Agincourt 600

1. Agincourt 600 Lesson 4: To what extent did women play a part in medieval warfare?

2. What do you notice about this fierce warrior?

3. Task In your allocated pair you must turn your description of the role of a medieval peasant woman into a mime so that the rest of the group can guess what job it is you are miming. When it is your turn to watch you must try and guess what is being mimed.

4. Task In your allocated pair you must turn your description of the role of a medieval peasant woman into a mime so that the rest of the group can guess what job it is you are miming. When it is your turn to watch you must try and guess what is being mimed. You have been given a list of possible jobs to help you decide.

5. The duties of a medieval peasant woman • The daily life of a peasant woman started in the summer as early as 3am • She first had to prepare a breakfast, usually of pottage (stew) • Work in the fields or on the land started by dawn and the daily life of a peasant woman during the Middle Ages would include this type of hard work during busy times, especially harvest • Preparations had to be started in order to provide the daily meals • Peasant women were expected to look after small animals - geese, chickens, etc. • Weaving, spinning and making and mending clothes were also part of a woman's work • Preparing rushes for lighting • Making preserves • Tending the vegetable plot and collecting berries and herbs • Women were also responsible for the children and needed an understanding of medicines and herbs for basic nursing requirements • Outside work finished at dusk, working hours were therefore longer during the summer months • Women generally ate when their husband and children had finished and had little leisure time

6. Comparison

8. Now back to our ‘fierce warrior’

9. Now back to our ‘fierce warrior’ I’d like you to turn my story into a time-line. Please don’t leave anything important out.

10. Can you do better than Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark (OMD)?

11. Listen to the two tracks by OMD. Can you do better?

12. Work in small groups to provide more historically accurate lyrics to either song

13. OMD Maid of Orleans https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vmwMhjbThKg If Joan of Arc had a heart, Would she give it as a gift To such as me who longs to see, How a legend oughta be Had dreams to give her heart away, Like an orphan along the way She cared so much, She offered up her body to the grave

14. OMD Joan of Arc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yyl9enDp8Ls Little catholic girl is fallin' in love A face on a page, a gift from above She should've known better than to give her heart She should've known better than to ever part without me, without me I gave her everything that I ever owned I think she understood it but she never spoke She shouldn't oughta try to be that way She shouldn't have to go there every day without me, without me Now listen to us good and listen well Listen to the song and everything we tell We should've known better than to give her away We should've known better to this very day, without me, without me Listen Joan of Arc, all you gotta do Say the right words and I'll be coming through Hold you in my arms and take you right away Now she's turned away to another land We never understood it why she gave her hand She shouldn't oughta promise, cause it's just pretend I know she doesn't mean it and she'll leave again without me, without me Without me, without me

15. Prepare a breakfast, usually of pottage (stew with oats, vegetables and sometimes meat)

16. Working on the land

17. Preparations had to be started in order to provide the daily meals

18. Peasant women were expected to look after small animals - geese, chickens, etc.

19. Weaving, spinning and making and mending clothes were also part of a woman's work

20. Tending the vegetable plot and collecting berries and herbs

21. Women were also responsible for the children

22. Women needed an understanding of medicines and herbs for basic nursing requirements

23. Women generally ate when their husband and children had finished and had little leisure time

24. Joan of Arc came from an obscure village and rose to prominence when she was a teenager, and she did so as an uneducated peasant. The French and English kings had justified the ongoing war through competing interpretations of inheritance law, first concerning Edward III's claim to the French throne and then Henry VI's. The conflict had been a legalistic feud between two related royal families, but Joan transformed it along religious lines and gave meaning to appeals such as that of squire Jean de Metz when he asked, ‘Must the king be driven from the kingdom; and are we to be English?’[30] • In the words of Stephen Richey, ‘She turned what had been a dry dynastic squabble that left the common people unmoved except for their own suffering into a passionately popular war of national liberation.’[90]Richey also expresses the breadth of her subsequent appeal: • ‘The people who came after her in the five centuries since her death tried to make everything of her: demonic fanatic, spiritual mystic, naive and tragically ill-used tool of the powerful, creator and icon of modern popular nationalism, adored heroine, saint. She insisted, even when threatened with torture and faced with death by fire, that she was guided by voices from God. Voices or no voices, her achievements leave anyone who knows her story shaking his head in amazed wonder.’