The village on the upper Meuse where Joan of Arc was born about 1412, a loyalist island in Burgundian country whose inhabitants testified about her childhood forty years later.
Domrémy lies in the valley of the upper Meuse, in what is now the Vosges department on the border of Lorraine and Champagne. In the early fifteenth century it was a village of perhaps thirty households, farming the river meadows and grazing stock on the higher ground.
Its political position was more unusual than its economy. The village and neighbouring Greux belonged to the castellany of Vaucouleurs, a small enclave that held for the dauphin Charles, while the surrounding country was Burgundian. That made Domrémy a loyalist island, exposed to raiding from every direction, and it is the single most important fact about the place Joan of Arc grew up in.
Joan was born about 1412 to Jacques d'Arc and Isabelle Romée. Her father was a farmer of reasonable standing who held village office — he collected taxes and organised the local watch — so the family was neither poor nor noble, and Joan herself testified that she had learned spinning and sewing from her mother and could not read or write.
She was baptised in the village church of Saint-Rémy. By her own account at her trial she was about thirteen when she first heard voices she identified as Saint Michael, Saint Catherine and Saint Margaret, in her father's garden and near the wood the villagers called the Bois Chenu, telling her to be good, to go to church and eventually to go to the aid of the king of France.
The war reached the village directly in 1428, when a force from the Burgundian side raided the valley. The inhabitants of Domrémy and Greux fled south to the walled town of Neufchâteau and stayed there some days, and when they returned they found the village burned and the church damaged.
Joan was among the refugees, and the episode was raised against her at her trial in an attempt to show she had lived away from home among soldiers. It was in the same year that she went to Robert de Baudricourt, the captain of Vaucouleurs, to ask for an escort to the dauphin — refused at first, granted in February 1429 — and from that point her life belongs to the war rather than to the village.
Domrémy supplied one of the most valuable bodies of evidence about any medieval commoner's childhood. When the nullification trial reopened her case in 1455 and 1456, twenty-five years after she was burned at Rouen, the commissioners went to the village and took sworn testimony from her surviving neighbours, godparents and childhood friends.
They described a girl who worked in the fields and spun, went to confession often, was teased for her piety, and told nobody about the voices at first. The testimony was collected to serve a legal purpose and its witnesses knew what verdict was wanted, so it is not neutral, but it remains a rare instance of ordinary villagers being asked at length about someone they had known as a child.
Charles VII exempted Domrémy and Greux from taxation in recognition of Joan's service, a privilege the villages retained for centuries and cited whenever it was questioned. The house identified as her birthplace passed through private hands and was eventually acquired by the department and turned into a museum.
The village was renamed Domrémy-la-Pucelle in the nineteenth century, and the Basilica of Bois-Chenu was built above it between 1881 and 1926 on the site associated with the voices. Both belong to the era of Joan's adoption as a national symbol, and a visitor should read them as nineteenth-century commemoration rather than as medieval evidence.