The English siege of Orléans (October 1428 – May 1429) was the turning point of the Hundred Years' War: Joan of Arc's arrival galvanised the defence, and the siege was broken in nine days.
The siege of Orléans, from 12 October 1428 to 8 May 1429, is the hinge of the Hundred Years' War. Before it, English arms had been effectively unbeaten in the field for a generation; after it, the initiative passed to Charles VII and never fully returned. The city commanded the Loire crossing on the direct road to Bourges, the Dauphin's capital — if Orléans fell, the war might have ended in a Lancastrian France.
It is also the siege that made Joan of Arc. The seventeen-year-old from Domrémy arrived with the relief convoy on 29 April 1429; nine days later the English siege lines were broken and burning. Whatever weight historians assign to her generalship against her effect on morale, contemporaries on both sides had no doubt the siege turned on her arrival.
By 1428 Bedford's regency had pushed the frontier of Lancastrian France to the Loire. The war council in Paris chose Orléans as the next objective — over Bedford's reported preference for Angers — and in October the veteran Earl of Salisbury invested the city with perhaps four to five thousand men, seizing the bridge suburb and the fortified bridgehead of Les Tourelles.
Salisbury was mortally wounded by a cannon shot within days of taking Les Tourelles, an omen of how the siege would run. His successors Suffolk and Talbot lacked the men to seal off the city completely: the English built a ring of detached forts — the bastilles — covering the west and south, but the eastern approaches stayed porous. Through the winter the garrison under Dunois, the Bastard of Orléans, and the citizens — who paid for and manned much of their own artillery — held on, while the only relief attempt, at the "Battle of the Herrings" in February 1429, ended in a French defeat.
Joan reached Charles VII's court at Chinon in February 1429, claiming a divine commission to raise the siege and lead the king to his coronation at Reims. After examination by clergy at Poitiers, she was given armour, a banner, and a place with the relief army assembling at Blois. On 29 April she entered Orléans through the eastern gates with a supply convoy, to a reception the city's own journal describes as ecstatic.
Her letters to the English commanders demanding their withdrawal were answered with insults, but inside the walls she changed the arithmetic of the siege. The garrison and citizens, who had endured six months of blockade, now pressed for the attack; the captains — Dunois, La Hire, Gilles de Rais, Poton de Xaintrailles — found themselves fighting alongside a standard the soldiers believed heaven had sent.
The counterattack ran from 4 to 7 May 1429 with a speed that stunned both sides. On 4 May the French stormed the bastille of Saint-Loup east of the city. On 6 May they crossed the river and took the fort of the Augustins on the south bank. On 7 May came the decisive assault on Les Tourelles, the strongest English work, commanding the broken bridge.
The fight for Les Tourelles lasted from morning to dusk. Joan was wounded by an arrow above the collarbone — as she had predicted — withdrew, and returned to the assault in the evening; the sight of her banner at the ditch carried the final storm. The English commander at the bridgehead, William Glasdale, drowned in the Loire when the drawbridge collapsed under him. On the morning of 8 May the remaining English forces under Suffolk and Talbot drew up in battle order, then burned their forts and marched away. The French, on Joan's reported insistence that the day was a Sunday, let them go.
The strategic consequences came fast. In June the French cleared the remaining English garrisons from the Loire at Jargeau, Meung, and Beaugency, and on 18 June destroyed the English field army at Patay. On 17 July 1429 Charles VII was crowned at Reims with Joan beside him — the political objective her voices had named from the start, and a coronation that transformed the Dauphin of Bourges into the anointed King of France.
Orléans itself never forgot. The city kept 8 May as a civic feast in Joan's honour — a commemoration that has continued, war and revolution notwithstanding, to the present day.
Militarily, the siege's failure exposed the overstretch of Lancastrian France: the English lacked the numbers to blockade a great city and simultaneously hold a four-hundred-mile frontier. The porous eastern siege lines let Orléans breathe just enough to survive the winter, and once a determined relief force arrived, the isolated bastilles were destroyed one by one.
Symbolically its weight was greater still. Orléans broke the aura of English invincibility that had hung over the war since Agincourt, and bound Charles VII's cause to a story of divine vindication that Reims sealed two months later. English propaganda understood this perfectly — which is why, when Joan was captured the following year, her trial at Rouen was designed to prove the siege had been the devil's work rather than God's.