lways
warring against each other, those dukes of Lorraine and Bar, that
Count of Vaudemont, that Damoiseau of Commercy, those Lord Bishops of
Metz, Toul, and Verdun. But theirs were the quarrels of princes. The
villagers observed them just as the frog in the old fable looked on at
the bulls fighting in the meadow. Pale and trembling, poor Jacques saw
himself trodden underfoot by these fierce warriors. At a time when the
whole of Christendom was given up to pillage, the men-at-arms of the
Lorraine Marches were renowned as the greatest plunderers in the
world. Unfortunately for the labourers of the castellany of
Vaucouleurs, close to this domain, towards the north, there lived
Robert de Saarbruck, Damoiseau of Commercy, who, subsisting on
plunder, was especially given to the Lorraine custom of marauding. He
was of the same way of thinking as that English king who said that
warfare without burnings was no good, any more than chitterlings
without mustard.[222] One day, when he was besieging a little
stronghold in which the peasants had taken refuge, the Damoiseau set
fire to the crops of the neighbourhood and let them burn all night
long, so that he might see more clearly how to place his men.[223]

[Footnote 221: Colonel de Boureulle, _Le pays de Jeanne d'Arc_,
Saint-Die, 1890, in 8vo, 28 small engravings. J. Ch. Chappellier,
_Etude historique sur Domremy, pays de Jeanne d'Arc_, 2 plans; C.
Niobe, _Le pays de Jeanne d'Arc_, in _Memoires de la Societe
academique de l'Aube_, 1894, 3d series, vol. xxxi, pp. 307 _et seq._]

[Footnote 222: Juvenal des Ursins, in the _Collection Michaud et
Poujoulat_, col. 561.]

[Footnote 223: A. Tuetey, _Les ecorcheurs sous Charles VII_,
Montbeliard, 1874, vol. i, p. 87.]

In 1419 this baron was making war on the brothers Didier and Durand of
Saint-Die. It matters not for what reason. For this war as for every
war the villagers had to pay. As the men-at-arms were fighting
throughout the whole castellany of Vaucouleurs, the inhabitants of
Domremy began to devise means of safety, and in this wise. At Domremy
there was a castle built in the meadow at the angle of an island
formed by two arms of the river, one of which, the eastern arm, has
long since been filled up.[224] Belonging to this castle was a chapel
of Our Lady, a courtyard provided with means of defence, and a large
garden surrounded by a moat wide and deep. This castle, once the
dwelling of the Lords of Bourlemont, was commonly ca