Joan of Arc in 3D: a guest interview with Helen Castor

Photo credit: Chas Gibbions

We are very pleased to welcome our October guest, Helen Castor, well known to those interested in History for her book and TV series, She-Wolves. She is also famous on this blog for being the big sister of Harriet Castor, who has only just stopped being a History Girl.

This is what Helen says about herself: Helen Castor is a medieval historian and a Bye-Fellow of Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge. Blood & Roses, her biography of the 15th-century Paston family, was longlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize in 2005 and won the English Association's Beatrice White Prize in 2006. Her last book She-Wolves: the Women who Ruled England before Elizabeth was widely selected as one of the books of the year for 2010. She presents Radio 4’s Making History and documentaries for BBC television, including a three-part series based on She-Wolves and, most recently, Medieval Lives: Birth, Marriage, Death.

Harriet: Thank you so much, History Girls, for this opportunity to come back and visit you! Thank you, too, for giving me this chance to interview my sister, Helen Castor, about her new book Joan of Arc: A History (published in the UK by Faber this month, and in the US by HarperCollins next May). You might think we’d have talked about Joan many times already… but the reality of busy lives – plus the fact that we live in different parts of the country – means that we don’t get the chance to see each other as often as we’d like, and so to have this excuse to chat about Helen’s new project has been a pleasure, as well as very interesting. You might accuse me of family bias (I can’t do anything about that!) but I can say with complete honesty I absolutely loved reading Joan; it is gripping, moving, and explains with vivid clarity the immensely complex and constantly shifting political scenes of the time, both in England and France – a huge achievement in itself, and one that succeeds in setting Joan the woman in her proper historical context.


Harriet: Your last book, She-Wolves – The Women Who Ruled England Before Elizabeth, was about four medieval queens. How did She-Wolves lead on to Joan of Arc?

Helen: In She-Wolves I was exploring the constraints on female power in a world that expected its rulers to be male – and one of the most significant of those constraints was that women couldn’t lead armies on the battlefield. As I talked about the book, I kept finding myself saying, ‘The only woman who did lead armies on the battlefield was Joan of Arc – and look what happened to her…’.

And eventually it dawned on me that I didn’t really know what had happened to her. I knew the outline of her story, as most people do; but I didn’t really understand how she’d come to do what she did, or what she thought she was doing, or how those around her – friends and enemies – had reacted. Once those questions had occurred to me, I wanted to know more.

Harriet: Many books have been written about Joan. What did you feel still needed to be explored?

Helen: There are countless books about Joan – as well as plays, films, music, art – which meant that sitting down to write was a fairly terrifying prospect. But what I felt was missing was a book that told her story forwards, not backwards.

By that I mean that most books about Joan start with her in the fields at Domrémy, hearing her voices for the first time. But all our evidence for that part of her life comes from the transcripts of her two trials – one that condemned her as a heretic, and the other, held twenty-five years after her death, to clear her name.

And that leaves us with a problem. The trials took place when it was already clear what Joan had achieved, so the evidence they present is deeply infused with hindsight of one kind or another. And if we start with Joan in the fields, that hindsight is built into the narrative: it’s obvious from the start that she has an extraordinary destiny in front of her, so we’re already telling the story of the icon and the saint.

What I wanted to do instead was put hindsight aside as much as possible; to understand the war in France, and then to experience the shock of a seventeen-year-old peasant girl appearing from nowhere, claiming to be sent by God. Then, we can start the story by asking why on earth anyone would listen to her…

Harriet: What were the particular challenges of the research for this book?

Helen: I knew the fifteenth century very well, but almost entirely from the English perspective. So it was a challenge – and a fascinating one – to find myself in fifteenth-century France, within a civil war every bit as complex and brutal as our Wars of the Roses a few decades later.

Beyond that, the transcripts of Joan’s trials are deeply testing sources to use. Utterly absorbing, but never straightforward – the process shaped by medieval canon law and theology, the testimonies full of inconsistencies and contradictions, and many of the witnesses’ stories growing in the telling. Every time I go back to them I see new things.

