Original subtitles

On the 8th of May 1429, the town of Orleans in France

erupted in celebration.

For seven long months,

it had been under siege by the English,

but now, after just four days of fighting,

the town had been liberated.

And the people of Orleans knew they had witnessed a miracle.

The speed of their liberation was astonishing enough.

But what confirmed it as a miracle

was the identity of their liberator.

She was a peasant girl, and she was just 17

Her name was Joan.

She was a truly extraordinary figure,

a female warrior in an age

that believed women couldn’t fight, let alone lead an army.

Take care what you do for in truth,

I am sent by God and you put yourself in great danger.

These are Joan’s own words,

recorded in a contemporary manuscript.

Six centuries after her death,

her words transport us back into her life and times.

To understand Joan’s story, we need to explore a world

where God and the devil are real.

Today, we’re more aware than we’ve been,

perhaps for centuries, of the power of faith

to drive people to do extraordinary things for good or ill.

And in a world where God’s will is at work,

anything is possible.

Over the centuries Joan has become an icon

to almost everyone, to the left and the right,

to Catholics and Protestants, traditionalists and feminists.

She’s captured the imagination of novelists,

playwrights, artists and musicians,

and her fame has spread all over the world,

taking her from France to Hollywood.

I’ve been studying the medieval world for almost 30 years,

and I feel pretty confident in saying

she’s had more pop songs written about her

than anyone else from the Middle Ages.

But for all the images of Joan that have been created

since her death, only one picture of her survives

which was made in her own lifetime.

And it’s here, a drawing, almost a doodle,

in the margin of the records of the Paris parlement.

It shows what a remarkable and troubling figure Joan was.

The clerk knew that the army at Orleans

had a young woman with them

who was carrying a banner and a sword.

But he’d never seen her.

Either he didn’t yet know, or couldn’t quite believe,

that Joan actually, shockingly, had short hair

and wore male armour.

Instead, he’s made her look as a woman should,

with long hair, modestly wearing a dress.

But while there’s only this one faint image of Joan,

unusually for anyone in the Middle Ages

let alone a lowborn woman,

a great deal was written about her by her contemporaries.

Even more importantly, her own words

have reached us through the centuries

with an astonishing strength and clarity.

And one of the most remarkable

and revealing documents of all

is the transcript of Joan’s trial for heresy in 1431.

This is the most detailed record that survives

from any medieval trial.

And through it, we can hear Joan’s own voice.

Here, she describes the first time

she heard a message from God when she was just 13 years old.

At first, I was very afraid.

The voice came at midday in the summer time

in my father’s garden.

The voice on my right side towards the church

and I seldom hear it without a light.

The light comes from the same side as the voice,

but all around, there is a great light.

It seemed to me to be a worthy voice,

and I believe that the voice was sent from God.

Once I heard the voice three times,

I knew that it was the voice of an angel.

We might ask, was Joan mad or ill?

But for the people of the Middle Ages,

the issues were entirely different.

They knew that angels and demons did communicate

with people of completely sound mind.

The problem wasn’t how to explain Joan hearing voices

that weren’t there,

the problem was how to tell whether the voices came to her

from God or the devil.

Joan received her first vision

when she was living with her family in Domremy,

a small village in the east of France.

But the France that Joan was born into

wasn’t nearly as peaceful as it looks now.

It was a country torn apart by war.

For generations, England and France

had been fighting in what we call the Hundred Years’ War.

Land including the countryside where Joan lived

was fought over by the two sides.

And the English even claimed the crown of France.

During Joan’s childhood,

France was very much on the back foot.

In 1415, when she was three,

the French suffered a dreadful defeat

at the hands of Henry V on the battlefield of Agincourt.

The French army vastly outnumbered the English,

but as the flower of the French nobility advanced

they were mown down by a barrage of English arrows.

History has attributed the English victory at Agincourt

to the supremacy of their archers

but at the time, the French saw it differently.

For the people who were there,

the explanation for this astounding victory

was the will of God.

Henry claimed that God was on the English side,

but the French knew that couldn’t be right.

So how were they to explain this bloody defeat?

Perhaps it was God’s punishment for their sins

because France was convulsed in civil war.

The old king, Charles VI, was mad and incapable of ruling.

Two factions known as the Burgundians and the Armagnacs

were fighting for control of his government.

In the medieval world, everything came down to God.

Whose side was he on?

Just five years after Agincourt,

France was so bitterly divided

that the Burgundians were prepared to believe

that God did back the English

and made an alliance with them.

But Joan and her family supported the Armagnacs,

led by the French King’s son, the dauphin,

and believed God was with them.

