Domrémy

Domrémy sat on the left bank of the Meuse, in the castellany of Vaucouleurs, on the edge of the duchy of Bar. It was a parish of wood, river, and strip fields. The people were laboureurs — peasant proprietors, not serfs — and they were the king’s in a country that was mostly the duke of Burgundy’s. Maxey, just across the water, was Burgundian. Boys from the two villages fought with fists and stones. That is not a metaphor for the Hundred Years’ War. It is how the war was played by children.1

Jacques d’Arc and Isabelle Romée kept a stone house still pointed out in the village. He was a man of some standing: he held local offices, collected taxes, kept watch. She went on pilgrimage, which is likely why she bore the name Romée, and she taught her daughter her Pater, her Ave, her Credo. There were children: Jacquemin, Jean, Pierre, Catherine, and Jehannette. At Rouen, asked her age, Joan said nineteen or thereabout. A courtly letter of June 1429 told the Duke of Milan she had been born on the night of Epiphany, 1412. Her mother, under oath in 1456, did not repeat that date. We may say about 1412 and leave the sixth of January as a pretty tradition.2

She was baptized at Domrémy by the parish priest. The rehabilitation called a crowd of godfathers and godmothers — a medieval child could have several — and they remembered a good girl, which is what villages always remember of a girl who has become famous and died for it. The memories are not therefore useless. They are consistent, and consistency in peasant testimony, taken independently, has weight. She was not taught letters. She could not read the Latin of a process. She could spin, tend animals, sew, and she went to the fields when there was need. She received the sacrament often by the standard of a fifteenth-century village. She gave alms. She was, they said, too pious for some tastes.3

The tree and the fountain

There was a tree at Domrémy called the Ladies’ Tree, or the Fairy Tree, a beech near a spring. On Laetare Sunday the children hung garlands and ate bread there. The Rouen promoters tried to make this into a sabbath. Joan’s answers are among the most careful she gave. She had heard that fairies came there in the old days. She had not seen any. She had sung there with the other girls. She had made garlands for the image of Our Lady of Domrémy more often than she had hung them on the tree. She had heard her godmother speak of fairies, and she thought her godmother was a decent woman. She would not damn her. The court could not get a witchcraft out of a village picnic, and it is to Joan’s credit that she would not give them one to save herself.4

This matters beyond the charge. The later saint is sometimes cleaned of her village until she is a pure instrument. The trial, which wanted the opposite — a rustic superstition — preserves the ordinary girl: the tree, the spring, the songs, the priest, the mother who taught the prayers. A Catholic reading does not require that she never played under a beech. It requires that the voices, when they came, were not the fairies.

What a child heard of kings

The people of Domrémy were Valois. When Burgundian raiders came, they fled. Joan would later say she had seen the English and Burgundians do much evil in France, and that she had heard, long before she left home, that she must go into France — meaning the king’s France, the Loire, the court, not her own marcher country, which was already, in her language, “France” only by loyalty. The distinction is in her speech at Rouen: I am not from your parts. She meant the parts that had accepted Troyes.5

Her father had a dream. He told her brothers he dreamed his daughter would go off with men-at-arms, and that he would rather drown her than let it happen. Isabelle remembered the violence of that speech. The dream is not a prophecy; it is a peasant’s fear of the roads, of garrisons, of a daughter ruined. It is also evidence that something in the household had already begun to look like departure, even if Jacques could not name it.6

Catherine, the sister, would die young. The brothers Jean and Pierre would eventually ride with Joan and be captured with her. The family was not a legend. It was a household that would be pulled into the war by a daughter who said God had told her to go.

At her trial they asked whether she had learned any craft. She said her mother had taught her spinning, and that she did not fear any woman in Rouen at spinning. It is a small boast, and it is almost the only one she makes about herself that does not refer to her mission. The girl from Domrémy is still in it: hands, wool, a standard she will not lower.

When the voices came, they came to this person — not to a knight’s child, not to a nun already in enclosure, not to a learned beguine. They came to a labourer’s daughter on a frontier, in a parish that could see Burgundy across the river, in a kingdom that had been signed over to an infant in London. That is the soil. The rest of the story grows out of it, or it does not grow at all.