When Joan was taken prisoner at the siege of Compiégne, she was kept six months in various castles by John of Luxemburg; but her youth, virtue, and courage made friends of her gaolers. The governor, however, was a sordid creature, and sold her to her enemies for English gold. Then another brutal creature called a bishop of Beauvais, also an inquisitor, rose up and insisted on his right to judge her, as she was captured within his diocese. She was taken to Rouen to be tried as a rebel heretic. Joan had a presentiment of her fate, and said, "I know well that these English will put me to death; but were they a hundred thousand more Goddams than have already been in France, they shall never have the kingdom." On hearing this, the English Earl of Stafford half drew his dagger to strike her, but was held back. As she was led to Rouen, great crowds came to see her; ladies of distinction went five leagues to speak comfort to her and encourage her, and wept on parting. The brutal bishop, like a vulture of the desert, seized on her as his prey; and though some lookers-on cried shame, and protested that the trial was illegal, this demon inquisitor had her locked in an iron cage, with irons on her feet, and kept in a dark room, guarded night and day in a castle tower, while a sham trial was kept up for forty days, and idle questions cast at her. The demon judge, after trying in vain to shake her fortitude, at last had her brought into the torture chamber. But Joan told him, "If you tear me limb from limb, you shall get nothing more from me; nay, if I were at the stake and saw the torch lighting the fagots, I shall say naught else." Joan was declared a heretic and a rebel; she was harassed to sign an abjuration, and a mock signature being forced from her, she was at first condemned to perpetual imprisonment. Part of her alleged crime was the wearing of man's clothes, and after a struggle she refused to give this up. She was tried and retried, and at last forty judges agreed that she must be burned at the stake. A woman's dress was put on her, and she was dragged to the place of execution. Her last wish was to have the cross, whereon God hung, kept continually in her sight as long as she lived. She was then done to death, and even the demon bishop was said for once to drop a tear as the inspired maid was in her last agony. OUTBREAK OF THE HERMIT ZEAL (A.D. 340).