The 19-Year-Old Peasant Girl Tried for Heresy by the Bishop of Beauvais and Burned at the Stake at Rouen on 30 May 1431

Joan of Arc (c. 1412 – 1431) was a peasant girl from the village of Domrémy on the Lorraine-Champagne border. She began at thirteen to hear voices she identified as Saint Michael, Saint Catherine of Alexandria, and Saint Margaret of Antioch, instructing her to find the Dauphin Charles, lift the English siege of Orléans, and have him crowned king of France.

In February 1429 she persuaded the local royalist captain Robert de Baudricourt to send her to the Dauphin’s court at Chinon. She arrived in mid-February. Charles VII, after personal interview and a three-week theological examination by a panel of clergy at Poitiers, accepted her account. He gave her a small armed escort and sent her to Orléans.

The English siege of Orléans was lifted on 8 May 1429 — nine days after Joan’s arrival in the city. She participated in the fighting personally and was wounded by a crossbow bolt above the breast. Charles VII was crowned at Reims on 17 July 1429. Joan stood beside him at the coronation altar, holding her white banner.

Within fifteen months she had been captured.

Compiègne and Rouen

Joan was captured by Burgundian troops at Compiègne on 23 May 1430 during a sortie outside the besieged town. The Burgundians were English allies. Joan was held for six months at the Burgundian fortress of Beaurevoir, then sold to the English for 10,000 livres tournois in November 1430.

The English moved her to Rouen, the capital of English-occupied Normandy, in December 1430. They wanted her tried and convicted by an ecclesiastical court rather than executed as a prisoner of war, because the religious conviction would also discredit Charles VII (who had been crowned, the English argument ran, by a heretic).

The trial was assigned to Pierre Cauchon, Bishop of Beauvais. Cauchon had been driven from his Beauvais diocese by Joan’s military campaign and was on the English military payroll. He was the wrong judge. The University of Paris formally validated the trial nonetheless.

The trial

The trial of condemnation ran from 9 January 1431 to 30 May 1431 at the Rouen castle. The complete transcript survives in approximately 600 pages of Latin and French, kept in the Bibliothèque nationale.

Joan was 19. She was illiterate but verbally skilful — modern reading of the transcript identifies repeated successful evasions of theological-trap questions. The court found seventy specific articles of heresy against her in March 1431. These were reduced by the University of Paris theology faculty in April to twelve, then to a final reduced list. The principal substantive charges were that she had claimed direct private divine revelation outside Church authority, that she had worn men’s clothing, and that she had insisted her voices spoke to her in French rather than in Latin (which was, contemporary opinion held, suspicious for genuine angelic communication).

The first verdict in mid-May 1431 was conditional. Joan signed a brief abjuration in a churchyard outside the city walls on 24 May, agreeing to wear women’s clothing and to submit to the Church. Her death sentence was commuted to life imprisonment. She was returned to the English castle prison.

Within three days she was wearing men’s clothing again. Her own subsequent court testimony said she had done so because she had been sexually assaulted in prison and the male clothing was harder to remove. Cauchon’s court interpreted the resumption as relapse into heresy — the single canonical offence for which a previously-pardoned heretic could be burned without further process.

30 May 1431

The execution was held on the morning of 30 May 1431 in the Place du Vieux-Marché at Rouen. Joan was burned at the stake. Her last reported word was “Jesus.” She was 19.

The ashes were collected and thrown into the Seine, by specific English order, to prevent any of her body becoming a relic. The English commander then ordered the pyre relit and the surviving organs (English contemporary accounts specifically mention an intact heart) burned a second time, then the second ashes also thrown into the river.

The trial transcript was preserved. So was the procedural record.

1456

Charles VII recaptured Rouen from the English in 1449. The English political utility of Joan’s heresy conviction was gone. In 1452 Charles VII ordered a Church review of the trial.

The rehabilitation trial ran from 1455 to 1456. It heard testimony from 115 witnesses including Joan’s brother Pierre, her childhood neighbours from Domrémy, the surviving clergy who had heard her testimony at Poitiers in 1429, and several judges and notaries from the 1431 trial. The 1431 conviction was unanimously overturned on 7 July 1456 by Pope Calixtus III’s appointed commission. The grounds were procedural irregularity and the political bias of Pierre Cauchon.

Joan was formally beatified in 1909 and canonised on 16 May 1920 by Pope Benedict XV. She is the patron saint of France.

The execution site at the Vieux-Marché is now marked by the modern Église Sainte-Jeanne-d’Arc — an unusual late-1970s church whose roof is shaped like both an upturned Viking longship and a tongue of flame.