Chapter I: Bugs and Beasts Before the Law (4)

It was in Ireland, the native realm of bulls and like incongruities, that conjuring or “rhyming” rats seems to have been most common, if we may judge from the manner in which it is alluded to by the Elizabethan poets. Thus in _As you Like It_ Rosalind says in reference to Orlando’s verses: “I was never so be-rhymed since Pythagoras’ time, that I was an Irish rat, which I can hardly remember.” Randolph declares:

“My poets
Shall with a satire, steep’d in gall and vinegar,
Rhime ’em to death, as they do rats in Ireland.”

Ben Jonson is still more specific:

“Rhime ’em to death, as they do Irish rats,
In drumming tunes.”

From this reference to the mode of conjuring it appears that the repeating of the rhymes was accompanied with the beating of a drum, as is still the usage in France. From the very earliest times a peculiar magical potency has been ascribed to words woven into rhythmic form. The fascination which metrical expression, even as a mere jingle and jargon, still retains for the youth of the individual was yet far more strongly felt in the youth of the race. The simple song was intoned as a spell and the rude chant mumbled as a charm.

In France the conjuration of field-mice bears a more distinctly religious stamp. On the first Sunday in Lent, the so-called Feast of the Torches (_la Fête des Brandons ou des Bures_), the peasants wander in all directions through the fields and orchards with lighted torches of twisted straw, uttering the following incantation, which not only threatens to burn the whiskers of obdurate mice, but also hints at the wine-bibbing propensities of the curate:

“Sortez, sortez d’ici, mulots!
Ou je vais vous bruler les crocs!
Quittez, quittez ces blés!
Allez, vous trouverez
Dans la cave du curé
Plus à boire qu’à manger.”

The form of imprecation varies in different provinces, but usually includes some threat of breaking the bones or burning the beards of the refractory rodents, in case they refuse to quit the close, as in the following summons:

“Taupes et mulots,
Sors de mon clos,
Ou je te casse les os;
Barbassione! Si tu viens dans non clos,
Je te brûle la barbe jusqu’aux os.”

The utterance of these words is emphasized by loud and discordant noises of cat-calls, tin horns, and similar instruments of “Callithumpian” music.

Gregory, who was Bishop of Tours in the latter half of the sixth century, states in his _History of the Franks_ (VIII. 35) that bronze talismans representing dormice and serpents were used in Paris to protect the city against the ravages of these creatures; and when the town of Le Mans was rebuilt after its destruction by fire in 1145, a toad with a gold chain round its neck, was enclosed in a block of stone as a preservative against venomous reptiles. (Le Corvasier: _Hist, des Évêques du Mans_, 1648, p. 441. Cf. Desnoyers: _Recherches_, etc., p. 7.)

The use of the above-mentioned means of conjuration is unquestionably of very ancient date. Thus in a treatise on agriculture entitled τὰ γεωπονικά and consisting of twenty books, written in the tenth century by the Bithynian Byzantine, Kassianos Bassos, the following prescription is given for getting rid of field-mice:

“Take a slip of paper and write on it these words: I adjure you, O mice, who dwell here not to injure me yourselves nor to permit any other mouse to do so; and I make over to you this field (describing it). But should I find you staying here after having been warned, with the help of the mother of the gods I will cut you in seven pieces.” The author quotes this recipe, in order, as he says, that nothing may remain unrecorded, but expressly declares that he has no confidence in its efficiency and advises the husbandman to put his trust in good rat-bane. Bassos derived the materials for his popular encyclopædia chiefly from the “Geoponics” composed by Anatolios and Didymos some six centuries earlier, and even most of his citations of classical writers are taken from the same sources. That the above-mentioned exorcism is pagan in its origin is evident from the invocation of the aid of Cybele for the destruction of disobedient vermin. In a Christian conjuration the Mother of God would have been substituted for the mother of the gods, whom the Greeks revered as the personification of all-creating and all-sustaining nature. The resemblance of this formula, which the Greeks may have borrowed with the worship of Cybele from the Phrygians, to the Yankee’s letter of advice is peculiarly interesting.

