This pirate is living rent-free in my head

Warning: If you read this, she'll be living rent-free in yours, too

Dear Writer,

Betas are coming in, and the news is good. Confusion stems from complicated worldbuilding, but nothing I can’t clear up in a solid revision, and apparently it’s funnier and sexier than I ever thought it was going to be so… good on me.

But now, I must wait. I need time between getting the feedback and making the changes, because my default setting is to absolutely agree with everything critical anyone says, and ignore anything positive they might have said, so I need to let the betas settle a bit before going in for another run.

During these creative pauses, I always gravitate to the same thing; history. Books, podcasts, documentaries, YouTube channels… I can’t get enough history, and medieval history is my absolute favorite. So much so that I included (and took out, because Too Much Explanation required for absolutely no in-the-moment story value) a reference to one of my characters being the reincarnation of the pirate Jeanne de Clisson, a middle-aged 14th century French noblewoman turned pirate whose Boudician¹ rage should be the first story in every textbook, whether it’s about medieval France or not, that’s how fucking badass this woman is.

Jeanne de Clisson was born Jeanne Louise de Belleville in 1300 and was married for the first time at 12 years old. Life expectancies were short back then, especially for women whose job was basically to breed during an age that featured a 20 percent maternal mortality rate, but even so… are you fucking kidding me? She had her first baby at 14, and had produced another at 16 and then went another 10 years without children before her first husband kicked it. I imagine a 16-year-old Jeanne, fresh from surviving giving birth to a second child, being like, “I did my fucking job, and I’m keeping a knife under my pillow. Find yourself a mistress, live well, and prosper,” and my guess is… Hubby #1 did just that.

Good for him.

After his death, Jeanne quickly married another guy, most likely to protect the two children she’d had by the age of 18, but that marriage was later annulled because his family were snobs and also… there’s some evidence that she was sleeping with a married noble, her future husband Olivier IV de Clisson, with whom she had a daughter who was four years old when his wife died and he was free to marry Jeanne, which he did in 1330.

They had four more children together, and now’s a good time to pause and do a head count. Two from the first marriage, one out of wedlock, four more… that’s seven children by the time Jeanne was 40.

And she started at 14.

By the age of 43, Jeanne had played the Russian roulette game of giving birth in medieval times (the era, not the restaurant) seven times and had survived. She had buried two children. She had sued her husband Olivier because he wasn’t divvying up the cash according to the stipulations of their marriage contract, and won. Now was the time in her life when things were supposed to finally get easier, and she could have lived out the rest of her life drinking wine and marrying her children off to other nobles and bouncing fat grandchildren on her knee.

But then the Breton War of Succession was all the trendy rage and the nobles of France were fighting over who would gain control of Brittany and there were these two duchesses (both also named variations on Jeanne, which was apparently the Olivia of its day) who were beefing hard about it, and all of that is fascinating but the bottom line is that Olivier and Jeanne backed the wrong French horse—and had by some accounts made some diplomatic flirty eyes at France’s long-time enemy England—and Olivier was deemed a traitor and dragged off to prison.

This is 1343, at which point Jeanne had already illustrated her fuck around and find out credentials, and her husband—the very thing a woman needed to be safe in medieval times²—was being held prisoner while accusations were also flying about her. And while women were not allowed to have their own property or make their own money or have their own thoughts, they were allowed to be murdered in a million different very painful ways if any man decided it should be so for any reason, so Jeanne got to work. She started working the backchannels, laying down bribe money to break Olivier out of prison, but all of it failed and eventually, the French eye of Sauron landed on her. The crown beheaded Olivier, sentenced Jeanne to banishment, and seized all her property, leaving her destitute with two young sons still at home.

That’s the Fuck Around. Now comes the Find Out.

Jeanne, under threat of beheading herself, took her two young sons to Nantes so they could see their father’s head on a pike at the city gates.

Okay, let’s pause a moment and imagine this. Here she is, she’s lost everything and has been deemed a traitor by the crown, and she makes the treacherous journey with her two young sons to see their father’s head on a fucking pike so that she can instill in them the rage she is currently running on.