 By Clément de Fauquembergue

(The only surviving image of Joan made during her lifetime: a picture drawn in the margin of the records of the Paris parlement by its notary, Clément de Fauquembergue, on 10 May 1429, the day when news arrived of the liberation of Orléans. He had heard that the Armagnacs were accompanied by a maid carrying a banner, but he had never seen her, and so depicted her with long hair in female dress).

Harriet: There seems to be a push, in the non-fiction history market, towards adopting a fiction-like style of writing. In this context, how would you describe your approach to writing narrative history?

Helen: For me, the point of writing narrative history is that it allows the past to be immersive. I’m trying to look through the eyes of the people who were there, to understand what they thought and felt – and that, of course, means there are many points of comparison with what writers of historical fiction are seeking to do. It’s crucial to remember that the people I’m writing about don’t know what hasn’t yet happened, any more than we do in our own lives; so any mention of what’s still to come, or of what later historians have said about their experiences, jolts us out of their world – and I try very hard to avoid that. Instead, all that contextual and historiographical discussion goes into the notes, where it can stand on its own terms.

So I suppose I’m saying that historical imagination always has to be at work in attempting to recreate the past – but at the same time there are boundaries to what I’ll allow myself to do. I’ll try to summon up a scene from all the available details in contemporary sources, or put flesh on the bones of my protagonists using every scrap of information I can find; but I won’t, for example, put words into their mouths. Most of the transcript of Joan’s trial is in the third person (‘she said that…’). Very occasionally something is recorded in direct speech – and those are the only moments when Joan speaks directly in my text. There remains the question of the accuracy of the notaries who recorded her words and translated them into Latin; but at least I can be faithful to the transcript.

Harriet: As you explain in the book, Joan wasn’t the only holy ‘simple’ person to emerge at this time. Could you tell us a bit more about this?

Helen: It can be tempting for us to assume, I think, that Joan’s exceptional career came about because she was a completely exceptional figure in her own time. Though she was extraordinary in many ways, it’s important to realise that God was present everywhere in her world, and that she wasn’t the only person – or the only woman – in late medieval France to claim that she heard messages from heaven.

What was unique about Joan was her claim that she’d been sent to lead the king’s army, which of course could be regarded as a miracle for as long as she was winning battles, but rapidly became a liability once the victories stopped. And, once she’d been captured, her own side adopted another messenger from God who was almost an ‘anti-Joan’: a simple boy, known as William the Shepherd, who carried no weapons but rode side-saddle, with stigmata on his hands and feet. He didn’t last long either… But if we understand the landscape of belief in which she lived, we stand a better chance of seeing what was truly remarkable about Joan herself.

Joan of Arc depicted in a 1505 manuscript.

Harriet: I had always thought of Joan’s adoption of male dress principally in terms of its symbolic value, but you point out that there were very important practical issues involved – not simply connected to horse-riding, but to personal security too. How much detail were you able to find out about this?

Helen: Her male dress appears to have started as a practical thing. When she set off for Chinon from Vaucouleurs, near Domrémy, the townspeople gave her a horse and an outfit of men’s clothes – which made complete sense, given that she would be riding across dangerous country for many days in the company of a small band of soldiers. But by the time she reached the Dauphin’s court, her male dress seems, for her, to have become part of her mission – an outward manifestation of the work she had been sent to do.

It’s very hard, though, to get a clear sense of what the balance was between the two – perhaps because they became so completely intertwined. At her trial, Joan said many different things about her clothes; she always defended her male dress, but not in consistent or completely coherent terms. Certainly, she was physically less vulnerable dressed as a man, because the cords with which hose were knotted on to a doublet offered some practical protection against sexual assault – and some later witnesses suggested that, during the three days towards the very end of her trial when she was dressed in women’s clothes, she was raped in her cell. We can’t know for sure; but it’s an important reminder of quite how vulnerable she was as a lone female prisoner in a castle full of soldiers who hated and feared her.

Harriet: Did your view of Joan change during your work on this project?