In the ancient conjuration the harmful or undesirable animals were commanded to go to a certain locality, set apart for them, and this injunction was accompanied with dire threats in case of disobedience; the milder epistolary form of the present day is more advisory and persuasive and offers them inducements to migrate and to take up their abode elsewhere. Sometimes this kind counsel is given verbally, as, for example, in Thuringia, where it is customary to get rid of cabbage-worms by going into the garden, requesting them to depart, and calling out: “In yonder village is church-ale (_Kirmes_)”; thus implying that they will find better entertainment at this festival. (Witzschel: _Sagen, Sitten und Gebräuche aus Thüringen_. Wien, 1878, p. 217.) The willingness of peasant communities to ward off evil from themselves at the expense of their neighbours is a survival of the primitive ethics, which recognizes only the rights of the family or tribe and treats all aliens as foes. It is the same feeling that causes the inhabitants of the Alps to erect so-called weather-crosses (_Wetterkreuze_) for the purpose of averting thunder-storms and hailstones from themselves by diverting them into an adjacent valley. This method of protection is based upon the theory that tempests, hurricanes, and all violent commotions of nature are the work of demons or witches, who avoid the symbol of Christ’s death and the world’s redemption and direct their fury elsewhere. A like egotism is expressed in the inscription on many houses of peasants entreating St. Florian to preserve their habitation from flames and to set fire to others, as though the holy man must indulge his incendiary passion by pouring out upon some human abode the blazing vessel, which he is represented as bearing in his hand. The inscription is the same as that with which Reynard the Fox adorned his castle Malepartus, and which might be translated:

“Saint Florian, thou martyr blessed,
Protect this house and burn the rest.”

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.

“Item, for cords to bind and hale her, two sols eight deniers parisis.

“Item, for gloves, two deniers parisis.”

This account, which amounted in all to sixty-nine sols eight deniers parisis, was examined and approved by the auditor of the court, De Baudemont, who affixed to it his own seal with signature and paraph and “in further confirmation and approbation thereof caused it to be sealed with the seal of the Chatellany of Meullant, on the 15th day of March in the year 1403.” (See Appendix I.) In the following year a pig was executed at Rouvres for the same offence.

Brutes and human criminals were confined in the same prison and subjected to the same treatment. Thus “Toustain Pincheon, keeper of the prisons of our lord the king in the town of Pont de Larche,” acknowledges the receipt, “through the hand of the honourable and wise man, Jehan Monnet, sheriff (_vicomte_) of the said town, of nineteen sous six deniers tournois for having found the king’s bread for the prisoners detained, by reason of crime, in the said prison.” The jailer gives the names of the persons in custody, and concludes the list with “Item, one pig, conducted into the said prison and kept there from the 24th of June, 1408, inclusive, till the 17th of the following July,” when it was hanged “for the crime of having murdered and killed a little child” (_pource que icellui porc avoit muldry et tue ung pettit enfant_). For the pig’s board the jailer charged two deniers tournois a day, the same as for boarding a man, thus placing the porker, even in respect to its maintenance, on a footing of perfect equality with the human prisoners. He also puts into the account “ten deniers tournois for a rope, found and furnished for the purpose of tying the said pig that it might not escape.” The correctness of the charges is certified to by “Jean Gaulvant, sworn tabellion of our lord the king in the viscounty of Pont de Larche.” (_Vide_ Appendix J.) Again in 1474, the official of the Bishop of Lausanne sentenced a pig to be hanged “until death ensueth,” for having devoured an infant in its cradle in the vicinity of Oron, and to remain suspended from the gallows for a certain length of time as a warning to wrong-doers. It is also expressly stated that, in 1585, the body of a pig, which had been executed for the murder of a child at Saint-Omer, at the hostelry of Mortier d’Or, was left hanging “for a long space” on a gibbet in a field near the highway. (Derheims: _Histoire de Saint-Omer_, p. 327.) A little later a similar spectacle met the eyes of Guy Pape, as he was going to Châlons-sur-Marne in Champagne, to pay homage to King Henry IV. In his own words: _dum ibam ad civitatem Cathalani in Campania ad Regem tunc ibi existentem, vidi quemdam porcum, in furcis suspensum, qui dicebatur occidisse quemdam puerum_. (Quaestio CCXXXVIII: _De poena bruti delinquentis_. Lugduni, MDCX.)

