Joan of Arc, St, French Jeanne d'Arc, known as the Maid of Orleans c.1412-1431
French patriot and martyr

Joan was born the daughter of well-off peasants in Domr�my, on the border of Lorraine and Champagne. She had an argumentative nature and shrewd common sense, but received no formal education. At the age of 13 she thought she heard the voices of St Michael, St Catherine and St Margaret bidding her rescue Paris from English domination in the Hundred Years War; English soldiers had over-run the area in 1421 and withdrawn in 1424. She was taken across territory occupied by the English to the dauphin (the future Charles VII) at Chinon. She is said to have identified the dauphin, who was standing in disguise in a group of courtiers, an act which was interpreted as divine confirmation of his previously doubted legitimacy and claims to the throne. She was equally successful in an ecclesiastical examination to which she was subjected in Poitiers and was consequently allowed to join the army assembled at Blois for the relief of Orleans. Clad in a suit of white armour and flying her own standard, she entered Orleans with an advance guard on 29 April and by 8 May had forced the English to raise the siege and retire in June from the principal strongholds on the Loire.

To put further heart into the French resistance, she took the dauphin with an army of 12,000 through English-held territory to be crowned Charles VII in Reims Cathedral. She set out on her own to relieve Compi�gne from the Burgundians, was captured in a sortie (1430) and sold to the English by John of Luxembourg for 10,000 crowns. She was put on trial (1431) for heresy and sorcery by an ecclesiastical court of the Inquisition, presided over by Pierre Cauchon, Bishop of Beauvais. She was found guilty, taken out to the churchyard of St Ouen on 24 May to be burnt, but at the last moment broke down and made a wild recantation. This she later abjured and suffered her martyrdom at the stake in the market place of Rouen on 30 May, faithful to her 'voices'. In 1456, in order to strengthen the validity of Charles VII's coronation, the trial was declared irregular.

Bibliography: Anne Barstow, Joan of Arc (1986); Edward Lucie-Smith, Joan of Arc (1977); V Sackville-West, Joan of Arc (1936).