. iv, first series, p. 488.]

The standard was the signal for rallying. For long only kings,
emperors, and leaders in war had had the right of raising it. The
feudal suzerain had it carried before him; vassals ranged themselves
beneath their lord's banners. But in 1429 banners had ceased to be
used save in corporations, guilds, and parishes, borne only before the
armies of peace. In war they were no longer needed. The meanest
captain, the poorest knight had his own standard. When fifty French
men-at-arms went forth from Orleans against a handful of English
marauders, a crowd of banners like a swarm of butterflies waved over
the fields. "To raise one's standard" came to be a figure of speech
for "to be puffed up."[834] So indeed it was permissible for a
freebooter to raise his standard when he commanded scarce a score of
men-at-arms and half-naked bowmen. Even if Jeanne, as she may have
done, held her standard to be a sign of sovereign command, and if,
having received it from the King of Heaven, she thought to raise it
above all others, was there a soul in the realm to say her nay? What
had become of all those feudal banners which for eighty years had been
in the vanguard of defeat; sown over the fields of Crecy; collected
beneath bushes and hedges by Welsh and Cornish swordsmen; lost in the
vineyards of Maupertuis, trampled underfoot by English archers on the
soft earth into which sank the corpses of Azincourt; gathered in
handfuls under the walls of Verneuil by Bedford's marauders? It was
because all these banners had miserably fallen, it was because at
Rouvray a prince of the blood royal had shamefully trailed his nobles'
banners in flight, that the peasant now raised her banner.

[Footnote 834: In Beaudouin de Sebourg (xx, 249) is the passage:

_Il est cousin au conte
Il en fait estandart_

quoted by Godefroy. Cf. La Curne and Littre.]

CHAPTER X

THE SIEGE OF ORLEANS FROM THE 7TH OF MARCH TO THE 28TH OF APRIL, 1429

Since the terrible and ridiculous discomfiture of the King's men in
the Battle of the Herrings, the citizens of Orleans had lost all faith
in their defenders.[835] Their minds agitated, suspicious and
credulous were possessed by phantoms of fear and wrath. Suddenly and
without reason they believe themselves betrayed. One day it is
announced that a hole big enough for a man to pass through has been
made in the town wall just where it skirts the outbuildings of the
Aumone.[836] A c