by Jack Lindsay
The valley of the Meuse is tranquil and beautiful today, and must have been even more so in the early fifteenth century. Then as now the meadows would be pearled with dew in the summer mornings, and the wooded hills scarved with mist. As the heat of the sun grew, the mist would be seen rising from the dense foliage and streaming away to disappear in the blue of the sky.
The idyllic quality of some of the days and seasons which Joan experienced when she was young emerges clearly when we read her own testimony, and that of her fellow-villagers, about the so-called Fairies’ Tree which preoccupied her judges in Rouen. To those harsh schoolmen, the Fairies’ Tree smelt of witchcraft. To us, it seems a charming instance of the folk beliefs and ceremonies which gave a special poetry to rural life in Europe during the Middle Ages, and which often survived until much later. It grew close to the village — a large weeping beech, particularly well formed and symmetrical. Gerardin d’Epinal, a fellow-villager who was one of the witnesses at the Trial of Rehabilitation, thought it was ‘as beautiful as a lily’. (1) The branches swept so low to the ground that they formed a kind of natural shelter, and the tree was also dubbed ‘aux Logis-des-Dames’ — the Ladies’ House. (2) The tree belonged to the Bourlémont family, and attached to it was a legend about a fairy who, ‘in ancient days’, had loved one of the seigneurs de Bourlémont. (3) The villagers remembered that the lovers were supposed to have used the great beech as a trysting place. They remembered, too, that the last Bourlémont seigneur had sometimes gone to dance there with his wife. (4) On Laetare Sunday — the Sunday in mid Lent which was a popular festival throughout the Barrois — they too were accustomed to go and celebrate the birth of spring. They danced and sang, and spread a cloth to eat a picnic under the tree. (5) Joan went with the rest, to make wreaths of flowers for the image of Our Lady in the chapel of Notre Dame de Bermont, and to hang garlands in the branches of the tree itself. She ‘danced there sometimes with the children, but she sang there more often than she danced’. (6)
If these activities are well authenticated, strangely enough, Joan’s duties as a herder of sheep are much less so. At Domrémy the herds were chiefly cattle, and it was these that constituted the wealth of the villagers. Yet the idea that Joan was a ‘little shepherdess’ is now so firmly rooted in the public imagination that it is difficult to combat it. Perceval de Boulainvilliers was one of the first to give it currency. He speaks of her as ‘looking after her parents’ sheep, while these wandered in the fields’. (7) The error was bred by distance, by the impulse towards courtly hyperbole, and by ignorance of local conditions. But it is also an example of a very medieval kind of allegorical thinking. A keeper of sheep, following in the footsteps of Christ, was likely to be a saviour herself.
At the time of her trial Joan was anxious to play down this aspect of her childhood. Her judges wished to prove that, while guarding the flocks and herds, she had escaped from the supervision of her parents. Her denial that she ‘guarded the sheep and other animals’ during the period that she lived in her father’s house (8) has been taken to refer to her brief sojourn in NeufChâteau, and to be the result of an error made during the compilation of the official version of the trial document. In addition to this, however, Joan is on record as having claimed that she did not usually keep watch over the animals, though she helped to drive them to pasture. (9) She added that she could not recall whether, in her youngest years, she looked after them. (10)
The probability is — and we find it supported by those who knew her as a child — that she took her turn at a common duty which did not occur so very often, and only at one season in particular. Every family, after the hay harvest, was allowed to graze a certain number of head of cattle, according to the amount of land they owned. The beasts were guarded on a rota system, by someone from each household in turn. It was the kind of job which could be delegated to children, and Joan certainly undertook it, but not, as she pointed out ‘when she was bigger and had reached the years of reason’. (11) One of her godmothers also said that Joan watched over the animals, (12) and her childhood playmates were later to recollect seeing her with her father’s beasts, her distaff in her hand. (13) But we must not imagine her spending the greater part of every day in some remote and lonely spot, surrounded by a herd of sheep.
