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.].