Lying at the extreme south of the castellany of Vaucouleurs, the village of Domremy was between Bar and Champagne on the east, and Lorraine on the west.[221] They were terrible neighbours, always warring against each other, those dukes of Lorraine and Bar, that Count of Vaudemont, that Damoiseau of Commercy, those Lord Bishops of Metz, Toul, and Verdun. But theirs were the quarrels of princes. The villagers observed them just as the frog in the old fable looked on at the bulls fighting in the meadow. Pale and trembling, poor Jacques saw himself trodden underfoot by these fierce warriors. At a time when the whole of Christendom was given up to pillage, the men-at-arms of the Lorraine Marches were renowned as the greatest plunderers in the world. Unfortunately for the labourers of the castellany of Vaucouleurs, close to this domain, towards the north, there lived Robert de Saarbruck, Damoiseau of Commercy, who, subsisting on plunder, was especially given to the Lorraine custom of marauding. He was of the same way of thinking as that English king who said that warfare without burnings was no good, any more than chitterlings without mustard.[222] One day, when he was besieging a little stronghold in which the peasants had taken refuge, the Damoiseau set fire to the crops of the neighbourhood and let them burn all night long, so that he might see more clearly how to place his men.[223] [Footnote 221: Colonel de Boureulle, _Le pays de Jeanne d'Arc_, Saint-Die, 1890, in 8vo, 28 small engravings. J. Ch. Chappellier, _Etude historique sur Domremy, pays de Jeanne d'Arc_, 2 plans; C. Niobe, _Le pays de Jeanne d'Arc_, in _Memoires de la Societe academique de l'Aube_, 1894, 3d series, vol. xxxi, pp. 307 _et seq._] [Footnote 222: Juvenal des Ursins, in the _Collection Michaud et Poujoulat_, col. 561.] [Footnote 223: A. Tuetey, _Les ecorcheurs sous Charles VII_, Montbeliard, 1874, vol. i, p. 87.]