What is the Veld of South Africa? An open grazing area of southern Africa. It is the term applied to grassy plateaus of the Republic of South Africa and of Zimbabwe.
At Rouen in English-controlled Normandy, Joan of Arc, the peasant girl who became the savior of France, is burned at the stake for heresy. Joan was born in 1412, the daughter of a tenant farmer at Domremy, on the borders of the duchies of Bar and Lorraine.
She was charged with seventy crimes, largely heretical and blasphemous in nature, including prophecy and claiming divine authority for herself. This was later reduced to twelve key âArticlesâ. It has been called âperhaps the best recorded heresy trial of the middle agesâ (Taylor, Joan of Arc, Manchester, p. 23). This wasnât just a theological trial, although the church certainly wanted to reinforce their orthodoxy by proving that Joan wasnât receiving messages from the God they themselves claimed the sole right to interpret, and her interrogators probably did genuinely believe she was a heretic.