Jeanne Hachette
Hatchet Woman
In June of 1472, Duke Charles the Bold of Burgundy was such a complete and total jackass to everybody that the King of France had officially declared him a traitor to the crown. Charles raised an army and started turning the French countryside into a giant raging inferno. So far in his illustrious career as a no-talent who punched third graders in the face, stole candy from underprivileged children and generally just contributed nothing of value to the human race, Charles the Bold had busted through the city walls of Dinant, Leige, and Nesle, slaughtered all of the inhabitants and torched everything.
Well to the people of the town of Beauvais, the idea of being raped, plundered, pillaged and char-grilled was about as appealing as a swift punch to the gut with a mailed fist. So when they saw him coming they immediately pulled up the drawbridge, assembled the militia, and prepared to stomp this guy with everything they had.
Of course, Duke Charles was the sort of guy who had a crippling inferiority complex, so he immediately set in to besiege the poor residents of Beauvais. A mere 300 ragtag militiamen garrisoned the walls of the city.
Charles the Bold, being the kind of person who arrogantly demanded that everyone refer to him by the epithet “The Bold” even though his biggest claim to fame was that he married two of his cousins and ended the lives of many defenseless peasants, immediately sent his troops to storm the city walls. He promised several days’ worth of plundering, looting, and murdering to his men when they captured the city. The brave defenders of Beauvais steeled themselves for a life-or-death struggle, except for one brave woman who wasn’t going to be intimidated by something as trivial as an army of medieval knights – Jeanne the Hatchet. She was kind of like Molly Hatchet, only instead of flirting with disaster, she was a master of it. This teenage peasant girl from Beauvais didn’t like the prospect of being manhandled by some rampaging, plunder-seeking Duke, and she was willing to do whatever she could to help out the obviously-overmatched defenders of her hometown. The defenders were hurling rocks, arrows, boiling oil, flasks full of sulfuric acid, Molotov cocktails and anvils down on the Burgundian troops as they swarmed up the sides of the walls. The invaders crossed the moat, threw ladders up against the stone walls of the town, and climbed onto the ramparts. Eventually, the champion of the Burgundy army pulled himself on top of the wall, planted the flag of Charles the Bold high above the town, and shouted a bunch of insults about how he was going to have his way with everybody’s mothers.
That was the final straw. Jeanne wasn’t going just going to stand there and let some jerk stick his flag on the walls of her town. She grabbed the closest thing to her – which just so happened to be a gleaming hatchet – sprinted across the wall like a homicidal Olympian and lunged at the invader.
He didn’t even know what hit him. One minute he was standing there, chopping in the general direction of the citizens of Beauvais, and the next minute this crazy woman was assaulting him with a hatchet. Jeanne smashed this guy in the shoulder with her axe and her second swing sent the hatchet blade right into his throat. As he stood there, his eyes slowly glazing over, Jeanne kicked him square in the chest, sending him flying off the wall to his death below. Then she pulled the flag up out of the ground, broke the flagpole over her knee and hurled it down into the moat on top of him.
The men defending the city killed every Burgundian they could get their hands on and chucked their bodies over the walls of the city. Jeanne continued to flip out like a ninja on the invaders, swinging her axe like a bloodthirsty lumberjack, and before long Charles the Bold was boldly running away from the ever-swinging death-bringing hatchet arm of our heroine. He never returned, and met a miserable end five years later when he was brained with a halberd and his dead body was eaten by wild animals.
When King Louis XI heard about how this one tough woman had single-handedly turned the tide of the battle by hacking up this knight with a hatchet and biting his flag in half with her teeth he couldn’t help but get psyched up as well. He threw a parade for her, lavished her with gifts, and gave her the right to marry the man of her choosing, which was kind of a big deal back in the days of arranged marriages when most women were bought and sold like livestock at the county fair. To this day, there is a statue of Jeanne in the town she so valiantly fought to defend, and in celebration of her heroism a parade known as the “Procession of the Assault” takes place every year on the anniversary of the battle.