And so the civil war went on.

For eight years, defeat followed defeat, until the dauphin

and his Armagnac supporters were pushed back,

south of the great curve of the river Loire.

For Joan, as for the rest of the people of France,

the war was a frightening reality.

Her home, Domremy, was an Armagnac village

surrounded by English and Burgundian territory.

At one point the village was attacked by enemy soldiers

and Joan, her family and friends had to take refuge

for a few days in a nearby town.

So perhaps it’s no surprise

that when Joan began to hear voices,

they talked about the war.

They said, she must go to the dauphin.

He would give her an army

and then she must drive the English out of France

and lead the dauphin to his coronation.

Joan wasn’t unique in claiming to hear heavenly voices.

She wasn’t the only person in 15th century France

who came forward with a message from God.

What was remarkable was what Joan’s voice

was telling her to do.

To fight and to lead.

This was an impossible proposition.

Joan was young, she was poor, and she was female

and to put her mission into action,

she had to reach the dauphin across more than 250 miles

of enemy territory.

Surely, it couldn’t be done.

At some point during 1428, Joan managed to reach here,

the town of Vaucouleurs,

a little more than 10 miles north of Domremy,

which housed the nearest garrison loyal to the dauphin.

But its captain sent her away with a flea in her ear.

The girl was clearly a fantasist,

her family, he said, should take her home

and give her a few slaps.

But Joan wouldn’t give up.

Word of her mission began to spread.

And when she came back to Vaucouleurs in February 1429,

the captain agreed to send her to the dauphin’s court.

What had happened to change his mind?

The evidence isn’t at all clear.

When Joan eventually set off from Vaucouleurs,

the people here gave her a horse

and an outfit of men’s clothes

to keep her safe on her dangerous journey.

Clearly, they believed in her.

But that wouldn’t be enough to secure access

to the dauphin himself.

We can’t be sure exactly what happened

but there is one more clue.

One of the six men who were given the job of escorting Joan

was a messenger from the dauphin’s court.

It seemed that someone there had heard of Joan’s claims

and now the dauphin wanted to hear more.

Like all medieval leaders, the dauphin knew

that his authority was bestowed on him by God.

He went to mass twice a day and looked for signs

of God’s will in the world around him

wherever they came from.

The truth is the dauphin was also desperate

and it had to be said that, by now,

anything, even the ravings of a peasant girl

was worth a try.

As Joan set out on her perilous journey

to the dauphin’s court in Chinon,

the situation for the Armagnacs was getting worse.

For five months, the English had been besieging Orleans,

a key Armagnac stronghold on the river Loire.

If Orleans fell, the dauphin’s lands in the south

of the kingdom would lie open to English attack.

On the 12th of February 1429,

a skirmish between the two sides ended in a massacre.

More than 400 of the dauphin’s soldiers died that day.

The English casualties numbered just four.

The dauphin was here in his fortress at Chinon

when he heard the terrible news.

He redoubled his prayers but the siege went on.

And then, just 11 days after the massacre,

a little band of six armed men, dusty from the road,

arrived here at his great castle of Chinon.

With them rode a girl, dressed as a boy,

her dark hair cut short.

She had come, she said, with a message from God.

Amid the luxury and ceremony of the Armagnac court,

this village girl dressed as a boy

was an extraordinary sight.

And her message was as startling as the girl herself.

If the dauphin would give her an army,

she would save his kingdom and bring him his crown.

But the dauphin had a problem.

Her words were intoxicating and terrifying at the same time.

If the dauphin put his faith in a false prophet

sent by the devil,

his kingdom of France would be lost forever.

But if he rejected a true prophet,

the result would be equally disastrous.

Could Joan really have been sent by God?

How to tell whether visions came from God or the devil

was a hot topic of theological debate.

The greatest contemporary French theologian,

a man named Jean Gerson,

had even written a book on the subject.

This is a late 15th century copy of Gerson’s work,

De Probatione Spiritum,

On the Proving of Spirits.

It’s a sort of manual to guide investigators

through the process of establishing

whether visions might truly have come from God.

It offers a helpful Latin checklist

which sets out the basics of the examination.

Ask who, what, why, to whom, what kind, whence?

In other words, ask what the nature of the vision shows

about where it might come from

and what the nature of the person

having the visions suggests

about how authentic they might be.

So 17-year-old Joan was questioned for three weeks

by the best theologians Armagnac France could muster.

From the outset Joan deeply troubled these men.

Her message was shocking enough.

