You’ve
heard of villagers in Europe putting pigs or goats on trial in the
Middle Ages. It turns out that a lot of those stories were made up out
of whole cloth for one reason or another. Yet some are true, although
the details are few. What were they thinking? Did people back then
really think that livestock were capable of guilt or understood the
proceedings of a trial? Ah, no. Beasts accused of murder were sometimes
sentenced to death after a fact-finding trial. Others were prosecuted as
a species, but that was often in ecclesiastical court.
Most
complaints against smaller animals leveled for infestation or
destruction of crops ended up in some sort of excommunication from the
church, or official ecclesiastical denouncement. Evans explains that
this was largely done as an effort to make people feel better about
exterminating them. Since even weevils, slugs, rats, and such were
considered God’s creatures, the devastation they inflicted was likely
part of his plan, so to just destroy them would be to act against God’s
will and creatures. Of course if they were tried in a church court, and
excommunicated (or condemned in the case of animals and insects), that
could mitigate guilt.
Atlas Obscura gets down to
the details of animal trials, and why they were a thing in the Middle Ages.
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