burn at the stake

When Joan's captors told her about the sentence on the morning it was to be carried out, Joan screamed and tore her hair. "Alas! that they are treating me so horribly and cruelly that my body, clean and whole, which was never corrupted, should be today consumed and reduced to ashes!" Citing the threats of sexual assault and the other abuses she had suffered in prison, she confronted Cauchon. "Bishop, I die because of you. If you had put me in the prison of a church court and handed me over to the hands of competent and agreeable ecclesiastical caretakers, this would not have happened to me. That is why I complain of you before God."