Animals on Trial: Medieval Courts Believed in Monster Justice
Sometime in 1457, in the Burgundian village of Savigny, a sow and her six piglets were formally arrested, tried before a court of law, and sentenced.
There is a moment in the historical record that stops you cold the first time you encounter it. Sometime in 1457, in the Burgundian village of Savigny, a sow and her six piglets were formally arrested, tried before a court of law, and sentenced. The sow was hanged. The piglets — on the grounds that they were young and had been led astray by their mother — were acquitted.
The judge, it appears, believed in mitigating circumstances.
Medieval animal trials were not rare aberrations. They happened across France, Germany, Switzerland, and Italy for several centuries, reaching their peak between the thirteenth and seventeenth centuries. Rats were summoned to court for destroying crops. Weevils were excommunicated. A rooster in Basel was prosecuted — in 1474, with full legal proceedings — for the unnatural crime of laying an egg. He was burned at the stake. The egg too, apparently, was considered dangerous.
What strikes me is not the strangeness of it. What strikes me is the internal logic. These were not people who believed they were doing something absurd. The medieval legal mind understood the cosmos as a moral order, top to bottom. If God had made the world and everything in it, then everything in it was subject to God's law — which meant it was subject to human law, which was God's law administered locally. A pig that killed a child had not merely caused damage. It had committed murder. The distinction mattered enormously, because murder required justice, not compensation.
There was also something else at work. Many of the cases involving insects or rodents were brought before ecclesiastical courts — church courts — which had a different tool available: the curse, the formal ban, the excommunication. The Bishop of Lausanne, in the fifteenth century, issued a formal warning to the leeches of Lake Geneva. A French court, dealing with a caterpillar infestation, appointed a defence lawyer for the caterpillars, who argued they had as much right to eat as anyone else.
The defence lawyer won.
What you see, when you look at this long enough, is not medieval irrationality. You see something very recognisable: the human need to impose narrative on catastrophe. When crops fail and children die and the harvest is gone, the question that will not leave is *why.* A trial answers *why.* It identifies an agent, assigns responsibility, performs consequence. It makes the suffering mean something.
We still do this. We always will. The courtroom has always been, at its heart, a story we tell ourselves about order.
*— Alexandre Noir*
