Pigs before court

‘Slaughter of pigs’, from ‘Breviaire d’amour’ by Ermengol de Beziers, 13th century © Luisa Ricciarini/Bridgeman Images.

An essay by Marianna Szczygielska

 
In the medieval and early modern periods, pigs occasionally appeared before a court, usually as suspects in criminal proceedings. Such animal trials have been recorded across Europe since the thirteenth century and involved various types of critters accused of inflicting harm on humans, damage of crops, or crimes against nature.¹ Both wild and domesticated animals were tried in front of courts, including insects such as locus, termites, and grasshoppers, other vermin such as rats, mice, and snails, as well as cats and goats as familiars to witches. Most church trials targeted groups of animals that caused damage to the fields and belonged to the wild domain, like for example, a group of moles excommunicated in the Valley of Aosta (Italy) in the year 824.² Secular trials focused more on individual animals that were part of the household. Horses, oxen, sheep, or pigs were often accused of transgressions of nature as victims of bestiality or perpetrators of homicide. In some cases, the owners were also imprisoned and tried, but the capital punishment fell only on the animal.

Among farmed animals, pigs were the most frequent defendants, usually accused of the highest degree of crime: murder. Homicidal pigs were most often sows who allegedly attacked human children. In 1266, at Fontenay-aux-Roses, near Paris, a pig was convicted of eating a child. There are doubts whether a public trial and execution took place in this case, which was often presented as the first recorded animal trial.³ In 1386, in Falaise in France a sow was brought before a tribunal for killing a child. The criminal procedure was almost the same as in the case of human felons: the pigs were arrested, sometimes assigned a defender, a hearing was held, witnesses were called, and eventually a verdict was announced. In most cases, the animals were found guilty and faced the death penalty as an “eye for an eye" type of retaliation. The sow from Falaise killed the child by mauling its face and arms, so her sentence included similar steps: first maiming her head and upper limbs and then hanging.⁴ Before she was led to the public square near the city hall for execution, someone dressed the pig in human clothing. Such anthropomorphizing of porcine felons might have been a way of turning them into a spectacle or setting them as an example; a cautionary tale for local townspeople to look after their children. The event was even commemorated with a fresco painted on a wall of the local church. The execution of justice was supposed to not only take revenge on the offenders but also restore the natural order. An animal killing a child stepped outside of its prescribed role within society and disrupted human dominion over nature. In this sense, recreating the proper judicial procedure and treating pigs as legal subjects instead of simply slaying the dangerous beast was a performance of restorative justice.⁵

Trial of a Sow and Pigs at Lavegny, from The Book of Days: A Miscellany of Popular Antiquities in Connection with the Calendar, Including Anecdote, Biography, & History, Curiosities of Literature and Oddities of Human Life and Character, ed. Robert Chambers, 1879.

 
Accused pigs were acquitted very rarely. In 1457, in Lavegny (Switzerland) a sow and her six piglets stood before the court for the murder of a five-year-old boy. While the adult sow was found guilty, her young were absolved on account of their age and lack of sufficient evidence of them engaging in the murderous feast on the child’s body other than by their mother’s example.⁶ This case also shows how gendered tropes of victimhood and blame for infanticide applied to both humans and animals in legal proceedings in early modern Europe. The sow was recognized not only as the ringleader who killed the child with malice but as a bad mother, while the piglets were cast in the roles of impressionable children. In fact, most of the animal trials involved female pigs accused of infanticide. Similarly, nearly all humans accused of this type of crime were women. Some scholars interpret the gendered nature of animal trials within the framework of “crimes against reproduction,” interpreting it as “an explicit attack on reproductive order” that cast the child-killing sows as “unruly disruptors of the sanctified structure of the family.”⁷ Swine were the property of the household and part of the family structure as an important food resource. When the roles between the eater and the eaten were reversed, the pig transgressed its place within the hierarchy of beings. Perhaps the reason for so many records of sows eating infants in pre-modern Europe had to do with women rearing children and pigs in the same space. Whereas in medieval times swineherds were mostly men who controlled larger groups of pigs driving them to pastures and woodlands, in later periods keeping one or two animals for sustenance fell under female chores.⁸

October - feeding pigs on acorns, 15th century, 1939. by Robinet Testard.

 
The surprising frequency with which pigs were put on trial in pre-modern Europe, attests to human-porcine proximity in everyday life. In a classic Victorian work on animal trials, E.P. Evans attributes this pig phenomenon “to the freedom with which they were permitted to run about the streets and to their immense number.”⁹ Although domesticated free-range swine were present in both rural and urban landscapes, they caused much trouble in medieval cities. Pigs came close to places where food scraps were discarded, serving as useful garbage recyclers, but sometimes eating more than they should. Wandering pigs destroyed property, attacked people, and disrupted the movement of carts and horses on the streets. Many cities passed specific ordinances on regulating urban pigs. For example, in the fourteenth century, the English town of Lynn allowed the swine only to roam the streets on Saturdays, which was the designated cleaning day.¹⁰ Pigs were part of the urban metabolic system as waste disposal and future food. This apparent freedom came at a price. Notorious pig offenders exposed their owners to fines, and themselves to court trials. Even though swine were awarded legal subjectivity in the procedure (along with reason and will), the sentence was usually fatal for the animal. Pigs in courtrooms might seem like a funny tale belonging to irrational and backward “dark ages.” They are, however, a testament to past human-porcine proximity that could temporarily shake up the natural order.

Footnotes

1. Esther Cohen, “Law, Folklore and Animal Lore,” Past & Present 110, no. 1 (February 1986): 6–37, https://doi.org/10.1093/past/110.1.6; Patrick J. J. Phillips, Medieval Animal Trials: Justice for All (Lewiston, N.Y: Edwin Mellen Press, 2013); Anila Srivastava, “‘Mean, Dangerous, and Uncontrollable Beasts’: Mediaeval Animal Trials,” _Mosaic: An Interdisciplinary Critical Journal_40, no. 1 (2007): 127–43. ↩

2. E. P. (Edward Payson) Evans, The Criminal Prosecution and Capital Punishment of Animals (London: W. Heinemann, 1906), 313, http://archive.org/details/criminalprosecut00evaniala. ↩

3. Colin Frank, “The Pig That Was Not Convicted of Homicide, or: The First Animal Trial That Was None | Global Journal of Animal Law,” Global Journal of Animal Law, no. 9 (2021), https://ojs.abo.fi/ojs/index.php/gjal/article/view/1736. ↩

4. Jen Girgen, “The Historical and Contemporary Prosecution and Punishment of Animals,” Animal Law Review 9 (January 1, 2003): 98. ↩

5. Lesley Bates MacGregor, “Criminalising Animals in Medieval France: Insights from Records of Executions,” _Open Library of Humanities _5, no. 1 (February 26, 2019), https://doi.org/10.16995/olh.319. ↩

6. Robert Chambers, The Book of Days: A Miscellany of Popular Antiquities in Connection with the Calendar (Edinburgh: W. & R. Chambers, 1879), 128–29, http://archive.org/details/b22650477_0001. ↩

7. Jesse Arseneault and Rosemary-Claire Collard, “Crimes against Reproduction: Domesticating Life in the Animal Trials,”_ Humanimalia_ 14, no. 1 (October 26, 2023): 21, https://doi.org/10.52537/humanimalia.11727. ↩

8. Dolly Jørgensen, The Medieval Pig (Boydell Press, 2024), 27. ↩

9. Evans, The Criminal Prosecution and Capital Punishment of Animals, 158. ↩

10. Jørgensen, The Medieval Pig, 36–37. ↩