On the 5th of September, 1379, as two herds of swine, one belonging to the commune and the other to the priory of Saint-Marcel-le-Jeussey, were feeding together near that town, three sows of the communal herd, excited and enraged by the squealing of one of the porklings, rushed upon Perrinot Muet, the son of the swinekeeper, and before his father could come to his rescue, threw him to the ground and so severely injured him that he died soon afterwards. The three sows, after due process of law, were condemned to death; and as both the herds had hastened to the scene of the murder and by their cries and aggressive actions showed that they approved of the assault, and were ready and even eager to become _participes criminis_, they were arrested as accomplices and sentenced by the court to suffer the same penalty. But the prior, Friar Humbert de Poutiers, not willing to endure the loss of his swine, sent an humble petition to Philip the Bold, then Duke of Burgundy, praying that both the herds, with the exception of the three sows actually guilty of the murder, might receive a full and free pardon. The duke lent a gracious ear to this supplication and ordered that the punishment should be remitted and the swine released. (_Vide_ Appendix K.)

A peculiar custom is referred to in the _procès verbal_ of the prosecution of a porker for infanticide, dated May 20, 1572. The murder was committed within the jurisdiction of the monastery of Moyen-Montier, where the case was tried and the accused sentenced to be “hanged and strangled on a gibbet.” The prisoner was then bound with a cord and conducted to a cross near the cemetery, where it was formally given over to an executioner from Nancy. “From time immemorial,” we are told, “the justiciary of the Lord Abbot of Moyen-Montier has been accustomed to consign to the provost of Saint-Diez, near this cross, condemned criminals, wholly naked, that they may be executed; but inasmuch as this pig is a brute beast, he has delivered the same bound with a cord, without prejudicing or in any wise impairing the right of the Lord Abbot to deliver condemned criminals wholly naked.” The pig must not wear a rope unless the right to do without it be expressly reserved, lest some human culprit, under similar circumstances, should claim to be entitled to raiment.

“’Twill be recorded for a precedent;
And many an error, by the same example
Will rush into the state: it cannot be.”

In the case of a mule condemned to be burned alive together with a man guilty of buggery, at Montpellier, in 1565, as the quadruped was vicious and inclined to kick (_vitiosus et calcitrosus_), the executioner cut off its feet before consigning it to the flames. This mutilation was an arbitrary and extra-judicial act, dictated solely by considerations of personal convenience. Hangmen often indulged in capricious and supererogatory cruelty in the exercise of their patibulary functions, and mediæval as well as later writers on criminal jurisprudence repeatedly complain of this evil and call for reform. Thus Damhouder, in his _Rerum Criminalium Praxis_ (_cap. de carnifice_, p. 234), urges magistrates to be more careful in selecting persons for this important office, and not to choose evil-doers, “assiduous gamblers, public whoremongers, malicious back-biters, impious blasphemers, assassins, thieves, murderers, robbers, and other violators of the law as vindicators of justice.” Indeed, these hardened wretches sometimes took the law into their own hands. For example, on the 9th of June, 1576, at Schweinfurt in Franconia, a sow, which had bitten off the ear and torn the hand of a carpenter’s child, was given into custody, whereupon the hangman, without legal authority, took it to the gallows-green (Schindrasen) and there “hanged it publicly to the disgrace and detriment of the city.” For this impudent usurpation of judiciary powers Jack Ketch was forced to flee and never dared return. Hence arose the proverbial phrase Schweinfurter Sauhenker (Schweinfurt sow-hangman), used to characterize a low and lawless ruffian and vile fellow of the baser sort. It was not the mere killing of the sow, but the execution without a judicial decision, the insult and contempt of the magistracy and the judicatory by arrogating their functions, that excited the public wrath and official indignation.

