Joan of Arc was captured at Compiègne on 23 May 1430

Joan of Arc was captured at about six in the evening of 23 May 1430 outside Compiègne, north-east of Paris, when her sortie against the Anglo-Burgundian army besieging the town collapsed and she was cut off before its bridge. The town’s historical society is firm on the date: the 23rd, not the 24th that is sometimes given.

She had slipped into Compiègne that day with 300 or 400 men. When English reinforcements arrived and panic spread, her troops fell back toward the fortified bridgehead; pinned against it, she was dragged from her horse by an archer who seized her cloak of gold cloth. Larousse names the chain of custody: a Picard archer serving the Burgundian knight known as the Bastard of Wandonne, who handed her at once to his lord, Jean de Luxembourg.

Where she fell turned out to matter. She was taken on the Picard bank of the Oise, inside the diocese of Beauvais, whose bishop, Pierre Cauchon, was a committed partisan of Burgundy and England. That accident of geography gave Cauchon the standing to try her.

The University of Paris demanded custody by 26 May. Held first at Beaulieu-en-Vermandois and then at Beaurevoir, near Cambrai, she tried to escape by jumping from a tower and survived. Meanwhile the English regent, the Duke of Bedford, paid Jean de Luxembourg 10,000 écus to have her delivered for trial before an Inquisition court. The English wanted her condemned so that the coronation she had won for Charles VII in July 1429, weeks after she helped relieve Orléans, would look like the work of a heretic.

By 23 December 1430 she had been brought to Rouen. The Vatican dates the start of her “passion” to the day of the capture at Compiègne; it ended just over a year later, when she was burned at the stake in Rouen.