For a peasant girl who lived in Domrémy, there were many other jobs to be done, and Joan did not shirk them. Her contemporaries remembered her as a hard and willing worker. (14) Some of the tasks she undertook required strenuous physical effort. For example, she sometimes went ploughing either with her father, (15) or with one of her young companions. (16) These exertions must have helped to build up the reserves of physical strength which others later marvelled at. Joan sewed and span, and was proud of her skill at these occupations — she told her judges that in this respect ‘she did not fear comparison with any woman in Rouen’. (17) Her physical dexterity, too, was to be a subject for comment once she became famous. She also carried out all the ordinary household duties which were expected of a girl of her class and kind. In all this she did nothing out of the ordinary in terms of the community to which she belonged.
There came a point, however, when those who surrounded Joan began to notice that she was increasingly different from the rest. She was intensely pious — ‘so pious’, her childhood friend Mengette declared, ‘that her comrades and I said she was too much so’. (18) When she heard the bell sound for mass, and she was in the fields, she would immediately return and go to church in order to hear the service said. (19) When evening came, she listened keenly for the compline bell, and, if she was still in the fields, would fall to her knees and say her prayers. (20) On occasion the churchwarden Perrin Drappier would forget to ring for compline. Joan, though normally gentle, would then become perturbed and would scold him. She even offered to give him some wool if he would be more conscientious about his duties in this respect. (21) Within the church she could sometimes be seen prostrated before the crucifix; or with her hands joined and her face and eyes lifted towards the image of Christ and that of the Holy Virgin. (22)
Every Saturday, she would go on pilgrimage to the little chapel of Notre Dame de Bermont, which lay above the road between Domrémy and NeufChâteau. She apparently started this custom in the days when her sister Catherine was still alive; and the sisters would go there with other young people, taking candles with them to light before the image. (23) Later, Joan developed the habit of slipping away to this chapel on her own, at times when her parents thought she was busy ploughing or working elsewhere in the fields. (24) By this time her contemporaries were aware of her tendency to draw apart from them. (25) They teased her for her piety, (26) and half-jestingly complained that she now refused to dance. (27)
Perhaps the most significant sign of the crisis through which Joan was passing was the frequency with which she went to confession. Joan’s own evidence conflicts with that of the people who knew her in her childhood and adolescence, perhaps for good reason. When the subject was raised by her judges, all she would say was that she ‘confessed her sins every year to her parish priest, or, if he was unable to hear her, to some other priest’. (28) She was thus giving the court to understand that her religious practice was strictly in line with that expected of most of the laymen of her time, and that she was careful to make the obligatory confession before the equally obligatory Easter communion which marked her as a member of the Church.
Her fellow-villagers recalled the matter differently. A modest estimate was that she ‘confessed at Easter and at the other solemn feasts’. (29) Others thought that she confessed whenever she got the opportunity, and that opportunities were not lacking. Mengette said, for instance, that she often saw Joan on her knees before their parish priest. (30) Joan herself was to remark, though in another context, that ‘one cannot cleanse one’s conscience too much’. (31) While these frequent confessions made the ecclesiastical court suspect her orthodoxy, at the time those who looked after her spiritual welfare approved of her attitude, and
did not find it strange. Her parish priest, Messire Guillaume Fronté, was heard to say that he had never met a better Catholic, and that there was none better in his parish. (32) Today, though without siding with those who condemned her, we may legitimately ask what it was that drove such a pure and blameless girl to these repeated purgings of conscience? One answer, perhaps, is that she was disturbed by the changes she found taking place in her own body, now that she had reached puberty, and by desires she scarcely understood.