Helen: She moved from two dimensions to three. I felt I’d found the real person, standing squarely within her own world, rather than the icon who somehow escapes from history altogether. What I found particularly moving was coming to an understanding of her voices and visions that made sense to me in human terms. On the last morning of her life, some of her judges visited her in her cell in a last attempt, as they saw it, to save her soul. Some historians have completely rejected this part of the transcript as a fabrication after the event, but for a whole number of reasons that doesn’t convince me historically; and what Joan says during that meeting about her voices and visions – when she knows she’s about to die, and all her grandiose stories of angels and saints have gone – seems to me to have a real psychological truth. I’ve tried to leave room throughout the book for anyone who reads it to come to their own conclusions, but that, for me, was the moment when I felt I understood.

Harriet: She-Wolves became not only a book but also a series of BBC TV documentaries, which I know many readers of this blog thoroughly enjoyed (me included!). Can we hope for the same with Joan?

Helen: I’m working with the same director and producer and most of the same team – all of them brilliant – on a one-hour programme for BBC Two, to be shown sometime next year. We’ve just finished filming in France, following in Joan’s footsteps from Domrémy to Rouen – and one of the things we’re hoping to do, as well as going to all those glorious places, is bring the transcript of her trial to life as much as we can. It’s an exciting process.

Joan of Arc: A History is published in the UK by Faber & Faber, and will be published in the US by HarperCollins in May 2015.

THE GLOWIEST GLOW-WORM - My historical hero, by H.M. Castor

Churchill wears a helmet during an air-raid warning, 1940

(Image: Public Domain under Title 17, Chapter 1, Section 105 of the US Code; 

Source: Library of Congress via Wikimedia Commons)

Captain Berkley noted: ‘Reynaud was not impressive. The PM was terrific, hurling himself about, getting his staff into hopeless tangles by dashing across to Downing Street without a word of warning, shouting that we would never give in etc.’

May 1940 - from ‘Churchill – A Life’ by Martin Gilbert (p.649)

I gather that at No. 10 the PM strode about the house, having been aroused by gunfire in North London, wearing his flowery dressing-gown and a tin hat.

Aug 22^nd 1940 – the diary of Jock Colville (Assistant Private Secretary), concerning a night-time air raid

[The fire was] great fun & we all enjoyed it thoroughly.

1908 letter to Clemtine Hozier (later Clementine Churchill) about a fire at a house where Churchill was staying. Churchill, in pyjamas, overcoat and fireman's helmet, had helped to direct the firemen in tackling the blaze.

I want to write about Winston Churchill. I want to express why – when researching his life – he has amazed & enthralled me, given me courage, astonished me. I cannot achieve it, I know, within the space of a blog. It was hard enough to try to fit his life into 127 pages for the book I wrote in the spring of last year. I can only implore you, if you’ve never read a biography of Churchill, to do so. (Roy Jenkins’ ‘Churchill’ is wonderful, as is Martin Gilbert’s ‘Churchill – A Life’.) And then, I can sketch out a few thoughts.

History study at my senior school was a patchy affair. I remember, at the age of about 12, doing a project for homework on the Nuremberg trials (which made me feel, I remember, physically sick), but I never gained an overall grasp of the major events of the Second World War. Thus, I came away with a vague knowledge that Winston Churchill had been our vital war leader, that he had been crucial in maintaining morale, had made great speeches… and there was that Battle of Britain bit (but why was all that dogfighting so important? It’s only in the last few years that I’ve found out).

This vague information wasn’t enough. Growing up as I did during the premiership of Margaret Thatcher, through the miners’ strike and the years of high unemployment, social unrest and ‘there is no such thing as society’, living in a Labour-voting household, suspicious of Tory jingoism, I am ashamed to admit – but admit I must – that as a teenager I was a wee bit suspicious of Churchill. After all, he was a Tory, wasn’t he? (The answer to which, though I didn’t realise it then, is: only some of the time. He swapped parties. Twice.)

And then, in 2000, I was commissioned to write a children’s book about him (the first of two, thus far).

And I became enthralled, amazed, gobsmacked by the man. All my suspicions evaporated. I was awed by the chutzpah, the foresight, the courage – not just his physical bravery (astonishing enough, & demonstrated so consistently, decade after decade, war after war) but the mental toughness. The humanity, the drive, the refusal to give up whatever the situation. The willingness to say what he thought, whatever the reaction it brought. His wit, his wonderful way with the English language. His sheer force of personality.

