Joan of Arc (3 page)

A few details of her early days give Joan’s life a context. She was born in a sizeable farmhouse, which still stands, in Domremy on the River Meuse. Domremy was situated in the marches or border lands of Lorraine; and Joan had from childhood a sense of identity that, paradoxically, comes naturally to someone born at the point of intersection between various worlds. Geographically, linguistically and politically, she lived her childhood on the edge.

North-eastern France, a land of undulating plains, is criss-crossed by rivers. To the west of Domremy the Marne moves northwards through champagne country just south of Reims, where French kings were crowned, before turning east to join the Seine near Paris. East of Domremy the Moselle snakes its way along another valley of vineyards, past Nancy, capital of the duchy of Lorraine, into Germany, where it becomes the Mosel. The Meuse, the river of Domremy, also flows through rich agricultural land, past a fortress, at Verdun, into the lands of the powerful bishopric of Liège before it turns into the Maas and, like the Mosel, empties into the Rhine.

Domremy lies near one of the great linguistic divides in Europe. To the north of Domremy people spoke low German, Flemish or Dutch or Frisian; to the east people spoke high German, what we call German and the Germans
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. Even if the dialect Joan spoke was regarded as a peasant patois, without the cultural prestige of what Chaucer, with his Anglo-Norman, called ‘Frenssh of Paris’, she was clear that her own tongue was French. And she was conscious that most French speakers lived west of Domremy.

Joan was acutely aware that she lived on the edge of various political systems. Domremy was close to Champagne, just in Lorraine, but most of Lorraine was outside France. Its duke was a subject of the Holy Roman Emperor, who was also King of Germany and King of Bohemia; and yet, though the Duke of Lorraine was, through the Duke of Bar, the overlord of most of Domremy, Joan knew that the overlord of her part of the village was the King of France. Much more powerful locally was the Duke of Burgundy, a French royal prince soon to be allied to the King of England. Just south of Lorraine, the duchy of Burgundy lay in eastern France, but the adjoining county of Burgundy (Franche-Comté) lay in the empire. A series of family alliances gradually gave the duke control of three wealthy provinces of the lands between France and Germany: of Flanders, where French was spoken in Lille and Flemish in Ghent (or Gand) and Brugge (or Bruges); of Brabant; and of Holland. Merchants had every reason to be grateful for the power of their duke, which opened to them the trade routes of northern Europe. Joan, who was not from that class, hated being thought a Burgundian. She knew the neighbouring village of Maxey was ‘Burgundian’; and the paths along which she rode were cleared by the success of Vaucouleurs’s castellan in keeping his fort, a little to the north of Maxey, loyal to France. And yet, if Joan was sure she was ‘French’ too, when she travelled west to see her king, she said she was going into ‘France’. It was the very confusion of her environment that accounts for her distinct political loyalties.

Joan was a peasant. Her parents were Jacques or Jacquot d’Arc and Isabelle Romée, and she had three brothers and a sister: the eldest, Jacquemin, who went away from home while she was a child; next Catherine, who married and died young; and lastly Jean and Pierre. She was never Joan ‘of Arc’, since in her part of the country children took their mothers’ names. She was born in January 1412 or 1413 and baptised by master Jean Minet. She had many godparents and could identify five of them. Her childhood was unremarkable. From her mother she learnt simple prayers, the ‘Our Father’, the ‘Hail Mary’ and the Apostles’ Creed. She helped in the fields, she was useful around the house. She experienced the results of taking sides in political matters when the boys of Maxey and Domremy indulged in a brawl, in which the Domremy boys got the worse bruises.

When questioning her about life in Domremy, her judges tried to find out whether she had taken part in superstitious rituals connected with a tree associated with fairies. She admitted that she had danced round the tree but supposedly superstitious practices bored her and she did not conceal her lack of interest. If she was unusual, she was unusually pious, but religious needs could have been satisfied, as her mother’s were, by going on pilgrimages to famous shrines. Her mother had gone to Le Puy-en-Velay, perched high on a rock, from which pilgrims set out en route to Santiago de Compostela or to Rome; and perhaps the surname Romée referred to a journey to Rome made either by her mother or by some maternal ancestor. In the last years of her short life Joan travelled far, but she might have gone nowhere but for her voices. Her voices changed her life for ever.

