In 1429 a peasant girl from Domremy in eastern France presented herself to the disinherited dauphin and said that voices, which she named as Michael, Catherine and Margaret, had sent her to raise the siege of Orleans and see him crowned. Both happened within months: Orleans was relieved in May and Charles VII was anointed at Reims in July, in the cathedral where French kings received the holy ampulla. Joan was captured at Compiegne in 1430, sold to the English, and tried at Rouen in 1431 by a court of French churchmen under Bishop Pierre Cauchon, on charges that centred on her voices, her refusal to submit their judgement to the church, and her wearing of male clothing. She was burned in the market square on 30 May 1431, nineteen years old.
The record of that trial, and of the nullification proceedings that Charles VII's government and Joan's family obtained in 1456, survives in unusual fullness, and Regine Pernoud built her account of Joan directly from the two sets of testimony. The 1456 court annulled the verdict and named the trial fraudulent.
Her afterlife outran the war. She became a figure of French national feeling in the nineteenth century, was beatified in 1909 and canonised in 1920, and is now a patron saint of France, claimed simultaneously as a saint, a national symbol and a case study in how a religious tribunal could be used as an instrument of war.