Domrémy-la-Pucelle

Of all the amazing feats she is said to have performed, none surpasses this.

Joan was born 19 years ago in the little village of Domremy, on the left bank of the river Meuse, just west of the Duchy of Lorraine.

Her father is Jacques d'Arc, a simple farmer.

From childhood, Joan claimed she saw visions of saints and heard their voices.

oh okay

Her home and her hometown is Domremy, which is near the the border with Lorraine, which is sort of in a French way.

It's kind of like close to the German border.

And that's where she had the divine vision that she bore arms and precisely fulfilled this prophecy criteria.

Mm.

16 of those she spends in this one village, Domrémy, in the Lorraine.

And so trying to be in that place, in that environment with her was my starting point to reconnecting with this figure from the past.

That's brilliant.

[laughs]

But these saints have been apparently coming to her since she was little, particularly when she hears the bells ringing.

I've actually stood in the garden of her house in Domrémy.

The entrance to the church is outside her window, and when the bells peal, the whole sort of air resonates.

In his day, he had ravaged villages with the best noble in the land, and he was not convinced that Jeanne was really the saint of God that she claimed.

When she returned home, she found herself the butt of Domrémy.

Nine months later, she ran away to Vaucouleurs again and found Robert more helpful.

He had for some time felt sympathy with the Dauphin Charles and had grown to detest the English and Burgundians, and he now welcomed the supernatural aid which Jeanne promised.

It is possible that he did not buy her from the Burgundians because he was too stupid, too poor, or too parsimonious.

It is more likely that his courtiers and himself began to believe that her success was so great that it could not be explained by mortal means, and that there must be something in the witchcraft story after all.

It would not have been a pleasant thing for the French aristocrats to find that when a little maid from Domrémy came to help the common people, the scum of the earth suddenly began to fight as they had not fought for generations.

Fully to understand what happened, we must remember that it was not very long since the Jacquerie, and that the aristocratic survivors had left to their sons tales of unutterable horrors.

Joan of Arc’s emergence threw that equilibrium into sharp relief, compelling English strategists, whose maps already noted every Norman foothold, to reassess not only the battlefield but also the ideological underpinnings of their own authority.

From an English eye, the news that a nineteen-year-old peasant from Domrémy had guided the garrison at Orléans felt like a threat to the legitimacy of Henry V’s successor and, more immediately, to the image of England as the dominant military power in northern France, prompting whispers in the royal council chambers that perhaps divine favor could shift as readily as cannon smoke across the Seine.

The chroniclers in London, both the royal court scribes who were tasked with recording official victories and the independent pamphleteers whose sensational tales traveled through taverns, began to frame her as an anomalous figure whose very existence seemed to undermine the divine right that underpinned Henry VI’s claim to the French crown, thereby setting the stage for the political maneuvering that would follow.

By early spring of fourteen twenty-nine, the English held a patchwork of Normandy and Gascony but had already suffered defeat at Agincourt two years earlier, an event that still haunted courtiers in Westminster.

It is more likely that his courtiers and himself began to believe that her success was so great that it could not be explained by mortal means, and that there must be something in the witchcraft story after all.

It would not have been a pleasant thing for the French aristocrats to find that when a little maid from Domrémy came to help the common people, these scum of the earth suddenly began to fight as they had not fought for generations.

Fully to understand what happened, we must remember that it was not very long since the Jacquerie, and that the aristocratic survivors had left to their sons tales of unutterable horrors.

However, Jeanne was put on her trial for witchcraft, and after a long and apparently hesitating process, for there had been grave doubts raised as to the legality of the whole thing, she was condemned to death.