The account of them must be taken from a transcript of her trial in Rouen, by which time it was well known that she claimed to be directed by ‘voices’. Whatever she had told those sympathetic to her before, the most complete record is the one drawn out of her by hostile interrogators trying her for heresy. The inner thoughts of this illiterate peasant girl are known largely by means of the constructions put on her words by lawyers. At Rouen, lawyers of the inquisition gave one version: in pretending to have revelations and apparitions she was ‘pernicious, seductive, presumptuous, of light belief, rash, superstitious, a diviner, a blasphemer of God and His saints, a despiser of Him in His sacraments, a prevaricator of the divine teaching . . . therefore of right excommunicate and heretic’.
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A generation later, lawyers nominated by the king and lawyers nominated by the pope published the conclusions of successive inquiries into her 1431 trial, and after many, many years the Church pronounced its own final sentence: Joan was a saintly virgin. No judgement on her person or her role in history can avoid references to her ‘voices’. In all the investigations into her case, however, only at her trial were the judges obsessed with them.

When the Rouen judges asked when she was first aware of them, Joan replied that at the age of thirteen she had a voice from God to help her and guide her. On the first occasion she was very afraid. It was about midday, in summer, in her father’s garden and she recalled that she had not fasted the previous day. The voice came from her right side, from the direction of the church; and she seldom heard it without a light. This light came from the same side as the voice, and generally there was a great light. She added that when she had come to ‘France’, she heard the voice often. The judges were not satisfied. How could she see the light she spoke of, if it was at the side? She did not reply. She said that if she was in a wood she easily heard the voices come to her – changing to the singular, she thought ‘it’ was a worthy voice, and believed it was sent from God; the third time she heard it, she was certain that it was an angel’s voice and that the voice always took good care of her and that she understood it well. What did it tell her to do for her soul’s salvation? She replied that it told her to be good and to go to church often; it also told her she ought to go to ‘France’. And, she added, this time Beaupère, one of the judges, would not learn from her in what form that voice appeared to her. Once or twice a week it told her to go to France, her father knew nothing about her plans, and she felt unable to stay where she was; and the voice told her too that she would raise the siege of the city of Orléans. It also ordered her to see Robert de Baudricourt, the town’s captain, at Vaucouleurs, and assured her that he would provide an escort for her. She was, she told them a little naively, a poor maid, who knew nothing about riding or fighting. She had gone to one of her uncles, stayed with him about eight days, and, when she told him she must go to the town of Vaucouleurs, he had taken her.

They asked her whether the voice that spoke to her was that of an angel, or of a saint, male or female, or straight from God. She answered that ‘the’ voice was the voice of St Catherine and of St Margaret. Their heads, she explained, were crowned in a rich and precious fashion with beautiful crowns. ‘I have God’s permission to tell this. If you doubt it, send to Poitiers where I was examined before.’ Soon after her arrival at the French court at Chinon, she had been interrogated by churchmen in Poitiers.

She had seen their faces. Asked if the saints who appeared to her had hair, she answered: ‘It is well to know that they have.’ Was there anything between their crowns and their hair? No. Was their hair long, did it hang down? ‘I do not know.’ She did not know if they had arms or legs, but they spoke very well and beautifully and she understood them very well. Did they have other limbs? ‘I leave that to God.’ The voice she heard was gentle, soft and low, and French. Asked if St Margaret spoke in English, she answered: ‘Why should she speak English when she is not on the English side?’ She did not know if their crowns had rings of gold or any other substance. When asked if she had rings, she was tart: ‘You have one of mine; give it back to me.’ She said the Burgundians have another ring; and she said that if they had her ring, could they show it to her. It was a ring, she said, given her by her father or her mother; she thought the names Jhesus Maria were written on it; she did not know who had them written; she did not think there was any stone in it; she was given the ring at Domremy. Her brother had given her the other ring they had and she charged them to give it to the Church. She had never cured anyone with any of her rings. She knew well enough they were trying to accuse her of using enchantment. This was obvious from the line of questioning that followed.

