That such cases usually came under the jurisdiction of monasteries and so-called spiritualities and were tried by their peculiarly organized tribunals, will not seem strange, when we remember that these religious establishments were great landed proprietors and at one time owned nearly one-third of all real estate in France. The frequency with which pigs were brought to trial and adjudged to death, was owing, in a great measure, to the freedom with which they were permitted to run about the streets and to their immense number. The fact that they were under the special protection of St. Anthony of Padua conferred upon them a certain immunity, so that they became a serious nuisance, not only endangering the lives of children, but also generating and disseminating diseases. It is recorded that in 1131, as the Crown Prince Philippe, son of Louis the Gross, was riding through one of the principal streets of Paris, a boar, belonging to an abbot, ran violently between the legs of his horse, so that the prince fell to the ground and was killed. In some cities, like Grenoble in the sixteenth century, the authorities treated them very much as we do mad dogs, empowering the carnifex to seize and slay them whenever found at large. On Nov. 20, 1664, the municipality of Naples passed an ordinance that the pigs, which frequented the streets and piazzas to the detriment and danger of the inhabitants, should be removed from the city to a wood or other uninhabited place or be slaughtered within twelve days on pain of the penalties already prescribed and threatened, probably in the order issued on Nov. 3, of the same year. It would seem, however, that these ordinances did not produce the desired effect, or soon fell into abeyance, since another was promulgated four years later, on Nov. 29, 1668, expelling the pigs from the city and calling attention to the fact that they corrupted the atmosphere and thus imperiled the public health. Sanitary considerations and salutary measures of this kind were by no means common in the Middle Ages, but were a gradual outgrowth of the spirit of the Renaissance. It was with the revival of letters that men began to love cleanliness and to appreciate its hygienic value as well as its æsthetic beauty. Little heed was paid to such things in the “good old times” of earlier date, when the test of holiness was the number of years a person went unwashed, and the growth of the soul in sanctity was estimated by the thickness of the layers of filth on the body, as the age of the earth is determined by the strata which compose its crust.
The freedom of the city almost universally enjoyed by mediæval swine is still maintained by their descendants in many towns of Southern Italy and Sicily, where they ramble at will through the streets or assemble in council before the palace of the prefect (cf. D’Addosio, Bestie Delinquenti, pp. 23-5).
In the latter half of the sixteenth century the tribunals began to take preventive measures against the public nuisance by holding the inhabitants responsible for the injuries done to individuals by swine running at large and by threatening with corporal as well as pecuniary punishment all persons who left “such beasts without a good and sure guard.” Thus it is recorded that on the 27th of March, 1567, “a sow with a black snout,” “for the cruelty and ferocity” shown in murdering a little child four months old, having “eaten and devoured the head, the left hand and the part above the right breast of the said infant,” was condemned to be “exterminated to death, and to this end to be hanged by the executioner of high justice on a tree within the metes and bounds of the said judicature on the highway from Saint-Firmin to Senlis.” The court of the judicatory of Senlis, which pronounced this sentence on complaint of the procurator of the seigniory of Saint-Nicolas, also forbade all the inhabitants and subjects of the said seignioralty to permit the like beasts to go unguarded on pain of an arbitrary fine and of corporal chastisement in default of payment. (Vide [Appendix P].)
But although pigs appear to have been the principal culprits, especially as regard infanticide, other quadrupeds were frequently called to answer for similar crimes. Thus, in 1314, a bull belonging to a farmer in the village of Moisy, escaped into the highway, where it attacked a man and injured him so severely that he died a few hours afterwards. The ferocious animal was seized and imprisoned by the officers of Charles, Count of Valois, and after being tried and convicted was sentenced to be hanged. This judgment of the court was confirmed by the Parliament of Paris and the execution took place at Moisy-le-Temple on the common gallows. An appeal based upon the incompetency of the court was then made by the Procurator of the Order of the Hospital of the Ville de Moisy to the Parliament of La Chandeleur, which decided that the bull had met with its deserts and been justly put to death, but that the Count of Valois had no jurisdiction on the territory of Moisy, and his officials no power to institute proceedings in this case. The sentence was right in equity, but judicially and technically wrong, and could not therefore serve as a precedent.
There is also extant an order issued by the magistracy of Gisors in 1405, commanding payment to be made to the carpenter who had erected the scaffold on which an ox had been executed “for its demerits.” Again on the 16th of May, 1499, the judicial authorities of the Cistercian Abbey of Beaupré near Beauvais condemned a red bull to be “executed until death inclusively,” for having “killed with furiosity a lad of fourteen or fifteen years of age, named Lucas Dupont,” who was employed in tending the horned cattle of the farmer Jean Boullet. (Vide [Appendix Q].) In 1389, the Carthusians of Dijon caused a horse to be condemned to death for homicide; and as late as 1697 a mare was burned by the decision and decree of the Parliament of Aix, which, it must be remembered, was not a legislative body, but a supreme court of judicature, thus differing in its functions from the States General, the only law-making and representative assembly in France, that may be said to have corresponded in the slightest degree to the modern conception of a parliament.