Buggery (_offensa cujus nominatio crimen est_, as it is euphemistically designated in legal documents) was uniformly punished by putting to death both parties implicated, and usually by burning them alive. The beast, too, is punished and both are burned (_punitur etiam pecus et ambo comburuntur_), says Guillielmus Benedictinus, a writer on law, who lived about the end of the fourteenth century. Thus, in 1546, a man and a cow were hanged and then burned by order of the parliament of Paris, the supreme court of France. In 1466, the same tribunal condemned a man and a sow to be burned at Corbeil. Occasionally interment was substituted for incremation. Thus in 1609, at Niederrad, a man and a mare were executed and their bodies buried in the same carrion-pit. On the 12th of September, 1606, the mayor of Loens de Chartres, on complaint of the dean, canons, and chapter of the cathedral of Chartres, condemned a man named Guillaume Guyart to be “hanged and strangled on a gibbet in reparation and punishment of sodomy, whereof the said Guyart is declared accused, attainted and convicted.” A bitch, his accomplice, was sentenced to be knocked on the head (_assommée_) by the executioner of high justice and “the dead bodies of both to be burned and reduced to ashes.” It is furthermore added that if the said Guyart, who seems to have contumaciously given leg-bail, cannot be seized and apprehended in person, the sentence shall, in his case, be executed in effigy by attaching his likeness in painting to the gibbet. It was also decreed that all the property of the absconder should be confiscated and the sum of one hundred and fifty livres be adjudged to the plaintiffs, out of which the costs of the trial were to be defrayed. (_Vide_ Appendix L.) This disgusting crime appears to have been very common; at least Ayrault in his _Ordre Judiciaire_, published in 1606, states that he has many times (_multoties_) seen brute beasts put to death for this cause. In his _Magnalia Christi Americana_ (Book VI, (III), London, 1702) Cotton Mather records that “on June 6, 1662, at New Haven, there was a most unparalleled wretch, one Potter by name, about sixty years of age, executed for damnable Bestialities.” He had been a member of the Church for twenty years and was noted for his piety, “devout in worship, gifted in prayer, forward in edifying discourse among the religious, and zealous in reforming the sins of other people.” Yet this monster, who is described as possessed by an unclean devil, “lived in most infandous Buggeries for no less than fifty years together, and now at the gallows there were killed before his eyes a cow, two heifers, three sheep and two sows, with all of which he had committed his brutalities. His wife had seen him confounding himself with a bitch ten years before; and he then excused himself as well as he could, but conjured her to keep it secret.” He afterwards hanged the bitch, probably as a sort of vicarious atonement. According to this account he must have begun to practice sodomy when he was ten years of age, a vicious precocity which the author would doubtless explain on the theory of diabolical possession. In 1681, a habitual sodomite, who had been wont to defile himself with greyhounds, cows, swine, sheep and all manner of beasts, was brought to trial together with a mare, at Wünschelburg in Silesia, where both were burned alive. In 1684, on the 3rd of May, a bugger was beheaded at Ottendorf, and the mare, his partner in crime, knocked on the head; it was expressly enjoined that in burning the bodies the man’s should lie underneath that of the beast. In the following year, fourteen days before Christmas, a journeyman tailor, “who had committed the unnatural deed of carnal lewdness with a mare,” was burned at Striga together with the mare.

For the same offence Benjamin Deschauffour was condemned, May 25, 1726, to be tied to a stake and there burned alive “together with the minutes of the trial;” his ashes were strewed to the wind and his estates seized and, after the deduction of a fine of three thousand livres, confiscated to the benefit of his Majesty. In the case of Jacques Ferron, who was taken in the act of coition with a she-ass at Vanvres in 1750, and after due process of law, sentenced to death, the animal was acquitted on the ground that she was the victim of violence and had not participated in her master’s crime of her own free-will. The prior of the convent, who also performed the duties of parish priest, and the principal inhabitants of the commune of Vanvres signed a certificate stating that they had known the said she-ass for four years, and that she had always shown herself to be virtuous and well-behaved both at home and abroad and had never given occasion of scandal to any one, and that therefore “they were willing to bear witness that she is in word and deed and in all her habits of life a most honest creature.” This document, given at Vanvres on Sept. 19, 1750, and signed by “Pintuel Prieur Curé” and the other attestors, was produced during the trial and exerted a decisive influence upon the judgment of the court. As a piece of exculpatory evidence it may be regarded as unique in the annals of criminal prosecutions.

The Carolina or criminal code of the emperor Charles V., promulgated at the diet of Ratisbon in 1532, ordained that sodomy in all its forms and degrees should be punished with death by fire “according to common custom” (“_so ein_ Mensch mit einem Viehe, Mann mit Mann, Weib mit Weib, Unkeuschheit treibet, die haben auch das Leben verwircket, und man soll sie der gemeinen Gewohnheit nach mit dem Feuer vom Leben zum Tode richten.” Art. 116.), but stipulated that, if for any reason the punishment of the sodomite should be mitigated, the same measure of mercy should be shown to the beast. This principle is reaffirmed by Benedict Carpzov in his _Pratica Nova Rerum Criminalium_ (Wittenberg, 1635), in which he states that “if for any cause the sodomite shall be punished only with the sword, then the beast participant of his crime shall not be burned, but shall be struck dead and buried by the knacker or field-master (_Caviller oder Feldmeister_).” The bugger was also bound to compensate the owner for the loss of the animal, or, if he left no property, the value must be paid out of the public treasury. “If the criminal act was not fully consummated, then the human offender was publicly scourged and banished, and the animal, instead of being killed, was put away out of sight in order that no one might be scandalized thereby” [Jacobi Döpleri, _Theatrum Poenarum Suppliciorum et Executionum Criminalium, oder Schau-Platz derer Leibes- und Lebens-Straffen_, etc. Sondershausen, 1693, II. p. 151.]

