ny longer watch sheep and cattle. But the times were
dangerous, and, when there was an alarm of soldiers or robbers in the
neighbourhood, she sometimes helped to drive the flock into a fortified
island, or peninsula, for which her father was responsible, in the river
near her home. She learned her creed, she said, from her mother. Twenty
years after her death, her neighbours, who remembered her, described her
as she was when a child. Jean Morin said that she was a good industrious
girl, but that she would often be praying in church when her father and
mother did not know it. Beatrix Estellin, an old widow of eighty, said
Joan was a good girl. When Domremy was burned, Joan would go to church
at Greux, 'and there was not a better girl in the two towns.' A
priest, who had known her, called her 'a good, simple, well-behaved
girl.' Jean Waterin, when he was a boy, had seen Joan in the fields;
'and when they were all playing together, she would go apart, and pray
to God, as he thought, and he and the others used to laugh at her. She
was good and simple, and often in churches and holy places. And when she
heard the church bell ring, she would kneel down in the fields.' She
used to bribe the sexton to ring the bells (a duty which he rather
neglected) with presents of knitted wool.

All those who had seen Joan told the same tale: she was always kind,
simple, industrious, pious, and yet merry and fond of playing with the
others round the Fairy Tree. They say that the singing birds came to
her, and nestled in her breast.[2]

Thus, as far as anyone could tell, Joan was a child like other children,
but more serious and more religious. One of her friends, a girl called
Mengette, whose cottage was next to that of Joan's father, said: 'Joan
was so pious that we other children told her she was too good.'

In peaceful times Joan would have lived and married and died and been
forgotten. But the times were evil. The two parties of Burgundy and
Armagnac divided town from town and village from village. It was as in
the days of the Douglas Wars in Scotland, when the very children took
sides for Queen Mary and King James, and fought each other in the
streets. Domremy was for the Armagnacs--that is, against the English and
for the Dauphin, the son of the mad Charles VI. But at Maxey, on the
Meuse, a village near Domremy, the people were all for Burgundy and the
English. The boys of Domremy would go out and fight the Maxey boys with
fists and