She dared to say that she’d been sent to make war

on the English despite the fact

that God hadn’t made women to be soldiers.

But what’s more, she wore men’s clothes,

and the Old Testament said that a woman

in men’s clothing was an abomination unto the Lord.

But one person who doesn’t seem

to have been anxious remarkably enough was Joan herself.

Here she was, an uneducated village girl,

on her own, hundreds of miles from home,

being questioned for weeks by courtiers and clerics.

It should have been a profoundly intimidating situation.

But in all the contemporary accounts of what Joan did

and said, there’s no sign of fear or doubt.

The essence of her message was,

God has sent me.

I know what I need to do.

Let me go and do it.

And it was Joan’s certainty

that offered a way out of the problem she posed.

The theologians could find no fault with her conduct,

but they needed a sign, they said,

to prove that her voices truly came from heaven.

They asked how she would carry out her promise

to take the dauphin to be crowned

at the ancient cathedral of Reims,

given that the besieged town of Orleans

lay directly in the way.

Joan’s answer was simple.

She would raise the siege herself.

Suddenly, for the dauphin and his court

at the great fortress of Chinon, everything was clear.

Orleans would be a test of Joan’s mission.

If she succeeded, it would be a sign from God

that everything she claimed was true.

If she failed, Orleans would still be under siege,

just as it was now, and the dauphin would know for sure

that her promises were nothing but a delusion.

And so the theologians reached their verdict.

The dauphin, they said, should not prevent her

from going to Orleans with his soldiers

but should have her escorted there honourably

placing his faith in God.

And now that the decision had been made,

preparations for the task ahead began in earnest.

There were soldiers to muster and supplies to collect.

Clerks scoured the archives for prophecies

that might foretell Joan’s coming.

And Joan herself asked the dauphin to send

to the nearby town of Fierbois for a sword

that she said lay hidden there

in the Church of St. Catherine.

Sure enough, and to everyone’s amazement,

the sword was found where she’d predicted.

The symbolism was lost on no one.

Christian warriors, from King Arthur to Charlemagne,

carried holy swords.

And this one appropriately came to Joan from St. Catherine,

the patron saint of young virgins.

How did Joan know where the sword was?

She said her voices had told her.

So was this her first miracle?

Well, that’s one way of reading of the evidence.

On the other hand, she had stopped in Fierbois

on her way here and St. Catherine’s Church

was a place where over the years,

soldiers had left many offerings, including their swords.

But, however Joan had come to know

about this sword in particular,

the point was that Joan herself and her supporters believed

it was a miraculous proof of her mission.

The dauphin ordered a fine suit of armour

to be specially made for her slender frame,

and a banner for her to carry into battle,

made of shining white silk

with a painted Christ flanked on either side by angels.

During these weeks of preparation,

Joan had a chance to practice riding a horse among soldiers,

to get used to her armour and to find out more

about the war she had come to fight.

But she was no less impatient

than when she had first arrived at Chinon.

And now, she sent her first challenge to the English.

The challenge came in the form of a letter.

Joan couldn’t write, so she dictated it to a clerk

and its text survives here,

in the transcript of her trial.

Joan’s fearlessness is unmistakable.

The village girl from Domremy speaks for God,

so she has no hesitation in addressing the king of England.

Restore to the maid, who is sent here by God,

the king of heaven, the keys to the fine towns

that you have taken and violated in France.

King of England, if you do not do this,

I am the military leader

and wherever I find your men in France,

I will make them leave, whether they want to or not

and if they will not obey, I will have them killed.

With her challenge dispatched, Joan and her military convoy

set off along the river Lorie towards Orleans.

On the 26th of April, Joan approached the town itself

and for the first time, the English army at Orleans

set eyes on the teenage girl in armour.

To the English, a girl in men’s clothes

riding among soldiers could only be a whore

and a sign of the dauphin’s desperation.

But to the people of besieged Orleans,

she was a saviour, come to rescue them.

The English had too few troops

to enforce a total blockade round Orleans

and Joan was able to slip into the town on the eastern side.

She was welcomed like an angel from God,

one of the townsmen said, and delirious crowds

reached out to touch her as she rode through the streets.

But while Joan smiled at the hopeful crowds,

privately, she was incandescent with fury.

She wanted to attack the English.

But the dauphin was still so unsure

of what form her miracle might take

that he’d ordered her soldiers back to their base.

So she found herself inside the besieged town,

with no army to break the siege as she’d promised.

Joan was left kicking her heels,

climbing the town walls to shout to the English

that they should surrender to God.

All she got in return was abuse.

Did she really think, they jeered,

that they should give themselves up to a woman

and her pimps?