All Christian legislation on this subject is simply an application and amplification of the Mosaic law as recorded in Exodus xxii. 19 and Leviticus xx. 13-16, just as the cruel persecutions and prosecutions for witchcraft in mediæval and modern times derive their authority and justification from the succinct and peremptory command: “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.” In the older criminal codes two kinds or degrees of sodomy are mentioned, _gravius_ and _gravissimum_; the former being condemned in the thirteenth verse and the latter in the fifteenth and sixteenth verses of Leviticus. Döpler tells some strange stories of the results of the _peccatum gravissimum_; and the fact that a sober writer on jurisprudence could believe and seriously narrate such absurdities, furnishes a curious contribution to the history of human credulity.

It is rather odd that Christian law-givers should have adopted a Jewish code against sexual intercourse with beasts and then enlarged it so as to include the Jews themselves. The question was gravely discussed by jurists, whether cohabitation of a Christian with a Jewess or _vice versa_ constitutes sodomy. Damhouder (_Prax. Rer. Crim._ c., 96, n. 48) is of the opinion that it does, and Nicolaus Boër (Decis., 136, n. 5) cites the case of a certain Johannes Alardus or Jean Alard, who kept a Jewess in his house in Paris and had several children by her; he was convicted of sodomy on account of this relation and burned, together with his paramour, “since coition with a Jewess is precisely the same as if a man should copulate with a dog” (Döpl., _Theat._, II. p. 157). Damhouder, in the work just cited, includes Turks and Saracens in the same category, “inasmuch as such persons in the eye of the law and our holy faith differ in no wise from beasts.”

But to resume the subject of the perpetration of felonious homicide by animals, on the 10th of January, 1457, a sow was convicted of “murder flagrantly committed on the person of Jehan Martin, aged five years, the son of Jehan Martin of Savigny,” and sentenced to be “hanged by the hind feet to a gallows-tree (_a ung arbre esproné_).” Her six sucklings, being found stained with blood, were included in the indictment as accomplices; but “in lack of any positive proof that they had assisted in mangling the deceased, they were restored to their owner, on condition that he should give bail for their appearance, should further evidence be forthcoming to prove their complicity in their mother’s crime.” Above three weeks later, on the 2nd of February, to wit “on the Friday after the feast of Our Lady the Virgin,” the sucklings were again brought before the court; and, as their owner, Jehan Bailly, openly repudiated them and refused to be answerable in any wise for their future good conduct, they were declared, as vacant property, forfeited to the noble damsel Katherine de Barnault, Lady of Savigny. This case is particularly interesting on account of the completeness with which the _procès verbal_ has been preserved. (See Appendix M.)

Sometimes a fine was imposed upon the owner of the offending animal, as was the case with Jehan Delalande and his wife, who were condemned, on the 18th of April, 1499, by the bailiff of the Abbey of Josaphat near Chartres, to pay a fine of eighteen francs and to be confined in prison until this sum should be paid, “on account of the murder of a child named Gilon, aged five and a half years or thereabouts, perpetrated by a porker, aged three months or thereabouts.” The pig was condemned to be “hanged and executed by justice.” The owners were punished because they were supposed to have been culpably negligent of the child, who had been confided to their care and keeping, and not because they had, in the eye of the law, any proprietary responsibility for the infanticidal animal. The mulct implied remissness on their part as guardians or foster-parents of the infant. In general, as we have seen, the owner of the blood-guilty beast was considered wholly blameless and sometimes even remunerated for his loss. (_Vide_ Appendix N.)

According to the laws of the Bogos, a pastoral and nominally Christian tribe of Northern Abyssinia, a bull, cow or any other animal which kills a man is put to death; the owner of the homicidal beast is not held in any wise responsible for its crime, nevertheless he practically incurs a somewhat heavy penalty by not receiving any compensation for the loss of his property. This exercise of justice is quite common among the tribes of Central Africa. In Montenegro, horses, oxen and pigs have been recently tried for homicide and put to death, unless the owner redeemed them by paying a ransom.

