Emma Moreau - Joan of Arc

On the banks of the Meuse River, in the Lorraine region of northeastern France, lies the village of Domrmy. It is a beautiful place. In the early fifteenth century, willows and cottonwoods flourished on the riverbank. Nearby stood a forbidding forest known as the Oaks or Polled Wood, where wolves and bears abounded.

The forest is featured in a mystic legend. As its most famous inhabitant later said, There is a wood in Domrmy called the Polled Wood. You can see it from my fathers door. It is not half a league away. I never heard that the fairies met there. But when I was on my journey to my king, I was asked by some if there was not a wood in my country called the Polled Wood, for it had been prophesized that a maid would come from near that wood to do wonderful things. But I said I had not faith in it.

In those days, the village was home to about forty families. Jacques dArc was a prosperous, enterprising farmer who lived in a substantial home by local standards. Its roof was made of slate, its outer walls of stone and plaster, and its floors of dirt. Jacques and his wife, Isabelle Rome, had three sons - Jacquemin, Jean, and Pierre - and two daughters, Catherine and Joan. The youngest, Joan, also known as Jehanne, entered the world on January 6, 1412.

Most of the residents of Domrmy farmed the land. It was a hard life. They grew their own food, built their own houses, and made their own clothes. In drawings and paintings from the time, women were seldom pictured absent a distaff. Distaff is still a word used to signify a female, but then it referred to a short rod with wool or flax wound around one end; whatever else a woman was doing, she held her distaff under one arm while she pulled and twisted the wool into yarn. The distaff became an emblem of womens interminable work, but not even children were free from labor.

Joans boasting about her sewing and spinning betrays a part of her at odds with the view held by the French at the time - that she was a modest, unassuming girl. In reality, she was proud and haughty.

Joans formal education was limited to religious instruction provided primarily by her mother: I learned Our Father, Hail Mary, and I Believe. This, she believed, was the only instruction a proper girl needed: I learned my faith and was rightly and duly taught to do as a good child should.

Because of all the work on the farm, Joan had considerable physical strength. She was an intelligent girl, although she had little knowledge of the outside world apart from what her father and other villagers talked about.

Her days were filled with austere duties; activities varied little from season to season. In the spring it was preparing and planting the fields; in the summer, tending the crops and herds; in the fall, gathering acorns to feed the swine; in the winter, doing whatever needed to be done to keep oneself and ones family alive. These chores were inserted into the unending toil of gardening, cooking, sewing, and repairing what was broken. Only on holidays, whether Catholic or pagan, did the drudgery cease.

From time to time, the Christian and the pagan came together. One such holiday was Laetare Sunday, the fourth Sunday of the Lenten season. It took place in the middle of a period of penitence and fasting and was intended to encourage the faithful to persevere. After attending Mass, Domrmys young people gathered at the outskirts of the forest around a massive beech tree and had a picnic of fruit and cakes. They danced, sang songs, and picked wildflowers, which they wove into garlands and laid on the branches of the towering tree.

Myth held that fairies were spotted years earlier frolicking near it - hence the name the Fairies Tree. Years later Joan vividly recalled these celebrations: Not far from Domrmy there is a tree called the... Fairies Tree, and near it there is a fountain. And I have heard that those who are sick with fever drink at the fountain or fetch water from it to be made well. Indeed, I have seen them do so, but I do not know whether it makes them well or not.... It is a great tree, a beech, and from it our fair May-branches come.... Sometimes I went walking there with the other girls, and I have made garlands under the tree for the statue of the Blessed Virgin of Domrmy.

Sometimes Joan also went to a nearby spring said to have supernatural qualities.

Later, at her trial, these childhood diversions were used against her, as many people believed this particular area of the country had served as a refuge for witches.

An unshakable belief in God was absolute for the faithful, as was the certainty that Satan posed a never-ending peril. The temporal world was a place where, in the words of one historian, good and evil, piety and heresy, the sacred and the pagan constantly warred. There was no middle ground people were believers or they were heretics. Anyone who deviated from the dictates of the Catholic Church risked being accused of witchcraft - a drastic charge given that witches were often burned alive.