Edward III. besieged Beauvais in 1346, but without success, and it only fell into English hands in 1420 through the treachery of Bishop Pierre Cauchon, whose name also appears as one of the witnesses against Joan of Arc at Rouen eleven years later. The memory of this latter offence so preyed upon his mind that when he became bishop of Lisieux--having presumably been ejected from the see of Beauvais--Couchon sought to expiate his sin by dedicating a chapel to the Virgin in the Cathedral of Saint Pierre. Hearing of the siege of Compiègne by the Burgundian forces, Joan had left Charles’s army, which was still dawdling by the Loire in a state of inaction, and marched off to Compiègne to relieve his party there. Arrived without the town, she soon headed a sortie against the Burgundians; they were driven back, and it is probable that the expedition would have been attended by the success which, to do her justice, had up to this moment crowned the efforts of the Maid, had not a body of Englishmen come up unexpectedly between her and the town and driven her into a corner. She was of course speedily captured. As soon as the news reached Paris both the University and the Vicar of the Inquisition demanded her person. Cauchon, however, stood firm. The Maid, he contended, had been captured within the diocese of Beauvais, and he, as the foremost prelate of the English party, claimed the right of putting her on trial; and after having paid to Burgundy 10,000 livres for this right, sent the Maid to Rouen, there to stand on her trial for sorcery, before a court of which Cauchon was president; and this fact alone might reasonably destroy all hope for poor Joan. Another fourteenth-century bishop of Beauvais brought his diocese before the world in no small degree. Jean de Dormans was not only bishop; he became Chancellor of France, and obtained from Rome the rank of a cardinal, under the title of the Four Crowned Saints. In Paris Dormans endowed a foundation which still bears the name of Collège de Beauvais, though what remains of the building serves as barracks, and the light of learning has left its precincts for ever. The old college is now united to its neighbour, the Collège de Presle; but the fourteenth-century chapel dedicated to Saint John the Evangelist still stands almost intact, though it, too, has been desecrated, and now serves the use of the military occupiers. Formerly there stood within this chapel six life-size figures, representing three men and three women of the Dormans family, and it is believed that when mediæval fragments were pieced together to form the chapel of Abélard and Héloise, which is now part of the burial-ground of Père-la-Chaise, the figure of one of these ladies of the fourteenth century was used to represent that of Héloise.