Trial of Joan of Arc
Execution of Joan of Arc at Rouen
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Original prompt & settings (JSON) ↗The court let the woman it was about to call a relapsed heretic confess and receive the Eucharist on the morning it killed her.
Morning, 30 May 1431
On the morning of 30 May 1431 Joan confessed and received the Eucharist before being taken from Rouen Castle to the Old Market, dressed in women's clothing.
At about 9 a.m., Pierre Cauchon and the ecclesiastical court publicly pronounced her a relapsed heretic, near the Church of Saint-Sauveur.
She was about 19. Her exact birth date is unknown, and that figure rests on a birth around 1412.
Abandoned to secular power
After a sermon by Nicolas Midi, the ecclesiastical judges formally abandoned Joan to secular power. Later witnesses said English personnel took her directly to the prepared pyre, without a separate secular sentence being read.
The legal classification was relapse into heresy, not witchcraft. On 24 May she had abjured and received a life sentence; after she resumed male clothing and reaffirmed that her voices came from God, Cauchon's court treated her as having relapsed.
Surviving evidence about why she resumed male clothing is contested.
The Old Market
Joan was bound to a high execution structure and burned alive. A cleric later testified that she asked for a church cross to be held where she could see it, and that she repeatedly invoked Jesus as the fire rose.
Witnesses examined during the nullification proceedings of 1450–1456 said the executioner gathered the remains and cast them into the Seine. Those accounts were collected more than twenty years after the fact and belong to the witnesses, not to the record of the day.
Ministers of Henry VI sent a narrative of the trial to European rulers on 8 June.
Sources
Researched 23 Aug 2026 5 sources not yet audited
How this was checked
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What the sources leave uncertain
- The execution date and place are secure, but Joan’s exact birth date is unknown; “19-year-old” is an approximation based on a birth around 1412.
- Many vivid execution details survive in testimony collected during the 1450–1456 nullification process, more than twenty years later. They should be attributed to witnesses rather than presented as verbatim certainty.
- The official record and later witnesses disagree on aspects of the abjuration, the reason Joan resumed male clothing, and whether proper secular sentencing procedure occurred.