The Criminal Prosecution and Capital Punishment of Animals

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 spiritGovern’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 desiresAre 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.