The dauphin’s captain was in a fix.

The people of the town expected Joan to save them

but without an army, she could do nothing.

So he slipped out of the town and rode to the dauphin

to beg him to send the soldiers back.

It took him four days but his argument was irrefutable.

How could God send a sign,

if Joan had no way of putting her mission to the test?

By the 4th of May, Joan had her soldiers, and at last,

the battle for Orleans could begin.

Joan led her men from the front,

carrying her banner and urging them on.

Medieval warfare was brutal and bloody

and for the first time,

she saw death in battle at first hand.

That night her mood was sombre and the next day,

she wrote again to the English enemy

demanding their surrender.

She attached the letter to an arrow

and had it fired into the English camp.

When it dropped to the ground,

the shouts could be heard in the distance.

News from the Armagnac whore.

But for all the abuse they hurled her way,

after two more days of fighting, the English were rattled.

And finally, on the 7th of May,

their day of reckoning had come.

The decisive Battle of Orleans was fought here,

where the English held a fortified tower

known as the Tourelles.

If Joan could take the Tourelles,

the English hold on Orleans would be broken.

Once again Joan was up at dawn.

She said her prayers and then led her men into battle.

English missiles rained down from the ramparts

as the Armagnac soldiers hurled themselves into the fight.

Hours passed, but still Joan urged them on

until an arrow caught her between her neck and shoulder.

As they saw her staggering and bloodied,

the Armagnacs faltered.

Was this the moment when God

would disown the Maid?

But a flesh wound couldn’t stop Joan’s mission.

She brandished her banner

and pressed forward into the ditch at the foot of the tower.

As her soldiers followed her into the attack,

sudden fear gripped the English.

Their captain lost his footing and toppled,

fully armed, into the river.

As he drowned, panic spread among his men.

And by sundown, Joan had won a famous victory.

After seven months of siege,

the Maid had freed Orleans in just four days.

Who could doubt Joan now?

This was proof that God intended her to pursue her mission.

And as she and the dauphin’s other captains

prepared to drive the English from the valley of the Loire,

news of her miracle began to spread.

Just three days after the battle,

an Italian merchant in Bruges

wrote to tell his father in Venice

what this maiden shepherdess had done.

“It seems,”, he said,

“that she may be another St. Catherine come down to Earth.”

Meanwhile Joan herself was growing into her new stature.

In February, she had been a simple village girl.

Now, it was June and a young nobleman

who met her was dazzled by her charisma,

by the presence of one sent by God.

“It seemed to me a gift from heaven that she was there,”

he said, “and that I was seeing and hearing her.”

And Joan’s determination to pursue her mission

was stronger than ever.

Orleans had been her test, and victory her sign.

Now came her true purpose.

To crown the dauphin and to drive the English

out of France forever.

For centuries, French kings had been crowned

in the great cathedral at Reims

and Joan was determined to see her dauphin

crowned there too.

But Reims lay more than a hundred miles

northeast of Orleans,

in the heart of English and Burgundian France.

It had been years since the dauphin

had even thought of riding to war in person.

Now, the Maid was going to take him deep

into enemy territory.

Joan and the dauphin rode at the head of the biggest army

he could muster.

And the combination of thousands of soldiers

with Joan’s implacable will driving them on,

proved irresistible.

Joan’s momentum was unstoppable.

Some towns held out for a few days,

others opened their gates straight away.

On the 16th of July 1429, just two and a half weeks

after leaving the Loire valley,

Joan, the dauphin and the Armagnac army arrived in Reims.

At last, the dauphin could be crowned

as the most Christian king of France.

Here in the cathedral in Reims was kept a flask of holy oil,

that had been sent from heaven

to France’s first Christian king

almost a thousand years before.

Every French king since then had been anointed with it

during the sacred ritual of his coronation

and now, the dauphin would be no exception.

A coronation would usually take weeks of preparation,

but there was no time to lose.

The dauphin’s servants worked through the night

and at nine the very next morning,

he entered this sacred space to receive his crown from God.

Just four months earlier,

the Armagnac cause had been at its lowest ebb.

Now, the dauphin was anointed and crowned

as King Charles VII of France.

And beside him stood Joan the Maid in her shining armour

with her banner in her hand.

When the ceremony was over, she knelt at his feet.

“Noble king,” she said, “God’s will is done.”

It was a triumph.

But Joan’s mission was far from finished.

Joan wanted to drive the English out of France forever.

To do this she needed to unite the country

under the newly crowned king

and France was still divided by civil war.

