Not only were insects, reptiles and small mammals, such as rats and mice, legally prosecuted and formally excommunicated, but judicial penalties, including capital punishment, were also inflicted upon larger quadrupeds. In the Report and Researches on this subject, published by Berriat-Saint-Prix in the Memoirs of the Royal Society of Antiquaries of France (Paris, 1829, Tome VIII. pp. 403-50), numerous extracts from the original records of such proceedings are given, and also a list of the kinds of animals thus tried and condemned, extending from the beginning of the twelfth to the middle of the eighteenth century, and comprising in all ninety-three cases. This list has been enlarged by D’Addosio so as to cover the period from 824 to 1845, and to include one hundred and forty-four prosecutions resulting in the execution or excommunication of the accused, but even this record is by no means complete. (Vide [Appendix F] for a still fuller list.)
The culprits are a miscellaneous crew, consisting chiefly of caterpillars, flies, locusts, leeches, snails, slugs, worms, weevils, rats, mice, moles, turtle-doves, pigs, bulls, cows, cocks, dogs, asses, mules, mares and goats. Only those cases are reported in which the accused were found guilty; of these prosecutions, according to the above-mentioned registers, two belong to the ninth century, one to the eleventh, three to the twelfth, two to the thirteenth, six to the fourteenth, thirty-four to the fifteenth, forty-five to the sixteenth, forty-three to the seventeenth, seven to the eighteenth and one to the nineteenth century. To this list might be added other cases, such as the prosecution and malediction of noxious insects at Glurns in the Tyrol in 1519, at Als in Jutland in 1711, at Bouranton in 1733, at Lyö in Denmark in 1805-6, and at Pozega in Slavonia in 1866. In the latter case one of the largest of the locusts was seized and tried and then put to death by being thrown into the water with anathemas on the whole species. A few years ago swarms of locusts devastated the region near Kallipolis in Turkey, and a petition was sent by the Christian population to the monks of Mount Athos begging them to bear in solemn procession through the fields the girdle of St. Basilius, in order to expel the insects. This request was granted, and as the locusts gradually disappeared, because there was little or nothing left for them to eat, the orthodox of the Greek Church from the bishop to the humblest laymen firmly believed or at least maintained that a miracle had been wrought. Pious Mohammedans exorcise and ostracize locusts and other harmful insects by reading the Koran aloud in the ravaged fields, as was recently done at Denislue in Asia Minor with satisfactory results. Also as late as 1864 at Pleternica in Slavonia, a pig was tried and executed for having maliciously bitten off the ears of a female infant aged one year. The flesh of the condemned animal was cut in pieces and thrown to the dogs, and the head of the family, in which the pig lived, as is the custom of pigs among the peasants of that country, was put under bonds to provide a dowry for the mutilated child, so that the loss of her ears might not prove to be an insuperable obstacle to her marriage. (Amira, p. 578.) It would be incorrect to infer from the tables just referred to that no judicial punishment of animals occurred in the tenth century or that the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries were peculiarly addicted to such practices. It is well known that during some of the darkest periods of the Middle Ages and even in later times the registers of the courts were very imperfectly kept, and in many instances the archives have been entirely destroyed. It is highly probable, therefore, that the cases of capital prosecution and conviction of animals, which have been collected and printed by Berriat-Saint-Prix and others, however thorough their investigations may have been, constitute only a very small percentage of those which actually took place.
Beasts were often condemned to be burned alive; and strangely enough, it was in the latter half of the seventeenth century, an age of comparative enlightenment, that this cruel penalty seems to have been most frequently inflicted. Occasionally a merciful judge adhered to the letter of the law and curbed its barbarous spirit by sentencing the culprit to be slightly singed and then to be strangled before being committed to the flames. Sometimes brutes were doomed to be buried alive. Thus we have the receipt of “Phélippart, sergeant of high justice of the city of Amiens,” for the sum of sixteen soldi, in payment for services rendered in March 1463, in “having buried in the earth two pigs, which had torn and eaten with their teeth a little child in the faubourg of Amiens, who for this cause passed from life to death (étoit allé de vie a trépas).” In 1557, on the 6th of December, a pig in the Commune of Saint-Quentin was condemned to be “buried all alive” (enfoui tout vif), “for having devoured a little child in l’hostel de la Couronne.” Again, a century earlier, in 1456, two pigs were subjected to this punishment, “on the vigil of the Holy Virgin,” at Oppenheim on the Rhine, for having killed a child. More than three centuries later the same means were employed for curing murrain, which in the summer of 1796 had broken out at Beutelsbach in Würtemberg and carried off many head of cattle. By the advice of a French veterinary doctor, who was quartered there with the army of General Moreau, the town bull was buried alive at the crossroads in the presence of several hundred persons. We are not informed whether this sacrifice proved to be a sufficiently “powerful medicine” to stay the epizoötic plague; the noteworthy fact is that the superstitious rite was prescribed and performed, not by an Indian magician or an African sorcerer, but by an official of the French republic.