He was not perfect (of course). He was not always right. He had a high romantic view of empire, for example, which made him oppose Indian independence. But, he was, by any measure, a truly astonishing person.

I’m going to hope that, unlike my young self, you know about his brilliant leadership, 1940-45. That you know about his grasp of the international picture, his strategic vision, his boldness, his stunning speeches (and the fact that he later won the Nobel Prise for Literature). All of that should be enough for any single life, but there are so many more reasons to admire him. Here are just a few:

I admire him for speaking out, throughout the 1930s, about the horrific nature of the Nazi regime (including the persecution of the Jews) & about the dangers of German rearmament, in the face of everything from scepticism to ridicule & taunts from some of his colleagues in Parliament. The speech he made in Parliament after Neville Chamberlain had been greeted by jubilant crowds upon returning home after signing the Munich agreement was a masterpiece (and it's important to mention that the person who spoke after Churchill accused him of being hysterical in his fears):

“I will begin by saying what everybody would like to ignore or forget but which must nevertheless be stated, namely, that we have sustained a total defeat." (At this, other MPs made so much noise - shouting "Nonsense!" and "Ridiculous!" - that Churchill had to pause. At last he went on:) "All is over. Silent, mournful, abandoned, broken, Czechoslovakia recedes into the darkness… It is a tragedy which has occurred.”

Wind back a little further – to the First World War. Amongst many other things, I admire Churchill’s insistence on going to the Western Front – albeit for a few months only – after he lost his government post as a result of the Dardanelles disaster. He could easily have avoided it - friends wanted to find him a safe job. But he insisted on going into the trenches. And on taking both his bath and his painting easel with him.

Winston Churchill in 1916 with the Royal Scots Fusiliers
 at Ploegsteert on the French-Belgian border

(Image: Public Domain; source unknown, via Wikimedia Commons - see link here)

I admire, too, the way he earned the respect and love of his initially highly sceptical men.

Going back further, to the pre-WWI years, I admire Churchill’s considerable efforts to effect social reform. He wanted to introduce a scheme of unemployment insurance to which the government would contribute, to introduce old age and sickness insurance too, and he set up the first labour exchanges in an attempt to de-casualise labour. (In 1908, it’s interesting to note, he made contact with a young university lecturer named William Beveridge). He wanted to reduce miners’ hours and improve safety & conditions in the mines. As Home Secretary Churchill worked to improve conditions in prisons, to curb excessive sentencing (such as 7 years' penal servitude for stealing lime juice), and he established for the first time a distinction between criminal & political prisoners (a move that was of immediate benefit to many imprisoned suffragettes). He worked also to reduce the numbers of young people in prisons and defended this move in Parliament, saying:

“...the evil only falls on the sons of the working classes. The sons of other classes commit many of the same offences. In their boisterous and exuberant spirits in their days at Oxford and Cambridge they commit offences – for which scores of the sons of the working class are committed to prison – without any injury being inflicted on them.”

Indeed, for someone born at Blenheim Palace, Churchill had an arguably surprising sense of social justice. When, during his time as a Liberal, Churchill & Lloyd George found their raft of social reforms threatened by a Lords revolt over the budget, Churchill wrote to his mother:

“I never saw people make such fools of themselves as all these Dukes and Duchesses are doing. One after another they come up threatening to cut down charities and pensions, sack old labourers and retainers, and howling and whining because they are asked to pay their share, as if they were being ruined.”

And in a letter to the King (Edward VII), Churchill wrote: “It must not be forgotten that there are idlers and wastrels at both ends of the social scale.” The King was furious & called him ‘socialistic’.

Churchill was far from a socialist – the idea would have appalled him (hinting at his huge enthusiasm for the study of history, in 1904 he said in Parliament: "It was always found in the past to be a misfortune to a country when it was governed from one particular point of view, or in the interests of any particular class, whether it was the Court, or the Church, or the Army, or the mercantile or labouring classes. Every country ought to be governed from some central point of view, where all classes and all interests are proportionately represented"). However, Tory though he (sometimes) was, I defy the present Tory government to claim him as their own. The current government’s determination, at this time of financial emergency, to protect the rich rather than the poor, & the strong rather than the weak, would not, I am convinced, be one of which Churchill approved.

