CARSOX— THE TRIAL OF AXIMALS AXD IXSECTS. 411 



Chassenee, then a young French avocat, who became a distinguished 

 jurist, and president of the Parlement de Provence, a position cor- 

 responding to chief justice, won his spurs at the bar by his ingenuity 

 in defending the Rats of the province of Autun, who were charged 

 with the crime of having eaten the barley crop. He urged that his 

 cHents, Hke other defendants, were entitled to notice before con- 

 demnation. When they failed to appear in court in obedience to the 

 proclamation published from the pulpits of all the parishes, he 

 argued that their non appearance was due to the vigilance of their 

 mortal enemies, the cats, and that if a person be cited to appear at a 

 place to which he could not come in safety the law would excuse 

 his apparent contumacy. Years later, at the height of his fame, in 

 1540, he insisted upon the same principle, in defending the persecuted 

 Waldenses who were prosecuted for heresy, contending that as it 

 had been established in the Rat case that even animals should not 

 be adjudged and sentenced without a hearing, all of the safeguards 

 of justice should be thrown around the accused. 



I have cited these cases of the Sow and the Rats, not as isolated 

 and extraordinary instances of medijeval trials, such as the cele- 

 brated Cock at Basel in 1474, but as fair examples of what was 

 common to Continental jurisprudence from the ninth to the eight- 

 eenth century. Indeed as late as 1864 in Pleternica in Slavonia, a 

 pig was tried and executed for having maliciously bitten off the ears 

 of an infant one year old, and we are told by Professor Karl von 

 Amira, who reports the case, that while the flesh of the animal was 

 thrown to the dogs, the owner of the pig was put under a bond to 

 provide a dowry for the mutilated girl, so that the loss of her ears 

 might not prove an obstacle to her marriage.^ Of the extent to 

 which the Trial of Animals formed a substantial part of Mediaeval 

 Jurisprudence, the most convincing proof is found in the Report and 

 Researches of Barriat-Saint-Prix,- who gives numerous extracts 

 from the original records of such proceedings, and also a list (5f the 

 kinds of animals tried and condemned. He gives ninety-three 

 cases from the beginning of the twelfth to the middle of the eigh- 



1 " Thierstrafen and Thierprocesse," p. 578, Innsbruck, i8gi. 

 'Memoires of the Royal Society of Antiquaries of France (Paris, 1829, 

 Tome VIII., pp. 403-50). 