Animals are said to have been even put to the rack in order to extort confession. It is not to be supposed that, in such cases, the judge had the slightest expectation that any confession would be made; he wished merely to observe all forms prescribed by the law, and to set in motion the whole machinery of justice before pronouncing judgment. The statement of a French writer, Arthur Mangin (L’Homme et la Bête. Paris, 1872, p. 344), that “the cries which they uttered under torture were received as confessions of guilt,” is absurd. No such notion was ever entertained by their tormentor. “The question,” which under the circumstances would seem to be only a wanton and superfluous act of cruelty, was nevertheless an important element in determining the final decision, since the sentence of death could be commuted into banishment, whipping, incarceration or some milder form of punishment, provided the criminal had not confessed his guilt under torture. The use of the rack might be, therefore, a merciful means of escaping the gallows. Appeals were sometimes made to higher tribunals and the judgments of the lower courts annulled or modified. In one instance a sow and a she-ass were condemned to be hanged; on appeal, and after a new trial, they were sentenced to be simply knocked on the head. Occasionally an appeal led to the acquittal of the accused.
In 1266, at Fontenay-aux-Roses, near Paris, a pig convicted of having eaten a child was publicly burned by order of the monks of Sainte Geneviève. In 1386, the tribunal of Falaise sentenced a sow to be mangled and maimed in the head and forelegs, and then to be hanged, for having torn the face and arms of a child and thus caused its death. Here we have a strict application of the lex talionis, the primitive retributive principle of taking an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. As if to make the travesty of justice complete, the sow was dressed in man’s clothes and executed on the public square near the city-hall at an expense to the state of ten sous and ten deniers, besides a pair of gloves to the hangman. The executioner was provided with new gloves in order that he might come from the discharge of his duty, metaphorically at least, with clean hands, thus indicating that, as a minister of justice, he incurred no guilt in shedding blood. He was no common pig-killer, but a public functionary, a “master of high works” (maître des hautes œuvres), as he was officially styled. (Vide [Appendix G].)
We may add that the west wall of the south branch of the transept in the Church of the Holy Trinity (Sainte-Trinité) at Falaise in Normandy was formerly adorned with a fresco-painting of this execution, which is mentioned in Statistique de Falaise (1827, t. I. 83), and more fully described by l’Abbé Pierre-Gilles Langevin, in his Recherches Historiques sur Falaise (1814, p. 146). In a Supplement (p. 12) to this work, published several years later, the Abbé states that, about the year 1820, the entire church, including the fresco, was whitewashed, so that the picture has since then been invisible, and, so far as can be ascertained, no engraving or other copy of it has ever been made. Unfortunately, too, as the same writer informs us, la châsse de la bannière (banner-holder) was fastened to the wall of the church on this very spot, thus covering and permanently destroying at least a portion of the painting.
In 1394, a pig was found guilty of “having killed and murdered a child in the parish of Roumaygne, in the county of Mortaing, for which deed the said pig was condemned to be haled and hanged by Jehan Petit, lieutenant of the bailiff.” The work was really done by the hangman (pendart), Jehan Micton, who received for his services the sum of “fifty souls tournois.” (Vide [Appendix H].) In another case the deputy bailiff of Mantes and Meullant presented a bill, dated March 15, 1403, which contained the following items of expense incurred for the incarceration and execution of an infanticide sow:
“Cost of keeping her in jail, six sols parisis.
“Item, to the master of high works, who came from Paris to Meullant to perform the said execution by comand and authority of the said bailiff, our master, and of the procurator of the king, fifty-four sols parisis.
“Item, for a carriage to take her to justice, six sols parisis.