Wanting to establish minimum standards of living below which no one should ever be allowed by the state to fall, in 1908 Churchill wrote in a letter (to Herbert Asquith): “Dimly across gulfs of ignorance I see the outline of a policy which I call the Minimum Standard.” But, he thought, if he tried to put it into action, “I expect before long I should find myself in collision with some of my best friends – like for instance John Morley, who at the end of a lifetime of study and thought has come to the conclusion that nothing can be done.” 

Churchill aged 23 or 24, 1898
(Image: Public Domain; source: BBC via Wikimedia Commons - see link here)

Churchill’s belief – crucially – was always that something could be done. However dire the predicament, something could always be done. The individual could make a difference. When fears of a Nazi invasion of Britain were at their height, Churchill’s suggestion for a slogan was: ‘YOU CAN ALWAYS TAKE ONE WITH YOU.’

He thought big – he thought audaciously. When he was at the Home Office, his most senior official was Edward Troup, who later said: “Once a week or oftener, Mr Churchill came into the Office bringing with him some adventurous or impossible projects; but after half an hour’s discussion something was evolved which was still adventurous, but not impossible.”

The White Queen might have believed six impossible things before breakfast - Churchill tended to do them.

And, before his arena for the doing-of-impossible-things was politics, Churchill was doing impossible things in the army (which he had entered after his father decided that he wasn’t intelligent enough to be a barrister).

Assuming what Roy Jenkins called “an almost divine right to be present at every scene of military action in the world”, he went to extraordinary lengths to put himself in personal danger. And when he couldn’t go to a theatre of war as a soldier, he managed to go as a war reporter instead.

His attitude to danger seemed a mixture of insouciance and fatalism; en route to fighting with the Malakand Field Force in 1897, aged 22, he wrote to his mother:

“I have faith in my star – that I am intended to do something in this world. If I am mistaken – what does it matter? My life has been a pleasant one and though I should regret to leave it, it would be a regret that perhaps I should never know.”

This attitude, wedded to his longing for adventure, led to some breathtaking Boys’-Own-style episodes, the most famous of which was his extraordinary experience as a war reporter during the Boer War in 1899. After an attack on the armoured train in which he was travelling – during which Churchill took charge of getting the train running again, as well as the rescue of the wounded – he was captured by the Boers, and put in a POW camp. He managed to escape, though without map, compass or means of transport, and with a 300-mile walk to safety in front of him. Against all the odds – after hiding in a train & down a mine – he made it to British-held territory… and promptly asked to be allowed to go straight back to the front.

Churchill as Morning Post correspondent during the Boer War, 1899
(Image: Public Domain; source: BBC via Wikimedia Commons - see link here)

Churchill wanted fame, and a reputation for personal courage – and his efforts to get both annoyed many people. In his brilliantly entertaining autobiography ‘My Early Life’ (which was first published in 1930, and incidentally includes a fascinating chapter entitled ‘The Sensations of a Cavalry Charge’), he acknowledges this with humour, self-deprecation, and no hint whatsoever of apology:

‘Now I began to encounter resistances of a new and formidable character. When I had first gone into the Army, and wanted to go on active service, nearly everyone had been friendly and encouraging.

…: all the world looked kind,

(As it will look sometimes with the first stare

Which Youth would not act ill to keep in mind).

The first stare was certainly over. I now perceived that there were many ill-informed and ill-disposed people who did not take a favourable view of my activities. On the contrary they began to develop an adverse and even a hostile attitude. They began to say things like this: ‘Who the devil is this fellow? How has he managed to get to these different campaigns? Why should he write for the papers and serve as an officer at the same time? Why should a subaltern praise or criticize his senior officers? Why should Generals show him favour? How does he get so much leave from his regiment? Look at all the hard-working men who have never stirred an inch from the daily round and common task. We have had quite enough of this – too much indeed. He is very young, and later on he may be all right; but now a long period of discipline and routine is what 2^nd Lieutenant Churchill requires.’ Others proceeded to be actually abusive, and the expressions ‘Medal-hunter’ and ‘Self-advertiser’ were used from time to time in some high and some low military circles in a manner which would, I am sure, surprise and pain the readers of these notes. It is melancholy to be forced to record these less amiable aspects of human nature, which by a most curious and indeed unaccountable coincidence have always seemed to present themselves in the wake of my innocent footsteps…'

But those innocent footsteps, infuriating to so many around him, continued on their way. And that astonishing self-belief & complete unwillingness ever to give up, sit still or believe that he could not make a difference… were exactly what was needed in 1940 when Britain stood alone against Hitler.