The true secret she was keeping from her family and friends, however — and it seems that she did not tell her priest about it either, even under the seal of confessional — was the fact that she had begun to hear voices. Her description of the way in which these voices first came to her is justly famous:
‘When she was thirteen years of age, she had a voice from God to help her to know what to do. And on the first occasion she was much afraid. And this voice came about the hour of midday, in the summertime, in her father’s garden... She heard the voice upon the right side, towards the church, and she rarely heard it without an accompanying brightness... And, after she had heard this voice upon three occasions, she understood that it was the voice of an angel.’ (33)
Since Joan’s voices were to govern her conduct for the rest of her career — she herself said: ‘Everything that I have done that was good I did by command of my voices’ (34) — it is necessary to look at this fascinating subject in more detail.
In the first place, we must note that Joan’s voices and apparitions were not unique. It is perhaps surprising to learn how many people are from time to time visited by visual or auditory hallucinations. Towards the end of the last century, for example, the English Society for Psychical Research conducted a census of hallucinations based upon a very large sample — nearly 16,000 people from English-speaking countries, and over 27,000 altogether. 9.4 per cent of the respondents from English-speaking countries said that they had experienced hallucinations of one kind or another, and affirmative replies from the whole sample amounted to as much as 11.96 per cent. In the English table of results, more than half (52 per cent) of hallucinatory experiences occurred when the subjects were aged between fifteen and thirty — that is they began with puberty, and declined after young adulthood. (35) However, the census-takers noticed the rarity of auditory hallucinations compared to visual ones, and of hallucinations affecting several of the senses compared to others. (36)
Joan’s voices and visions tend to fit a pattern which is quite familiar to twentieth-century doctors, and which is extensively recorded in medical literature. One specialist remarks, for example, that on their first appearance hallucinations are experienced as inexplicable, and as something foreign to the subject’s own concept of himself or herself. They therefore have a quality of the uncanny, and arouse feelings of awe, or alternatively of dread, horror and loathing. (37) There is a marked similarity here, to Joan’s description of how the voices came to her; and also a similarity to the account she gives of her first meeting with St Michael: ‘The first time, she was in great doubt if it was St Michael who came to her, and this first time she was much afraid; and she saw him a number of times before she knew it was St Michael.’ (38) When adolescents suffer from delusions of this type, even today, they often present themselves in religious terms.
The more bizarre details given in the trial document, especially in the section of Posthumous Information, which is sometimes dismissed as being in large part a fabrication, are also closely paralleled in the accounts offered by present-day patients. Joan is said to have told one of her judges that she once beheld a multitude of angels ‘in the guise of certain very tiny things’. (39) In addition, she told another judge that her apparitions came to her on some occasions ‘in great multitudes and in very small dimensions’. (40) These descriptions precisely match modern cases, where the subject sees the multitudinous personages of his vision much reduced in volume, but extra-ordinarily brilliant in hue, as if the shrinkage had led in turn to a condensation of the colours. (41)
The manner in which Joan’s voices and visions manifested themselves, and the relationship they seemed to establish with her, also have close similarities with the situations that doctors encounter today. One reason for her withdrawal from her friends at Domrémy was that the voices which now preoccupied her were more clearly heard in solitude. When she was a prisoner in Rouen, Joan was to complain that ‘the tumult of the prisons and the noise made by the guards’ prevented her from hearing St Catherine. (42) Yet the voice was capable of drawing attention to itself, often with great insistence, at moments when Joan’s attention had every cause to be focused elsewhere. There is a terrible pathos in the answer she made to her judges during the séance of 27 February 1431. Asked if she heard the voice in the room where the trial was being held, she replied that she had, but ‘she did not understand the voice properly, and understood nothing she could repeat, until she had gone back to her chamber’. (43)