On the 14th of June, 1494, a young pig was arrested for having “strangled and defaced a young child in its cradle, the son of Jehan Lenfant, a cowherd on the fee-farm of Clermont, and of Gillon his wife,” and proceeded against “as justice and reason would desire and require.” Several witnesses were examined, who testified “on their oath and conscience” that “on the morning of Easter Day, as the father was guarding cattle and his wife Gillon was absent in the village of Dizy, the infant being left alone in its cradle, the said pig entered during the said time the said house and disfigured and ate the face and neck of the said child, which, in consequence of the bites and defacements inflicted by the said pig, departed this life (_de ce siècle trépassa_).” The sentence pronounced by the judge was as follows, “We, in detestation and horror of the said crime, and to the end that an example may be made and justice maintained, have said, judged, sentenced, pronounced and appointed, that the said porker, now detained as a prisoner and confined in the said abbey, shall be by the master of high works hanged and strangled on a gibbet of wood near and adjoinant to the gallows and high place of execution belonging to the said monks, being contiguous to their fee-farm of Avin.” The crime was committed “on the fee-farm of Clermont-lez-Montcornet, appertaining in all matters of high, mean and base justice to the monks of the order of Premonstrants,” and the prosecution was conducted by “Jehan Levoisier, licenciate in law, the grand mayor of the church and monastery of St. Martin de Laon of the order of Premonstrants and the aldermen of the same place.” The plaintiffs were the friars, who preferred charges against the pig and procured the evidence necessary to its conviction. (_Vide_ Appendix O.)

In 1394, a pig was hanged at Mortaign for having sacrilegiously eaten a consecrated wafer; and in a case of infanticide, it is expressly stated in the plaintiff’s declaration that the pig killed the child and ate of its flesh, “although it was Friday,” and this violation of the _jejunium sextae_, prescribed by the Church, was urged by the prosecuting attorney and accepted by the court as a serious aggravation of the porker’s offence.

Nothing would be easier than to multiply examples of this kind. Infanticidal swine were hanged in 1419 at Labergement-le-Duc, in 1420 at Brochon, in 1435 at Trochères, and in 1490 at Abbeville; the last-mentioned execution took place “under the auspices of the aldermanity and with the tolling of the bells.” It was evidently regarded as a very solemn affair. The records of mediæval courts, the chronicles of mediæval cloisters, and the archives of mediæval cities, especially such as were under episcopal sovereignty and governed by ecclesiastical law, are full of such cases. The capital punishment of a dumb animal for its crimes seems to us so irrational and absurd, that we can hardly believe that sane and sober men were ever guilty of such folly; yet the idea was quite familiar to our ancestors even in Shakespeare’s day, in the brilliant Elizabethan age of English literature, as is evident from a passage in Gratiano’s invective against Shylock:

“thy currish spirit
Govern’d a wolf, who, hang’d for human slaughter,
Even from the gallows did his fell soul fleet,
And, whilst thou lay’st in thy unhallow’d dam,
Infus’d itself in thee; for thy desires
Are wolfish, bloody, starv’d, and ravenous.”

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.

It was during the latter half of the seventeenth century, when, as we have seen, criminal prosecutions of animals were still quite frequent and the penalties inflicted extremely cruel, that Racine caricatured them in Les Plaideurs, where a dog is tried for stealing and eating a capon. Dandin solemnly takes his seat as judge, and declares his determination to “close his eyes to bribes and his ears to brigue.” Petit Jean prosecutes and L’Intime appears for the defence. Both address the court in florid and high-flown rhetoric and display rare erudition in quoting Aristotle, Pausanias and other ancient as well as modern authorities. The accused is condemned to the galleys. Thereupon the counsel for the defendant brings in a litter of puppies, _pauvres enfants qu’on veut rendre orphelins_, and appeals to the compassion and implores the clemency of the judge. Dandin’s feelings are touched, for he, too, is a father; as a public officer, also, he is moved by the economical consideration of the expense to the state of keeping the offspring of the culprit in a foundling hospital, in case they should be deprived of paternal support. To the contemporaries of Racine the representation of a scene like this had a significance, which we fail to appreciate. It strikes us as simply farcical and not very funny; to them it was a mirror reflecting a characteristic feature of the time and ridiculing a grave judicial abuse, as Cervantes, a century earlier, burlesqued the institution of chivalry in the adventures of Don Quixote. (See Appendix R.)