THE TRIAL OF ANIMALS AND INSECTS. 



A Little Known Chapter of Mediaeval Jurisprudence. 



By HAMPTON L. CARSON. 



{Read April 12, 1917.) 



In the open square of the old Norman city of Falaise, in the 

 year 1386, a vast and motley crowd had gathered to witness the 

 execution of a criminal convicted of the crime of murder. Noble- 

 men in armour, proud dames in velvet and feathers, priests in 

 cassock and cowl, falconers with hawks upon their wrists, huntsmen 

 with hounds in leash, aged men with their staves, withered hags with 

 their baskets or reticules, children of all ages and even babes in 

 arms were among the spectators. The prisoner was dressed in a 

 new suit of man's clothes, and was attended by armed men on horse- 

 back, while the hangman before mounting the scaffold had provided 

 himself with new gloves and a new rope. As the prisoner had 

 caused the death of a child by mutilating the face and arms to 

 such an extent as to cause a fatal hemorrhage, the town tribunal, or 

 local court, had decreed that the head and legs of the prisoner 

 should be mangled with a knife before the hanging. This was a 

 mediaeval application of the lex talionis, or " an eye for. an eye and 

 a tooth for a tooth." To impress a recollection of the scene upon 

 the memories of the bystanders an artist was employed to paint a 

 frescoe on the west wall of the transept of the Church of the Holy 

 Trinity in Falaise, and for more than four hundred years that 

 picture could be seen and studied until destroyed in 1820 by the 

 carelessness of a white w-asher. The criminal w^as not a human 

 being, but a sow, which had indulged in the evil propensity of eating 

 infants on the street. 



Within the first ten years of the sixteenth century, Bartholomew 



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