The Burgundians under the Duke of Burgundy

looked to the King of England as their sovereign.

So Joan wrote to the Duke to ask him to acknowledge her king

as the rightful King of France.

I bring you words from the king of heaven,

that you will win no battle against loyal Frenchmen,

and all those who wage war

against the holy kingdom of France wage war

against King Jesus, the king of heaven

and of the whole world.

Know surely that however many men you bring against us,

they will win nothing at all,

and great sorrow will be the result of the great battle.

The Duke of Burgundy didn’t deign

to respond to this presumptuous letter.

Any change in his position would be on his own terms,

not those of a peasant girl.

As for Joan’s king, he was in a stronger position

than he could have dreamed of just a year earlier

and behind the scenes, courtiers from both sides

were beginning to make diplomatic overtures.

But Joan had no interest in compromise.

She was doing God’s work

and the mission he had given her was not yet complete.

With all the certainty of faith and youth,

she was still only 17.

She saw the world in black and white.

If the duke of Burgundy would not submit to her king,

he would find her ready to fight.

The kingdom’s capital remained in Burgundian hands.

It was time for another miracle.

Just as Joan had taken Orleans, now she would take Paris.

Reluctantly, Joan’s king agreed to give her the chance.

But Paris was a very different challenge from Orleans.

It was the most heavily fortified city

west of Constantinople.

This is one of the few remaining sections

of the massive walls that surrounded Paris.

There were fortified towers and gun placements

on top of the walls, which lay behind an immense ditch

that encircled the whole city.

And it was defended by English soldiers and native Parisians

who hated the Armagnac whore

every bit as much as the people of Orleans

had welcomed her as a delivering angel.

But Joan didn’t hesitate.

As always, her strategy was simple.

Attack in the name of God.

And the day of the assault could only be a good omen.

The 8th of September, the holy feast day

of the Nativity of the Virgin.

As at Orleans, she led the way into the great ditch,

brandishing her banner while a storm of arrows and stones

rained down from above.

After hours of brutal fighting,

Joan called urgently to the enemy soldiers

on the walls above.

Surrender quickly in the name of Jesus.

For if you do not surrender before nightfall,

we will come in there by force whether you like it or not

and you will all be put to death without mercy.

“Shall we, you bloody tart?” came the response,

and a crossbow bolt ripped through her thigh.

Joan staggered and fell.

Her standard-bearer took an arrow in the face

and died beside her.

She didn’t stop shouting to her soldiers

to continue the attack

even when the trumpets sounded the retreat

and she was carried, bleeding from the field of battle.

Joan wanted to continue the fight, to attack the next day,

but her King wouldn’t allow it.

He’d only given her just one day

to take the great city of Paris.

It was an impossible task but this had been her chance

and she had failed.

She was distraught.

How could she?

How could anyone understand what had happened?

Was this a sign that God had abandoned the Armagnac cause?

For Joan’s king, that was unthinkable.

It was far more likely that God had abandoned Joan.

Heaven’s help had brought triumph at Orleans and Reims.

Perhaps now, God expected the king to help himself.

And if diplomacy was the way forward

then Joan’s determination to fight

was fast becoming a liability.

By the end of September, a six-month truce was agreed,

a breathing-space for the Armagnacs

and the Burgundians and their English allies.

And Joan had little choice but to limp back

to the safety of the Armagnac lands south of the Loire.

After the failure of her attack on Paris,

it suddenly becomes hard to trace Joan’s movements.

We do know that she was sent on some minor skirmishes

but it seems as though the king didn’t quite know

what to do with her.

If Joan were no longer performing miracles,

then what place did a woman have in an army?

Perhaps they hoped that the Maid might choose this moment

to retire gracefully from the public stage.

But Joan herself had no doubts,

whatever anyone else might think.

Her mission still stood.

And when the truce expired in the spring of 1430,

she was ready to fight wherever she had the chance.

In May, news reached Joan that the duke of Burgundy

had attacked the Armagnac town of Compiegne,

north of the capital.

Undeterred by the fact that she no longer

had the clear support of her king

or a royal army of thousands,

Joan believed that God still wanted her

to complete her mission.

So she rode here to Compiegne

with a group of loyal followers.

Joan arrived under cover of darkness

on the night of the 22nd of May.

The next morning she called for her banner,

and gathered her little band of soldiers

to attack the enemy outside the gates.

Joan rode out across the bridge

and charged at the Burgundians.

She drove her men on and on,

calling out that God was with them.

But another detachment of enemy soldiers

closed in behind her and cut her off from the bridge.