She sells everything she has left, hires 400 men to work under her command, and starts delivering a metric shit-ton of find out to the French as she declares war. She attacks a castle and murders everyone inside, leaving one survivor to tell the tale. She cuts a bloody swath through the countryside nobility, her former friends, and then uses her plunder to buy three ships (naming her personal flagship My Revenge) and torments the French commerce ships in the English channel, always leaving a survivor or two to run back to the king with a first-person account of what the fuck.

They called her the Lioness of Brittany, and she wasn’t near done. She tormented the French coast, aided the English during the Crécy campaign. The French were basically her bitches for seventeen years, and in that time, they only got a serious shot in once, when they sank her ship and left her and her sons (the very sons she had dragged to see dad’s head on a pike) adrift on the water for days; one of those sons, Guillaume, died of exposure, and if you think that experience finally tamed the Lioness of Brittany well… you haven’t been paying attention.

Now in her fifties, Jeanne joined forces with the English king Edward III, and eventually married Walter Bentley, one of Edward’s military lieutenants. This is the part I love; this is the part where I imagine, like most women in their fifties, Jeanne settled into her best years. The English took the very land Jeanne had lost to the French and she reclaimed her home. Then, as both nations were under the siege of the Black Death which was killing fucking everyone, they started to negotiate rather than kill each other, and Edward commanded Walter to return some of those lands to the French.

And here’s the thing; Walter refused. Jeanne had to sue one husband to give her the funds he’d contractually agreed to, and now, here was Walter, taking her side against the fucking King of England, and being held in the Tower of London, the famous cell-to-headless pipeline of the Thames, while he awaited a ruling. Walter was eventually released, and some of Jeanne’s lands returned to the French, but they were able to settle, finally, on the English-controlled coast of Brittany, until they both died within weeks of each other at the end of 1359.

I love this story. Not because it’s a happy story, because it’s not. And not because it’s privileged rich fucks killing other privileged rich fucks while the peasantry, whose lives were certainly just as rich and interesting, are forgotten.

But because a bunch of rich, patriarchal fucks got their ass handed to them by a woman they assessed to be so little threat to them, they couldn’t even be arsed to behead her when they had the chance. They didn’t kill her. They didn’t destroy her. She made them pay, and pay, and pay, for seventeen years, and eventually, she won.

Like I said, this isn’t a happy story, although I’d say the end—short-lived though it was—seems to contain about as much happiness as Jeanne de Clisson ever got. Walter seems like a stand-up guy, and sure, he was fighting for his own future with his wife, but he was fighting alongside her, on her behalf, at a time when he could have cut her out and gone back to England, easy peasy. Jeanne de Clisson was not a Nice Lady, but the very idea of Nice Lady is an oppressive piece of patriarchal propaganda, and as Laurel Thatcher-Ulritch once said, well-behaved women (aka, Nice Ladies) seldom make history.

This is because they are usually the pavement upon which the men who make history walk.

Here’s the thing about being a woman under patriarchy; from jump, you are made to believe that you are lesser, that you deserve the unfair treatment you receive. That you are an object made for the pleasure of men. That the worst thing you can possibly do is survive your youth.

And most importantly, that you are powerless.³

This poisonous programming is installed at an age so young that it takes forever to realize you even believe these things. Undoing that gaslighting and brainwashing is a fucking job of work, and it’s usually around 40 when, as a white woman who stands at a very empowered crossroads on this wagon train of bullshit, you start reckon with the lies…. hopefully including the ones you’ve unknowingly participated in to the detriment of others.

Now you know, now it’s time to reckon.

Jeanne de Clisson’s story is a testimony to a part of that reckoning. You are very, very powerful, and if you can just know that, you can deliver a metric shit-ton of find out, if you so choose.

I’m sorry I had to cut Jeanne from the book, but telling her story here, for you all, is more joyful anyway, because I can take the time to really talk about her, and that is always fun.

Everything,

L

1. I’m pretty sure Boudician is not a word but it is now, because we need it to describe a woman who Has Had Enough of Men’s Shit. If you don’t know the story of Boudica, let me know, and I’ll give you that one, too.

2. Again, not the restaurant.

3. I imagine it’s a similar experience being non-white under white supremacy, or being poor under capitalism. This is not just about women and patriarchy; the story of Jeanne de Clisson illustrates hidden truths about power for every oppressed population.