Jeanne herself was in no way marked out from her girl friends by any special accomplishments or ambition. She prided herself solely on her domestic usefulness and her skill in household work. She was intensely pious, but in no way introspective or morbid. God and His angels and saints were as real to her, more real indeed, than the men and women of her native village. The thoughts of sacred things subdued her soul to an unconsciousness of self, which marks her off even from such beautiful spiritual natures as Teresa and Bridget of Sweden and Catherine of Sienna, whose habit of mind was less simple and less humble than hers. She seems to have grieved long and deeply on the misfortunes of France, which was to her the only country claiming her allegiance. For, although geographically in Lorraine, Domremy was part of the French Kingdom, and its people were devotedly on the side of the Dauphin and the national party. The Duke of Burgundy, who had sided with the English, had only one adherent in Domremy, and he was treated, after the manner of good-natured peasants, with a certain humorous toleration by the patriots of the village. Growing up in this atmosphere, Jeanne, who was born on the feast of the Epiphany 1412, heard in her earlier girlhood of the sad state of her country torn asunder by faction and treason, and presenting a very broken front to the redoubtable armies of England, which had in the course of a century carried the banner of St. George over all the lands from Calais to Cadiz without once meeting an enemy strong enough to look them in the face on a pitched field of battle. Agincourt, and the carnage after Agincourt, revived in French minds the humiliation of Poitiers and the horrors of Limoges, so that dread and hatred of the English were the burden of every household story. Nor must we forget that in Europe then, as in Asia and Africa now, news spread apace, and unlettered folk got to know in some strange way the doings of camps and courts. Old prophecies too were on every lip. That weird unrest which Shakespeare shadows forth in Peter of Pomfret and his sayings, shaking the throne of Richard II. by their very vagueness, was nowhere felt more intensely than in Lorraine, with its blending of old Celtic myths, German romances, and tales of Provençal minstrelsy in all hearts and memories.