Surrounded by the enemy, Joan was pulled from her saddle.

Now, she was a prisoner.

This was not how Joan’s mission was supposed to end.

And for the Armagnacs, the fault could only lie

with Joan herself.

Charles was still the true king, anointed by God.

But Joan, they said, had become too proud and wilful

and so God had allowed her to be taken.

Keeping the Armagnac faith

meant abandoning Joan to her fate.

But what would that fate be?

The Burgundians and the English

wanted Joan to be discredited for all to see.

But deciding what to do with her, who should try her

and on what charges was no simple matter.

It took months and for all that time,

Joan was kept in captivity and ignorance.

These were Joan’s darkest days.

She knew that God had sent her to save France

from the English and the false French who supported them.

But now, God had delivered her

into the hands of those same enemies.

What did it mean?

Perhaps God meant her to help herself.

During the long months of her captivity,

Joan tried and failed to escape

and then, seeing no other way out,

she jumped from the window of the tower

in which she was locked.

She survived the fall

but her injuries took some time to hill

and she was still a prisoner.

In December 1430, Joan was taken to Rouen in Normandy,

the capital of English France.

It would be here that she would be tried

and her fate decided.

What happened next was carefully written down

and we can follow it all, word for word,

through the transcript of her trial.

Joan’s fame was so great that the eyes of the world

were on this case.

Joan was put on trial by her enemies

but she wasn’t accused of war crimes.

This was a show trial about faith,

a process designed to get at the truth

as her enemies saw it,

to demonstrate that God was not on Joan’s side.

And for us, it’s an astonishing source.

Through this unique text, we can trace,

question by question and answer by answer,

the interrogations to which Joan was subjected.

It takes us right into the courtroom.

Her main interrogator was a man named Pierre Cauchon.

He had supported the Burgundian cause

since the beginning of the civil war

but he was a loyal counsellor of the English King of France.

But Cauchon was also a bishop.

For him, this wasn’t just a matter of politics,

it was a matter of faith.

Cauchon’s faith was as strong as Joan’s.

He wanted to prove that Joan was a heretic,

that she deviated dangerously from Church doctrine.

And if he could get her to admit her guilt,

he might even save her soul from eternal damnation.

On the 21st of February 1431, Cauchon was ready.

At eight that morning,

Joan was brought from her cell to face a panel of judges.

The might of the church was ranged against her.

Silence fell, and suddenly she was there,

a girl, dressed as a boy, with her hair cut short.

42 men of the church were gathered with Cauchon

to hear her speak.

She was the only woman in the room,

by far the least educated and the youngest by years.

But she’d got used to that since leaving Domremy.

Joan’s judges might be ready but so was she.

And the words they spoke were all recorded

in the trial transcript.

Will you swear an oath,

touching the holy gospels,

to tell the truth about the things we ask you

that concern the faith and all other things that you know?

I don’t know what you want to question me about.

Perhaps you might ask me things I will not tell you.

For both sides, her revelations from God

were the heart of the matter.

Those, she said, she had only ever told her king.

And she wouldn’t speak of them now.

Cauchon’s first day of questions yielded very little.

And the second day started the same way.

I took an oath for you yesterday, that should be enough.

I advise you to swear, for no one who is questioned

in a matter of faith, not even a prince,

can refuse to take an oath.

You burden me too much.

In the end, she swore a limited oath

and the questions started slowly and carefully,

moving backwards and forwards through her story.

Often she answered, but sometimes,

from one question to the next, she blankly refused.

Was it well done to attack the city of Paris

on a holy feast day?

Move on.

But as the judges wove their web of questions around her,

gradually, little by little, something began to shift.

They wanted to prove that her revelations were false.

But Joan who was back on the battlefield,

even if this was a different kind of war

wanted to prove that they were true.

So now, despite her protests,

she began to talk about her messages from God.

The voice came at midday, in the summer time

in my father’s garden.

The voice came from my right hand side towards the church

and I seldom hear it without a light.

The light comes from the same side as the voice

moved around where there’s a great light.

It seems to me that it’d be a worthy voice

and I believe it to be a voice sent by God.

And once she had begun, the thread was there to be pulled.

Bit by bit, as they asked and asked again,

she began to offer up more details of the voice she heard.

And on the fourth day of the trial,

what she said was extraordinary.

Is the voice that speaks to you the voice of an angel

or the voice of a saint or does it come directly from God?

It is the voice of St. Margaret and St. Catherine.

And their forms are crowned in beautiful crowns,

very rich and very precious.

Which was the first voice that came to you

when you were 13 or so?

