The Savoyan jurist, Gaspard Bailly, in the second part of the disquisition entitled Traité des Monitoires, already mentioned, treats “Of the Excellence of Monitories” and discusses the main points touching the criminal prosecution and punishment of insects. He begins by saying that “one should not contemn monitories (a general term for anathemas, bans and excommunications), seeing that they are matters of great importance, inasmuch as they bear with them the deadliest sword, wielded by our holy mother, the Church, to wit, the power of excommunication, which cutteth the dry wood and the green, sparing neither the quick nor the dead, and smiting not only rational beings, but turning its edge also against irrational creatures; since it hath been shown at sundry times and in divers places, that worms and insects, which were devouring the fruits of the earth, have been excommunicated and, in obedience to the commands of the Church, have withdrawn from the cultivated fields to the places prescribed by the bishop who had been appointed to adjudge and to adjure them.”
M. Bailly then cites numerous instances of this kind, in which a writer on logic would find ample illustrations of the fallacy known as post hoc, ergo propter hoc. Thus in the latter half of the fifteenth century, during the reign of Charles the Bold, Duke of Burgundy, a plague of locusts threatened the province of Mantua in Northern Italy with famine, but were dispersed by excommunication. He quotes some florid lines from the poet Altiat descriptive of these devastating swarms, which “came, after so many other woes, under the leadership of Eurus (i.e. brought by the east wind), more destructive than the hordes of Attila or the camps of Corsicans, devouring the hay, the millet and the corn, and leaving only vain wishes, where the hopes of August stood.” Again in 1541, a cloud of locusts fell upon Lombardy, and by destroying the crops, caused many persons to perish with hunger. These insects “were as long as a man’s finger, with large heads and bellies filled with vileness; and when dead they infected the air and gave forth a stench, which even carrion kites and carnivorous beasts could not endure.” Another instance is given, in which swarms of four-winged insects came from Tartary, identified in the popular mind with Tartarus, obscuring the sun in their flight and covering the plains of Poland a cubit deep. In the year 1338, on St. Bartholomew’s Day, these creatures began to devastate the region round Botzen in the Tyrol, consuming the crops and laying eggs and leaving a numerous progeny, which seemed destined to continue the work of destruction indefinitely. A prosecution was therefore instituted against them before the ecclesiastical court at Kaltern, a large market-town about ten miles south of Botzen, then as now famous for its wines, and the parish priest instructed to proceed against them with the sentence of excommunication in accordance with the verdict of the tribunal. This he did by the solemn ceremony of “inch of candle,” and anathematized them “in the name of the Blessed Trinity, Father, Son and Holy Ghost.” Owing to the sins of the people and their remissness in the matter of tithes the devouring insects resisted for a time the power of the Church, but finally disappeared. Under the reign of Lotharius II., early in the twelfth century, enormous quantities of locusts, “having six wings with two teeth harder than flint” and “darkening the sky and whitening the air like a snowstorm,” laid waste the most fertile provinces of France. Many of them perished in the rivers and the sea, and being washed ashore sent forth a putrescent smell and produced a fearful pestilence. Precisely the same phenomenon, with like disastrous results, is described by St. Augustine in the last book of De Civitate Dei as having occurred in Africa and caused the death of 800,000 persons.
In the majority of cases adduced there is no evidence that the Church intervened at all with its fulminations, and, even when the anathema was pronounced, the insects appear to have departed of their own free-will after having eaten up every green thing and reduced the inhabitants to the verge of starvation; and yet M. Bailly, supposed to be a man of judicial mind, disciplined by study, accustomed to reason and to know what sound reasoning is, goes on giving accounts of such scourges, as though they proved in some mysterious way the effectiveness of ecclesiastical excommunications and formed a cumulative argument in support of such claims.