Churchill remarked once, at dinner, to Violet Asquith: “We are all worms, but I do believe I am a glow-worm.”

Thank goodness for the self-belief and vision of that glow-worm.

H.M. Castor’s new non-fiction children’s biography of Churchill, Real Lives: Winston Churchill - written under the name Harriet Castor – was published by A&C Black last week.

H.M. Castor's novel VIII - a new take on the life of Henry VIII - is published by Templar in the UK and by Penguin in Australia. It is now available in paperback, hardback & ebook format.

H.M. Castor's website is here.

How the Tudors Dressed by Barbara Mitchelhill

From the writer’s point of view, the historical novel, is like an iceberg with only the smallest part on show to the public. First comes the research, which can take months or even years. Next comes plotting and planning before the writing itself - and all this is the tip of the iceberg. But if our iceberg isn’t about to sink without trace, it needs more underpinning by getting it noticed. In other words, promotion.

My next book, Road to London, set in the Tudor period, isn’t published until April 5^th but plans have been afoot since September as to how to promote it. After talking to Harriet Castor about the stunning Tudor dress she wears for the promotion of VIII, I had the idea of making two children’s outfits as might be worn by the two main characters in the story. One would be for Thomas, a scholar from Stratford-upon-Avon, and one for Alice, a serving wench from London. I wanted children at school events to be able to try them on and discover how different these clothes were from their own. For one thing, the outfits would be made of either linen or wool – no cotton or easy wash synthetics. A company called The Tudor Tailor was very helpful, full of advice and supplied patterns for each of the costumes.

I drove up to Stoke-on-Trent to a shop called Abakhan, which is an Aladdin’s cave of fabric at great prices and not long after, I got out my sewing machine (which I confess I hadn’t used for ages) and began to make Alice’s outfit.

This is the linen smock Alice would wear during the day and she would almost certainly sleep in, too. No nipping down to M&S or Dorothy P’s to buy a nice nighty. The smock was made of linen so that it could be washed from time to time – but I can only guess that it wouldn’t happen as often as we would like in 2012. Please note that she would not wear knickers. The advantage of this was that it was easier to ‘got to the loo’ if she was out in the fields. The disadvantage was that rape was very much easier.

On top of the smock, Alice would wear a red flannel petticoat, firstly for warmth as Tudor houses, in spite of their open fires, could be bitterly cold. But the Tudors also believed that red worn close to the skin would promote good health. When Henry VIII’s body began to fail, red flannel underwear was made for him and, interestingly, Elizabeth I was wrapped in red flannel when she had smallpox.

Alice’s woollen kirtle with attached bodice would be worn on top of the petticoat and was unlikely to be washed often but dirt and mud would be brushed off. The kirtle I made for Alice has a bodice attached with ties of ribbon at the front. I think the ribbon would be bought at a fair or from a tinker passing by and might well have been given to her as a birthday present. Ribbons or laces were a very practical way of fastening the bodice as it could be loosened or tightened to fit. I could have made buttons. These would be made with a circle of cloth, gathered up tightly, then stitched with back-stitch to cover the cloth. Then, of course, you would have to make a button hole. All terribly time-consuming – so I took the easy way out and added ribbons.

Now Alice is ready for work in the tavern. Her apron is made of linen and is not gathered at the top as is a modern apron but is perfectly smooth. Her cap is simply a square of linen tied round her head to keep her hair out of the way.

With just a month to go, I must get on with the boy’s outfit. Not quite so multi layered as Alice’s – just a smock, doublet and hose. I’m pleased with the results on a limited budget. The two outfits came in at around £80 – unless you pay me for my time, of course!

Visit my website.