It was St. Michael that came before me and he wasn’t alone

but well attended by the angels from heaven.

Did you see St. Michael and the angels bodily and really?

I saw them with my bodily eyes, just as well as I see you

and when they left me,

I wept and truly wished they had taken me with them.

This was exactly what Cauchon wanted to hear.

The church accepted that angels and demons

could be seen by humans.

But it was a tricky thing to know which was which.

After centuries of debate,

the theological principle accepted by the church

was that an angel was not a physical being

but a spiritual one

so the more real, physical details Joan described,

the more like a demon her vision sounded.

But Joan stood no chance of understanding

this scholarly argument.

And as she tried to demonstrate the truth of her visions

by adding more and more detail,

she damned herself in the eyes of her judges.

Cauchon was inching closer to proving

that Joan’s messages came from the devil, not from God.

But he wanted more.

It was time for a change of tactics.

For a week, Joan was left to wait in her cell,

alone with her English guards,

her feet chained even when she slept.

Then, there was a knock at the door.

The interrogations would continue

but now the court had come to her.

Cauchon had decided that he would deny her a public stage.

Now, he and a handful of colleagues would crowd her

in the confines of her own prison.

Here, surely, they would make the pressure tell.

Cauchon believed that, when Joan first went to her king,

she must have given him proof of her heaven sent mission.

What sign did you give your king

when you came to him?

One that is fair and honourable

and most believable and good

and the richest that there is in the world.

Does the sign still exist?

It will last for a thousand years and more.

The sign is in my king’s treasury.

Is it gold or silver?

A precious stone or a crown?

I will not tell you anything more about it.

No one could describe a thing as rich as the sign is.

In any case, the sign you need is that God

will deliver me from your hands

and it is the most certain one he can send you.

Joan’s words make it heartbreakingly clear

that she still believed that help was coming,

that God would perform another miracle and save her.

But Cauchon knew he was getting closer.

He pushed again on his next visit to her cell

and then again the next day.

And finally, she offered up her story.

She said that when she’d first been at Chinon,

after Easter in 1429,

an angel had come to bring her king a crown of pure gold.

The angel have walked up the stairs into the king’s chamber,

with a company of other angels that only Joan could see.

Joan had said to the king,

“Sire, here is your sign, take it.”

And this crown from God meant that the kingdom of France

would be restored to him

if he would give Joan soldiers and put her to work.

For Cauchon, this was a breakthrough.

An angel who could physically walk upstairs,

speak to the king’s court and hand over a crown?

This must be the conjuring of the devil.

This, like her descriptions of her saints

was a story Joan had never told before.

Why was she telling it now?

Alone under interrogation,

she needed to vindicate her mission,

to give detailed proof of the truth of what she claimed.

But for Cauchon, the devil was literally in these details

and it was the details, in the end,

that proved what the bishop already knew,

that Joan was guilty of heresy.

The punishment for heresy was clear.

She would be burned at the stake.

But there was a chance that Joan might still live.

Cauchon’s hardest task lay ahead.

If he could persuade Joan to admit her guilt,

he would save both her life and her immortal soul.

For two weeks, Cauchon tried everything to win Joan round.

Kind persuasion, reason and argument,

and eventually, even the threat of torture.

Joan was led to a room in the castle

where terrible implements were laid out, ready for use.

But Joan was unmoved.

In truth, if you were to have me torn limb from limb

and my soul separated from my body,

I wouldn’t tell you anything more.

And if I did tell you anything else about it,

afterwards, I would always say

that you made me say it by force.

Cauchon knew that Joan meant what she said.

He sent her back to her cell.

Time was running out.

The church had done its work but it couldn’t take a life.

The sentence would be carried out by the English

and they were impatient to get on with it.

On the morning of the 24th of May 1431,

Joan was brought from her prison in Rouen Castle

to this square in front of the abbey of Saint-Ouen.

Here, in public, she would be sentenced

and then handed over to the English authorities

to be burned.

Everyone would see the fate of a heretic.

The whole of Rouen had turned out to watch

as Joan was bound on a tall platform,

with the executioner’s cart standing by.

A sermon was preached,

and once again, Joan was asked

if she would submit to Holy Mother Church.

Joan had been so sure that God would rescue her

but still help hadn’t come.

She needed to buy time.

But there was no more time.

Cauchon began to read the final sentence

and suddenly, Joan raised her voice.

I wish to obey the church and my judges.

The church says that my visions should not be believed,

so I will not uphold them.

I submit to Holy Mother Church.

I submit.

There was uproar.

The Maid was recanting.

