JEHAN LASCUIZ

Jehan L'Ascuiz
• Foreword
• A Monk of Fife
• Jehan L'Ascuiz
• Poems
• Pluscarden Abbey
• De Monclars

Joan of Arc
• Foreword
• The Life of Joan Of Arc

•Early Historians
• Later Biographies
• The Heroic Epic
• At The Fringe

• Contemporary Accounts
• More Eyewitnesses
• The Trial

• The Company She Keeps
• The Model Woman

• Joan in Politics
• The Call to Arms

• Saint Joan
• Canonized at Last

Back to the Enigma
• The Secret and its Guardians

• Acknowledgements

The Life of Joan of Arc

jehanlascuiz@serreorg.com

Joan of Arc’s life and deeds are very well documented, mainly because of her testimony at her Trial of Condemnation in 1431, and the testimonies of many of her contemporaries at her Trial of Rehabilitation in 1455-56, have been preserved .

Born to Jacques D’Arc and Isabelle Romée in about 1412 in the small village of Domremy in eastern France, Joan grew up surrounded by the constant skirmishes and violent raids of the Hundred Years War between the French Armagnacs and the English, who were allied with the French Burgundians. Joan and other members of her village were fierce partisans of the Armagnacs. In 1418, their weak leader, the Dauphin Charles, fled English-occupied Paris for Chinon, a town south of the Loire.

Joan began to hear voices in about 1424 that ultimately urged her to perform two deeds:J first, to raise the siege of Orleans, laid by the English against the French Armagnacs on October 12, 1428, and second, to bring the Dauphin to the Cathedral in Reims to be properly crowned Charles VII, King of France.

The besieged city of Orleans, on the Loire River, was crucial strategically because it was the last major city still held by the French between the river and the Mediterranean. Bringing the Dauphin Charles to be crowned Charles VII at the Cathedral was also significant because the coronation would bestow much needed legitimacy on his claim for the throne.

Although Joan was a peasant who could neither read nor write, she convinced the King’s agent in Vaucouleurs, a town near Domremy, to provide her with horses and escorts to go to Chinon.

From that time on, she donned men’s clothing and kept her hair cropped short, in the style of a fashionable young man. She arrived in Chinon in March 1429, met with the Dauphin and by the end of the next month she had left with an army for Orleans.

After several battles, Joan and her soldiers drove the English from Orleans, lifting the siege. After more successful campaigns, Joan convinced the Dauphin to travel with her and her army through enemy territory to Reims, rightly predicting that the sites along the way held by the English would fall as they approached.

The coronation of Charles VII took place on July 17, 1429. This was the highpoint of Joan’s success.

Joan of Arc continued to fight the English, but she lost several battles and eventually was captured and held for ransom, a very common practice.

King Charles VII, however, refused to pay for her release.

The trial lasted for months, and finally, completely exhausted and threatened with death by fire, she signed a retraction she could not read and was sentenced to prison for life.

One of her crimes was wearing male apparel. Within a few days of the verdict, Joan put on men’s clothing that was left in her cell. The court ruled she was a relapsed heretic, and the next day, May 30, 1431, she was burned at the stake.

Twenty-four years later she was exonerated in a Trial of Rehabilitation. She was canonized by the Catholic Church in 1920.