The most important portion of M. Bailly’s work is that in which he shows how actions of this kind should be brought and conducted, with specimens of plaints, pleas, replications, rejoinders, and decisions. First in order comes the petition of the inhabitants seeking redress (requeste des habitans), which is followed in regular succession by the declaration or plea of the inhabitants (plaidoyer des habitans), the defensive allegation or plea for the insects (plaidoyer pour les insectes), the replication of the inhabitants (réplique des habitans), the rejoinder of the defendant (réplique du defendeur), the conclusions of the bishop’s proctor (conclusions du procureur episcopal), and the sentence of the ecclesiastical judge (sentence du juge d’église), which is solemnly pronounced in Latin. The pleadings on both sides are delivered in French and richly interlarded with classical allusions and Latin quotations, being even more heavily weighted with the spoils of erudition than the set speech of a member of the British Parliament.
The following abridgment of the plea, in which the prosecuting attorney sets forth the cause of complaint, is a fair specimen of the forensic eloquence displayed on such occasions:
“Gentlemen, these poor people on their knees and with tearful eyes, appeal to your sense of justice, as the inhabitants of the islands Majorica and Minorica formerly sent an embassy to Augustus Cæsar, praying him for a cohort of soldiers to exterminate the rabbits, which were burrowing in their fields and consuming their crops. In the power of excommunication you have a weapon more effective than any wielded by that emperor to save these poor suppliants from impending famine produced by the ravages of little beasts, which spare neither the corn nor the vines, ravages like those of the boar that laid waste the environs of Calydon, as related by Homer in the first book of the Iliad, or those of the foxes sent by Themis to Thebes, which destroyed the fruits of the earth and the cattle and assailed even the husbandmen themselves. You know how great are the evils which famine brings with it, and you have too much kindness and compassion to permit my clients to be involved in such distress, thus constraining them to perpetrate cruel and unlawful deeds; nec enim rationem patitur, nec ulla aequitate mitigatur, nec prece ulla flectitur esuriens populus: for a starving people is not amenable to reason, nor tempered by equity, nor moved by any prayer. Witness the mothers, of whom it is recorded in the Fourth Book of the Kings, that they ate their own children, the one saying to the other: ‘Give thy son that we may eat him to-day, and we will eat my son tomorrow.’” The advocate then discourses at length of the horrors of hunger and its disastrous effects upon the individual and the community, lugging in what Milton calls a “horse-load of citations” from Arianus Marcellinus, Ovid and other Latin prosaists and poets, introduces an utterly irrelevant allusion to Joshua and the crafty Gibeonites, and concludes as follows: “The full reports received as the result of an examination of the fields, made at your command, suffice for your information concerning the damage done by these animals. It remains, therefore, after complying with the usual forms, only to adjudicate upon the case in accordance with the facts stated in the Petition of the Plaintiffs, which is right and reasonable, and, to this effect, to enjoin these animals from continuing their devastations, ordering them to quit the aforesaid fields and to withdraw to the place assigned them, pronouncing the necessary anathemas and execrations prescribed by our Holy Mother, the Church, for which your petitioners do ever pray.”
It is doubtful whether any speaking for Buncombe in the halls of Congress or any spouting of an ignorant bumpkin in the moot-court of an American law-school ever produced such a rhetorical hotchpotch of “matter and impertinency mixed” as the earnest plea, of which the above is a brief abstract.
Rather more to the point, but equally overburdened with legal lore and literary pedantry, is the rejoinder of the counsel for the insects:
“Gentlemen, inasmuch as you have chosen me to defend these little beasts (bestioles), I shall, an it please you, endeavour to right them and to show that the manner of proceeding against them is invalid and void. I confess that I am greatly astonished at the treatment they have been subjected to and at the charges brought against them, as though they had committed some crime. Thus information has been procured touching the damage said to have been done by them; they have been summoned to appear before this court to answer for their conduct, and, since they are notoriously dumb, the judge, wishing that they should not suffer wrong on account of this defect, has appointed an advocate to speak in their behalf and to set forth in conformity with right and justice the reasons, which they themselves are unable to allege.
“Since you have permitted me to appear in defence of these poor animals, I will state, in the first place, that the summons served on them is null and void, having been issued against beasts, which cannot and ought not to be cited before this judgment seat, inasmuch as such a procedure implies that the parties summoned are endowed with reason and volition and are therefore capable of committing crime. That this is not the case with these creatures is clear from the paragraph Si quadrupes, etc., in the first book of the Pandects, where we find these words: Nec enim potest animal injuriam fecisse, quod sensu caret.