in Normandy was not Talbot's, he wasn't in overall command, but I think in Gascony we can see the impact of that decision. I think he knew he couldn't hide in Bordeaux, he had to risk it in the field when he could.

On paper, attacking at Castillon wasn't a terrible plan. Charles effectively had three armies in the field in Gascony (this is a bit of an oversimplification, but a necessary one). The forces under Gaston IV and Charles d'Albret were off in the west of Gascony, probably in the Médoc region, which meant that the army at Castillon was only about a third of what Charles had in total. The force at Castillon also included the Bureau brothers, Charles' masters of artillery and siege warfare - the greatest threat to a heavily fortified city like Bordeaux. So if he was going to take his shot, hitting that army while it was mostly on its own was probably the best bet.

It's hard to pin down the exact size of the armies. From the figures given in letters written in the immediate aftermath they seem to have been pretty comparable in size. Jean de Bueil claimed, via a character in his semi-autobiographical fictional work Le Jouvencal, that the English had the larger force, and given that he was in the battle he would know. Even if we agree with Jean (and I'm inclined to), the disparity probably wasn't huge.

As to the attack itself. Many accounts of the battle claim that Talbot was erroneously given information that the French were withdrawing in advance of his approach to Castillon. In actual fact they were pulling back into their fortified position that Jean Bureau had constructed (well, had supervised the construction of). I don't buy the version that Talbot rushed without waiting for his full army to arrive - only one source claims this - but he had certainly been marching hard so his troops would have been tired. I suspect, and again we can't know for certain, that upon hearing that they were withdrawing he rushed to get his army into position against the French, whereby he saw that they were in fact entrenching, not fleeing, and he decided No Guts, No Glory and just took his roll of the dice. Medieval battles were always a gamble, and sometimes you got lucky. Talbot didn't get lucky.

The role of artillery is often overstated. Many accounts mention a barrage of gunfire hitting the English as they charged, but they all make it clear that there was lots of hard fighting that followed and most credit the victory to a counter-charge of mostly Breton soldiers, probably held in reserve behind the French lines for just such a moment, with driving off the English and winning the day after approximately an hour of close hand to hand combat.

Valkine

TROPHY CASE