Picture a courtroom in 14th-century Normandy. The air is thick with anticipation. In the dock, shuffled forward by a bailiff, stands the defendant: a pig. It is accused of a heinous crime—the murder of a human infant. Witnesses are called, evidence is presented, and a judge, robed and solemn, presides over the proceedings. This isn’t a scene from a Monty Python sketch or a twisted fairy tale. This was a real, and surprisingly formal, aspect of the medieval legal system: the animal trial.

For centuries, across Europe, animals were arrested, tried, and sentenced by both secular and religious courts. While it seems utterly bizarre to our modern sensibilities, these trials were a serious attempt to restore order to a world where the lines between the divine, the human, and the natural were profoundly blurred. To understand these strange court cases is to peer directly into the medieval mind.

Two Kinds of Court, Two Kinds of Criminal

The medieval legal system prosecuted animals in two distinct categories, depending on the creature and the crime. These trials weren’t just chaotic mob justice; they followed established legal procedures, often with surprising diligence.

First were the cases in secular (or civil) courts. These trials typically involved individual, domesticated animals that had directly harmed a person or property. The most common defendants were:

• Pigs: Often allowed to roam freely in medieval towns, they were the most frequent animal defendants, usually charged with mauling or killing young children.
• Horses, bulls, and dogs: Prosecuted for causing death or serious injury through kicking, goring, or biting.

These animals were treated much like human criminals. They were arrested, held in prison, and given a public trial. If found guilty, their sentence was almost always death, carried out by hanging or burning at the stake—a punishment mirroring that for human felons.

The second category involved ecclesiastical (or church) courts. These courts dealt with collective pests and vermin—creatures that damaged crops and property, threatening a community’s livelihood. The defendants were entire species:

• Rats and mice: Accused of destroying grain stores.
• Weevils, locusts, and caterpillars: Charged with blighting fields and vineyards.
• Snakes and eels: Sometimes tried for being a general nuisance.

Since you can’t exactly hang a swarm of locusts, the church courts employed spiritual punishments. The proceedings would begin with a formal summons for the animals to appear. When they inevitably failed to show up, the court would issue a public warning, and if the pests persisted, they would be formally cursed and excommunicated from the church.

The Case of the Killer Sow of Falaise

Perhaps the most famous and well-documented animal trial is that of a sow in Falaise, Normandy, in 1386. The pig was accused of “having mangled and murdered” an infant in its cradle. The details of the trial reveal just how seriously these proceedings were taken.

The sow was arrested and imprisoned in the local jail, just like a human suspect. It was brought before the court of the Viscount of Falaise, where evidence was heard. The pig was found guilty and sentenced to a gruesome, symbolic death. In a chilling act of retributive justice, the sow was to be maimed on its head and forelegs—mirroring the injuries of the child it killed—before being hanged by its hind feet from a gibbet.

To fully drive the point home, the sow was dressed in human clothing, including a waistcoat, gloves, and breeches, for its public execution. The town spent a considerable sum on the executioner and the pig’s “new clothes.” This wasn’t merely about killing a dangerous animal; it was a public ritual designed to demonstrate that the crime of murder demanded justice, regardless of the perpetrator’s species. The community, by seeing justice done, could feel that order had been restored.

Bartholomew Chassenée, The Pests’ Public Defender

Ecclesiastical trials could be just as legally complex, and they even produced one of history’s great legal footnotes: Bartholomew Chassenée, a 16th-century French jurist who made a name for himself as a brilliant defense lawyer for animals.

In one famous case, Chassenée was appointed to defend a group of rats accused of destroying the barley crop in Autun. When his rodent clients failed to appear in court after being summoned, Chassenée launched a masterful defense. He argued that the summons was invalid because it was addressed to the rats of Autun generally, not to each individual rat. More ingeniously, he argued that his clients couldn’t possibly make the journey to the courthouse because it was fraught with peril, namely “the malevolent designs of their enemies, the cats.”

The court, taking the argument with complete legal seriousness, accepted his reasoning. While the rats were eventually condemned in absentia, Chassenée’s procedural arguments show that these were not kangaroo courts. They were governed by a genuine, if alien, sense of due process.

Why Did They Do It? Justice, Theology, and Order

So, what possessed medieval society to engage in such a strange practice? The answer lies at the intersection of law, theology, and the precariousness of daily life.

1. Divine Order and Moral Agency: The medieval worldview was rooted in the Book of Genesis, which states that God gave humanity “dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of theair, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.” An animal that killed a human or destroyed the crops that sustained them was seen as stepping out of its God-given place in the natural hierarchy. Such an act was a disruption of the divine order. Some theologians believed animals were not just beasts, but could be agents of Satan, instruments of demonic malice that needed to be purged from the community.

2. Justice as a Universal Concept: In the medieval mind, justice wasn’t just a human social contract; it was a cosmic principle. If a wrong was committed, justice had to be served for the world to be set right again. This intensely anthropocentric view extended human legal concepts to the entire natural world. The law was a tool to impose order on chaos, and applying it to animals was the ultimate expression of human control over creation.

3. Community Cleansing and Spectacle: The public execution of a murderous pig or the excommunication of a plague of insects served as a powerful social ritual. It was a form of collective catharsis, assuring the community that the moral stain of the crime had been cleansed and that divine favor was restored. These spectacles also served as a stark warning to the human populace, reinforcing the gravity of crimes like murder and the power of the law to punish them.

The era of animal trials faded with the dawn of the Enlightenment, as a more scientific and secular worldview took hold. Today, we view them as a historical absurdity. But these trials are more than just a quirky footnote; they are a profound window into a world that saw the hand of God and the threat of chaos in every corner of life, a world that believed so deeply in justice that it would extend its reach even to the animal kingdom.