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“Monkey hangers”, Cockatrices, and Murderous Pigs: Animal Trials in the Middle Ages

By Karin Murray-Bergquist

According to local folklore, Hartlepool, England saw a very strange trial in the Napoleonic Wars. After a French shipwreck, residents of the town tried and executed the one being that came to shore alive: a monkey.

This resulted in the mocking nickname “monkey-hangers,” persistent despite the dubious truth of the story; but it was not the first time that legal proceedings have been brought against non-human animals – in continental Europe, in the late Middle Ages and the early Renaissance, there were several such events.

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The exhaustive work on this topic was written by E.P. Evans in 1906, cataloging over 200 criminal proceedings against animals of all sorts. The list of wrongdoings was long, ranging from crop damage to harm to an individual, and was dealt with in a variety of ways.

Pigs were frequent offenders, and the earliest recorded example of a porcine trial and execution by burning comes from 1266. They were also often responsible for the most serious crimes, such as, in several cases, attacking and killing children. Falaise, France saw another pig on trial in 1386, with the result that the hangman received his fee and a pair of new gloves.

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Some crimes were rather unusual. In 1474, a rooster, “a citizen of Basle, was facing death for laying an egg; sources disagree as to whether the egg would become a basilisk or a cockatrice,” according to Sonya Vatomsky. This event, which was likely due to particulars of sex characteristics in chickens, was certainly unusual, but the reaction is markedly one of the culture in which it occurred: both the idea of putting the animal on trial and the overtones of witchcraft that were beginning to take hold in Europe at the cusp of the Renaissance.

Bestiality was another charge for which animals could be tried, though in some cases, this was only punishable for the human involved. Along with the question of their legal responsibility, they had not consented to the act, and therefore were released.

Not only were animals treated as equivalent to humans in their responsibility for crimes, but they were also allowed clemency on occasion, if they were deemed not to be the main offenders. The infamous Falaise pig, convicted of murder, had several accomplices – but they were not hanged, as the court decided that they had not been directly involved. Piglets who had been near their mother when she committed a crime were also generally acquitted.

Illustration from Chambers Book of Days depicting a sow and her piglets being tried for the murder of a child.

Punishments

It is difficult to excommunicate something with which one cannot communicate. Yet, the late medieval ecclesiastical courts occasionally did just this, expelling miscreant animals from their flock, with presumably dire spiritual repercussions. These included insects and mice, whose crimes were those typical of these animals’ behavior, such as eating crops or stored grain. Weevils, locusts, and leeches were all at various times made to answer for their destruction.

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Aside from being banned from Mass, the animals involved in these trials were also examples of punishment en masse. In the 1480s, a bishop ordered that the slugs that were destroying his garden be excommunicated, after which they were collectively destroyed – a case, Grundhauser argues, of easing the clergyman’s conscience with regard to the destruction of any of God’s creatures.

There is a theory, put forth by Leeson, that these ecclesiastical trials were intended to improve tithe returns by making an effective example of the insects. When income from tithes was dropping, an indication of what would happen to those who strayed from the Church, whatever their species, could be a tool to keep the congregation in line.

Secular courts, on the other hand, dealt with more severe crimes. Murder and physical injury were the province of the civic courts, and it is from these cases that we hear the more outlandish stories of oxen, pigs, and bulls standing trial or even being tortured for confessions. In most instances, it seems, the offenders were farm animals, where their size and proximity to humans made deadly encounters more likely.

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Legal Responsibility

How, and why, to punish errant animals was a question with both legal and spiritual implications. Thomas Aquinas debated the morality of laying a malediction on an animal as a legal repercussion. If the creature was not morally responsible for its actions, he argued, such a punishment was not only ineffective but cruel. Beirnes notes that attempts to establish the moral responsibility of animals were inconclusive, and that “there is no solid evidence of a general belief that the volition and intent of animals was of the same order as those of humans.”

Salisbury suggests that the rise of animals as domestic companions coincided with, and perhaps caused, the rise in animal trials. As non-human caused, the rise in animal trials. As non-human animals were included in more aspects of daily life, and were regarded as valuable for reasons other than agricultural production, it could be that they became more human in the perceptions of their owners. This is corroborated by the lack of evidence that wild animals were ever prosecuted; even leaving aside the difficulty of achieving this, it is not clear that such attempts were made, except in ecclesiastical cases where the case was not against one individual but an erring collective, such as a swarm of locusts.

Animals who were executed were, as a general rule, not eaten. This was an evident taboo, even though some sources remarked on the quality of the pork that was thrown away after the execution of a pig. Once they had been tried like human beings, they were no longer considered edible; at any rate, no one wanted to combine the categories of a creature who was welcome at the dinner table with one who would constitute the main course.

Defendants, Prosecution, or Legend?

According to Sara McDougall, many of the sources for animal trials come from the nineteenth century, making it difficult to distinguish between real and invented cases. These, like the Hartlepool monkey, might have arisen from teasing songs, jokes at the expense of the communities in which they took place, or exaggerations of historical events.

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In some respects, the cultural conditions that allowed animal trials in the late medieval period have not disappeared but shifted in recent years. “Monkey-hangers” aside, the practice of ascribing humanlike intent to non-human animals continues to exist in everyday life, if not necessarily on the legal level. Yet the criminal careers of miscreant creatures have also continued: in 2008, a Macedonian bear was convicted of stealing honey from a beekeeper, though in that case it was the parks service who paid the fine.

Karin Murray-Bergquist is a graduate student at the University of Iceland, Viking and Medieval Norse Studies. Follow her on Instagram @galloussophisticate

Further Readings:

Beirnes, Piers. “The Law is an Ass: Reading E.P. Evans’ The Medieval Prosecution and Capital Punishment of Animals.” Society and Animals, vol. 2, no. 1, 1994, pp. 27–46.

Dinzelbacher, Peter. “Animal Trials: A Multidisciplinary Approach.Journal of Interdisciplinary History, vol. 32, no. 3, 2002, pp. 405–421.

Evans, E.P. The Criminal Prosecution and Capital Punishment of Animals. Faber and Faber, 1906.

Grundhauser, Eric. “The Truth and Myth Behind Animal Trials in the Middle Ages.” Atlas Obscura, August 10, 2015. .

Humphrey, Nicholas. “Bugs and Beasts Before the Law.” The Mind Made Flesh, Oxford University Press, 2002, pp. 235–254.

Leeson, Peter T. “Vermin Trials.” Journal of Law & Economics, vol. 56, no. 3, 2013, pp. 811–836.

Salisbury, Joyce E. The Beast Within: Animals in the Middle Ages. 2nd ed., Routledge, 2010.

Vatomsky, Sonya. “When Societies Put Animals on Trial.” JSTOR Daily, September 13, 2017.

Walter, E.V. “Nature on Trial: The Case of the Rooster that Laid an Egg.” Comparative Civilizations Review, vol. 10, no. 10, 1985, Article 7.

This article was first published in The Medieval MagazineClick here to learn more about it.

 

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