Cauchon asked if she was ready to confess her sins.

And an official of the court stepped forward

with a document acknowledging her heresy

and a pen for her to sign it.

She made her mark on the paper.

It was done.

Now, Cauchon delivered a different sentence.

Joan would live but she would be kept in prison

for the rest of her life,

doing penance for the sins she had committed.

Joan was bundled back to her cell.

Her submission was complete.

After more than two years of dressing as a man,

she took off her male clothes and put on a dress

and she bowed her head so that her short hair

could be shaved off.

There could be no clearer sign that her mission was over.

Cauchon’s work was done.

The Maid’s soul was saved

and now her misguided claims could be safely forgotten.

That should have been it.

But there are more pages still to turn.

Here, on the 28th of May,

four days after the dramatic events at Saint-Ouen,

Cauchon was called back to the castle.

It said that he found Joan habitu virile

dressed once again as a man

and her state of mind was profoundly disturbed.

Here, the bishop questions her again

but all Joan’s calmness and confidence are gone.

Now, her answers are tangled and much harder to follow.

Something had happened in those few days.

Later, witnesses suggested

that once she was dressed in women’s clothes,

she’d been assaulted or raped in her cell.

But what is clear above all

is the overwhelming distress she felt

at having given up on her truth and denied her voices.

And what the cleric noted in margin that we she said next

was the .

Her fatal reply.

God sent me word of the great pity of my betrayal.

I have damned my soul to save my life.

If I said that God hadn’t sent me, then I would be damned

for I was truly sent by God.

My voices tell me I have done harm

by saying what I did was wrong.

Whatever I said and recanted,

I did it only through the fear of fire.

This time, Cauchon knew there could be no going back.

Joan was a relapsed heretic.

She would be handed over to the English to be burned.

Early in the morning of the 30th of May,

Cauchon and some of his fellow cleric

visited Joan for the last time.

Her life was now beyond hope,

but perhaps there was still a chance

that her soul could be saved

if she would finally tell the truth.

And this record of what Joan said

in the last hours of her life is extraordinarily moving.

All her certainties have gone.

Rescue hasn’t come.

She knows she will die.

And yet telling the truth

means she can’t let go of her voices and visions.

Is it true that you heard voices and received apparitions?

Yes.

Whether they are good or evil spirits, they appeared to me.

I heard the voices most of all

when the church bells rang in the morning and the evening.

And the apparitions, the angels?

They came in a great multitude as the tiniest things.

What of the angel who gave

the one you call your king a crown?

I was the angel.

I promised my king that if he would put me to work,

I would see him crowned.

Over the centuries,

there have been as many ways of reading Joan’s trial

as there are people to read it.

It’s even been suggested that this last conversation

on the morning of Joan’s death is fabrication,

made up by Cauchon to undermine her message.

But to me, there’s a truthfulness to it.

Joan’s story of an angel bringing her king

a golden crown doesn’t seem plausible to us

and it didn’t to her judges either.

But if Joan was the angel,

and the crown her promise of a coronation,

it makes much more sense as a way for Joan,

alone among her enemies,

to make her mission real in the world.

But Joan’s truth and Cauchon’s were incompatible.

And that’s why Joan had to die.

Joan was brought here to the marketplace in Rouen,

where a pyre had been prepared.

A cap was placed on her head

bearing the words relapsed heretic, apostate, idolater.

Joan was tied to a stake on a high scaffold

so that everyone could see her burn.

As the flames took hold,

she called the name of Jesus, over and over again.

Once she was dead, and her clothes had burned away,

the executioner raked back the fire

to show the crowd that she was just a woman.

And then he stoked the flames,

so there’d be nothing would be left of her but ashes.

Joan’s body was gone but her story wouldn’t die.

Her belief in her visions and her extraordinary courage

remained an inspiration.

By 1456, just 25 years after her death,

the political tide had turned.

France was reunited under Joan’s Armagnac king

and Joan’s case was heard in court once again.

This time, Joan was found not guilty of heresy.

Since then, Joan has become a legend and an icon.

In 1920, she was even made a saint.

Now, she’s almost an empty vessel

into which we pour our own preoccupations,

whatever they may be.

But if she becomes all things to all people,

we risk losing the human being.

The girl who burned in this place

was a ferocious champion of one side in a bloody civil war.

She was able to do what she did

to achieve what should have been impossible

for someone of her class and sex

because she and all those around her

believed they were fighting a war

in which God’s will was at work.

And perhaps it’s there

in the possibilities that faith can create

and the violence it can bring,

that Joan’s world and ours, don’t seem so very far apart.