Had St Catherine and St Margaret spoken to her under the fairies’ tree? She did not know. Had they spoken to her at the fountain by the tree? Yes, but she did not know what they said. Asked what the saints promised her, there or elsewhere, she replied that they made no promises to her, except by God’s leave. The questioning was relentless. What had they promised? Had the angel failed her when she was taken (by the English)? Did she summon them? Did St Denis, patron of France come too? No, he did not. Did she speak to Our Lord about keeping her virginity? It was quite enough to speak about that to those he sent, namely St Catherine and St Margaret. Had she spoken to anyone about her visions? Only to Robert de Baudricourt and to her king. How did she greet St Michael and the angels, when she saw them? She reverenced them and kissed the ground where they had stood after they had gone. Did they not call her ‘daughter of God, daughter of the Church, daughter greathearted?’ Before the raising of the siege of Orléans, and every day since, when they have spoken to her they have often called her Joan the Maid, daughter of God. In what form had St Michael appeared? She did not see his crown, and knew nothing about his clothes. Was he naked? ‘Do you think God has nothing to clothe him with?’

These were not idle questions, for the questioners had to convince themselves. They claimed:

The said Joan, though from her youth up she has spoken, done, and perpetrated many sins, crimes, errors and faults, that are shameful, cruel, scandalous, dishonourable and unsuitable to her sex, all the same proclaims and asserts that everything she has done is at God’s command and in accordance with His will, that she has never done anything that does not come from Him, through the revelations of His holy saints and blessed virgins Catherine and Margaret.

She was irritating, though they did not say so, because she seemed on easy terms with her voices, of whom she begged three things, her own freedom, God’s support for the French and her own salvation. She had claimed that St Michael went with her into the castle of Chinon, where she first met her king, yet ‘to say this of archangels and of holy angels must be held presumptuous, rash, deceitful; especially seeing that it is not written that any man, however upright, nor even Our Lady, Mother of God, received such reverence or greetings’. Often she said that the Archangel Gabriel, St Michael, and sometimes a million angels came to her. Joan boasted that at her prayer the said angel brought with him, in this company of angels, a most precious crown for her king, to put upon his head, and that it is now put into the king’s treasury; with it, according to Joan, the king would have been crowned at Reims had he waited a few days, but because of the speed with which the coronation was carried out he used another crown. These, it was asserted, were less divine revelations than lies invented by Joan, suggested to her or shown to her by the demon in illusions, in order to mock at her imagination while she meddled in things beyond her ability to comprehend.

The sense of the court was clear: Joan was not mad, she was bad.

The clergy of the University of Paris and others have considered the manner and end of these revelations, the content of the things revealed, and the quality of your person and having considered everything relevant they declare that it is all false, seductive, pernicious, that such revelations and apparitions are superstitions and proceed from evil and diabolical spirits. You have declared that you know well that God loves certain living persons better than you, and that you learned this by revelation from St Catherine and St Margaret; also that those saints speak French, not English, as they are not on the side of the English. And since you knew that your voices were for your king, you began to dislike the Burgundians.

This idea, said the clergy (who were either Burgundians or their allies), was ‘a foolish, presumptuous assertion, a superstitious guess, a blasphemy against St Catherine and St Margaret, and a failure to observe the commandment to love our neighbours . . . If you [Joan] had the revelations and saw the apparitions of which you boast in such a manner as you say, then you are an idolatress, an invoker of demons, an apostate from the faith, a maker of rash statements, a swearer of an unlawful oath.’ Finally, they admonished her:

You have believed these apparitions lightly, instead of turning to God in devout prayer to give you certainty; and you have not consulted prelates or learned clerics to enlighten you [this wounded them deeply] though, because of your status and the simplicity of your knowledge, you should have done so. Take this example: suppose your king had appointed you to defend a fortress, forbidding you to let any one enter. Would you not refuse to admit anyone who claimed to come in his name but brought no letters or authentic sign? So too Our Lord Jesus Christ, when He ascended into Heaven, committed the government of His Church to the apostle St Peter and his successors, forbidding them to receive in future those who claimed to come in His name but brought no other sign than their own words. So you should not have put faith in those which you say came to you, nor ought we to believe in you, as God commands the opposite.