One reason why, at Domrémy, she took such a close interest in the churchwarden’s dutifulness, or lack of it, in ringing for compline and the other offices was that the bells served as a kind of trigger-mechanism for the manifestations. She was to say in her last hours that she heard her voices ‘above all when the bells sounded, at the hour of compline and of matins’. (44) As her relationship with them strengthened, however, she began to feel able to consult them at will, at times when there was some problem to be resolved, and soon felt confident of being able to summon them if she needed them. ‘Often,’ she said, ‘they came without being called, and at other times, if they did not come, she would ask God to send them... She had never had need of them and not had them.’ (45)
But who and what were these advisers with whom Joan had been provided? She mentions three saints in particular: St Michael (the first to come to her), St Catherine and St Margaret. They spoke to her in French — ‘a better French than yours’, as she rudely told Séguin Séguin, a member of the commission appointed by Charles VII at the start of her mission. (46) When asked by her judges in Rouen if St Margaret spoke to her in English, she replied with equal tartness: ‘Why should she speak English, when she does not belong to the English party?’ (47) Because her saints ‘spoke very well and marvellously’, (48) Joan had no difficulty in understanding them after the first few occasions. In addressing Joan in the only tongue she knew and by gradually becoming more distinct to her, they again followed a pattern of auditory hallucination which is well known to specialists. (49)
All the saints who came to Joan had some connection either with her own personal situation, or with the situation in which France then found herself; and all were particularly suitable as guides in what was to be her mission. St Michael appeared to her in the guise of ‘un très vrai prud’homme’ (50) — or, as we might say, a good deal more tamely, as ‘a fine-looking gentleman’. He was the obvious patron for any kind of patriotic endeavour — in the early fifteenth century he had virtually replaced St Denis as the patron of France, and the Valois kings paid special regard to him. Charles VII, when Dauphin, had a particular reverence for this saint, and in 1419 ordered that his image should be painted upon the standards of France. At the time when Joan’s visions began, Mont Saint-Michel was one of the symbols of French resistance to the English, and one of the few successes that Charles VII could show at this period was the naval victory won by his supporters before the stronghold in June 1425. In addition to all this, St Michael was the patron of the Barrois, from which Joan’s mother came.
St Catherine and St Margaret were announced by St Michael as Joan’s other councillors. (51) Both were high-born virgins and martyrs. Catherine was the name of Joan’s sister, who may still have been alive when the visions began. She was also the patroness of Maxey, just across the Meuse from Domrémy. Perhaps more important in Joan’s mind, however, was the fact that St Catherine was the bride of Christ. When Joan ‘having her ring on her hand and upon her finger’ touched Catherine as she appeared to her in visible form,
(52) it was near to being a repetition of the mystic marriage which the saint herself had undertaken.
St Margaret was represented in an elegant statue in the church at Domrémy. It is still there, and, judging from the style, must have been fairly newly installed in Joan’s time. But it seems that Joan attached less importance to her. She is much less often mentioned, and usually appears as a kind of coadjutor of St Catherine’s, just as she often accompanies the latter in representations of the virgin surrounded by saints.
It is apparent, from some of Joan’s replies, that there was a certain inconsistency about the way in which her visions appeared to her. Where St Catherine and St Margaret are concerned, it is fairly evident that they manifested themselves not as full length figures but as heads with glittering crowns — ‘she saw them always in the same form, and their forms were very richly crowned... About their robes she knows nothing’. (53) And again: ‘What aspect did she see? - She saw their faces.’ (54)
About St Michael she was even vaguer — she said that he did not have a crown and that she knew nothing of his clothing. (55) Asked if he was naked, and if he had hair, she produced two of her magnificently impertinent retorts. To the first question, the answer was: ‘Do you think God has nothing to clothe him with?’ (56) And to the second: ‘Why should it have been cut off?’ (57) Yet at last she admitted that she did not know whether St Michael had hair or not.
Questions about the actual appearance of her saints made her extremely uneasy, just as she was uneasy, and also irritated, at being questioned about what they said. There seem to have been two reasons for her disquiet. The first was that questions about her voices seemed to her a violation of privacy — they were an attempt to meddle with revelations which had been made to her directly and by divine agency. The second was that she felt threatened, because her voices and visions had a curious habit of slipping out of focus, and she did not like to admit to this. When, for example, she was asked if she saw other parts of her three saints except their faces, she burst out angrily: ‘I have told you all I know about that, and rather than tell you all I know I would prefer you cut off my head.’ (58)