In 1474, the magistrates of Bâle sentenced a cock to be burned at the stake “for the heinous and unnatural crime of laying an egg.” The auto da fé was held on a height near the city called the Kohlenberg, with as great solemnity as would have been observed in consigning a heretic to the flames, and was witnessed by an immense crowd of townsmen and peasants. The statement made by Gross in his Kurze Basler Chronik, that the executioner on cutting open the cock found three more eggs in him, is of course absurd; we have to do in this case not with a freak of nature, but with the freak of an excited imagination tainted with superstition. Other instances of this kind have been recorded, one in the Swiss Prättigau as late as 1730, although in many cases the execution of the gallinaceous malefactor was more summary and less ceremonious than at Bâle.
The oeuf coquatri was supposed to be the product of a very old cock and to furnish the most active ingredient of witch ointment. When hatched by a serpent or a toad, or by the heat of the sun it brought forth a cockatrice or basilisk, which would hide in the roof of the house and with its baneful breath and “death-darting eye” destroy all the inmates. Many naturalists believed this fable as late as the eighteenth century, and in 1710 the French savant Lapeyronie deemed this absurd notion worthy of serious refutation, and read a paper, entitled “Observation sur les petits oeufs de poule sans jaune, que l’on appelle vulgairement oeufs de Coq,” before the Academy of Sciences in order to prove that cocks never lay and that the small and yolkless eggs attributed to them owe their peculiar shape and condition to a disease of the hen resulting in a hydropic malformation of the oviduct. A farmer brought him several specimens of this sort, somewhat larger than a pigeon’s egg, and assured him that they had been laid by a cock in his own barnyard. On opening one of them, M. Lapeyronie was surprised to find only a very slight trace of the yolk resembling “a small serpent coiled.” He now began to suspect that the cock might be an hermaphrodite, but on killing and dissecting it discovered nothing in support of this theory, the internal organs being all perfectly healthy and normal. But although the unfortunate chanticleer had fallen a victim to the scientific investigation of a popular delusion, the eggs in question continued to be produced, until the farmer by carefully watching the fowls detected the hen that laid them. The dissection showed that the pressure of a bladder of serous fluid against the oviduct had so contracted it, that the egg in passing had the yolk squeezed out of it, leaving merely a yellowish discoloration that looked like a worm. Another peculiarity of this hen was that she crowed like “a hoarse cock” (un coq enroué), only more violently; a phenomenon also a source of terror to the superstitious, but ascribed by M. Lapeyronie to the same morbid state of the oviduct and the consequent pain caused by the passage of the egg (Mémoires de l’Académie de Sciences. Paris, 1710, pp. 553-60.)
A Greek physiologus of the twelfth century, written in verse, calls the animal hatched from the egg of an old cock επτεινάρια, a name which would imply some sort of winged creature. It was “sighted like the basilisk,” and endowed also in other respects with the same fatal qualities.
In the case of a valuable animal, such as an ox or a horse, the severity of retaliatory justice was often tempered by economical considerations and the culprit confiscated, but not capitally punished. Thus as early as the twelfth century it is expressly stated that “it is the law and custom in Burgundy that if an ox or a horse commit one or several homicides, it shall not be condemned to death, but shall be taken by the Seignior within whose jurisdiction the deed was perpetrated or by his servitors and be confiscated to him and shall be sold and appropriated to the profit of the said Seignior; but if other beasts or Jews do it, they shall be hanged by the hind feet” (Coustumes et Stilles de Bourgoigne, § 197 in Giraud: Essai sur l’Histoire du Droit Francais, II. p. 302; quoted by Amira). It was a cruel irony of the law that conferred upon pigs and Jews a perfect equality of rights by sending them both to the scaffold.
Animals were put on a par with old crones in bearing their full share of persecution during the witchcraft delusion. Pigs suffered most in this respect, since they were assumed to be peculiarly attractive to devils, and therefore particularly liable to diabolical possession, as is evident from the legion that went out of the lunatic and were permitted, at their own request, to enter into the Gadarene herd of swine. But Beelzebub did not disdain to become incarnate in all sorts of creatures, such as cats, dogs of high and low degree, wolves, night-birds and indeed in any beast, especially if it chanced to be black. Goats, it is well known, were not a too stinking habitation for him, and even to dwell in skunks he did not despise. The perpetual smell of burning sulphur in his subterranean abode may render him proof against any less suffocating form of stench. The Bible represents Satan as going about as a roaring lion; and according to the highest ecclesiastical authorities he has appeared visibly as a raven, a porcupine, a toad and a gnat. Indeed, there is hardly a living creature in which he has not deigned to disport himself from a blue-bottle to a bishop, to say nothing of his “appearing invisibly at times” (aliquando invisibiliter apparens), if we may believe what the learned polyhistor Tritheim tells of his apparitions. As all animals were considered embodiments of devils, it was perfectly logical and consistent that the Prince of Darkness should reveal himself to mortal ken as a mongrel epitome of many beasts—snake, cat, dog, pig, ape, buck and horse each contributing some characteristic part to his incarnation.