How Old Was Joan of Arc When She Died?

Joan of Arc was 19 years old when she was burned at the stake in the market square of Rouen on 30 May 1431. She was born c. 1412 in the village of Domrémy, on the eastern marches of Champagne, in the duchy’s small dependent territory of the duchy of Bar. The short life of a peasant girl from the Meuse valley, who became the most famous military figure of the late Middle Ages in eighteen months, is the most striking single biographical fact of the war. The standard modern studies in English are Régine Pernoud’s Joan of Arc: Her Story (translated 1998) and the contributions to the Cambridge Companion to Joan of Arc, ed. M. D. Bailey (2023); in French, the Procès de Jeanne d’Arc remains the indispensable primary source.

A short life, dated

The dates of Joan’s life are fixed by two contemporary processes, the trial of 1431 and the rehabilitation of 1450–1456. The first trial, conducted by a French ecclesiastical court under English supervision, recorded Joan’s testimony that she was born in Domrémy and was “about nineteen” at the time of the trial; she also testified that she was thirteen when she first heard the Voices, which she dated to the summer of 1425, fixing her birth at 1412. The rehabilitation proceedings, with access to the original witnesses from Domrémy, fixed the date more precisely to the Epiphany season (early January) of 1412.

The year and the place are not in serious dispute. The day and the month are not on record. Joan’s parents, Jacques d’Arc and Isabelle Romée, were minor landholders of Domrémy; her father held the office of doien of the village, a small customary dignity. She had three brothers, Jacquemin, Jean, and Pierre, and a sister, Catherine. The family was pious, ordinary, and not poor.

The Voices and the calling

In the summer of 1425, when she was thirteen, Joan began, by her own account, to hear the voices of Saint Michael, Saint Catherine of Alexandria, and Saint Margaret of Antioch. The voices instructed her to support the Dauphin Charles, to lift the siege of Orléans, and to have the Dauphin crowned at Reims. The hearing of voices was not, in itself, unusual in 15th-century French piety; what was unusual was Joan’s claim that the voices had given her a specific political and military mission. She went to the nearby town of Vaucouleurs in May 1428, asked to see the garrison commander Robert de Baudricourt, and was turned away. She returned in January 1429 and was finally given an escort to take her to the Dauphin at Chinon.

Orléans, 29 April – 8 May 1429

Joan arrived at Orléans on 29 April 1429. The siege had been opened by the English in October 1428, the Earl of Salisbury having been killed by a cannonball on 27 October. Joan entered the city with a small supply convoy and a force of perhaps 4,000 men. The English positions around the city were systematically attacked and captured over the next nine days; the English lifted the siege on 8 May 1429. Joan was wounded by an arrow in the shoulder during the assault on the bastille of Saint-Loup on 4 May but recovered. She was 17.

The Loire campaign and the coronation

The Loire campaign of June 1429 — Jargeau (11–12 June), Meung-sur-Loire (15 June), Beaugency (16–17 June), Patay (18 June) — opened the way north to Reims. Charles VII was crowned at Reims on 17 July 1429, with Joan standing beside the altar. The anointing with the holy oil of the Sainte Ampoulle, the Chronique du Roi René records, transformed the political situation. The Dauphin was now a king, and the political legitimacy of the Anglo-Burgundian government in Paris was, in a meaningful sense, ended.

Paris and the long slide

The next three months were the high-water mark and the limit. Joan pressed for an attack on Paris in September 1429; the attack of 8 September failed, and Joan was wounded. She remained with the army through the autumn and winter, at the siege of La Charité-sur-Loire in November and at Lagny in April 1430, but the campaigning had lost its purpose. Charles VII had got what he needed from her — the coronation — and was reluctant to commit to the aggressive policy she proposed.

Compiègne, 23 May 1430

Joan was sent to Compiègne in May 1430 to defend the town against the Burgundian besiegers under John of Luxembourg. On 23 May she led a sortie outside the walls. The sortie was at first successful; the French drove the Burgundians from the outer works. As she turned to retreat, the garrison drew back into the town and the Burgundian forces closed the gate. Joan was cut off and pulled from her horse by a Burgundian archer. She was sold to the English in November 1430 for 10,000 livres tournois, transferred to Rouen in December, tried for heresy between 21 February and 30 May 1431, and burned.

The trial and the verdict

The trial was conducted under English supervision by a French ecclesiastical court. The presiding judge was Pierre Cauchon, the bishop of Beauvais, a French cleric in the English faction. The seventy charges against Joan included the wearing of men’s clothing, the claim to hear voices, the refusal to submit to the authority of the Church militant, and the assertion of a vocation to acts of violence. Joan conducted her own defence and frequently outwitted her examiners; the trial record is one of the most remarkable documents of the Middle Ages. She was found guilty of heresy on 9 May 1431, given the opportunity to recant, and on 30 May was burned at the stake in the market square of Rouen.

The rehabilitation

The rehabilitation process opened in 1450 at the request of Charles VII and Joan’s family. Pope Nicholas V authorised a formal investigation; the verdict was annulled by a commission appointed by Pope Callixtus III in 1456, on the grounds that the trial had been conducted with grave procedural irregularities. Joan was beatified in 1909 and canonised by Pope Benedict XV on 16 May 1920. Her feast day, in the Roman calendar, is 30 May.

Significance

Joan of Arc is, in the modern French republican calendar and in the Catholic calendar alike, a saint of France. Her short life, the political use to which it was put, and the posthumous rehabilitation made her the most powerful national symbol in the French tradition. The most interesting modern historiographical question, set out by Pernoud and answered with various emphases by the contributors to the Cambridge Companion, is how a 17-year-old peasant girl from the marches of Champagne could have acquired the religious, military, and political literacy she displayed in 1429. The answer, in the best current reading, is that she did not acquire it — that the literacy was the literacy of the Voices, of the political faction that supported her, and of the chroniclers of the Procès who remembered her.