36 The Animal-Lore of ShaJcspeare’s Time. 
of diabolical fury, was originally applied to doughty 
champions who went about wrapped in bear-skins, or who 
wore habits made of bear-skin oyer their armour. These 
warriors, writes Mr. Baring-G-ould (p. 45), were often 
dressed in wolf-skins, and it was an easy transition to 
imagine these unscrupulous destroyers of the public 
peace as possessing the strength as well as the ferocity 
of the animals whose skins they wore. Among the 
Anglo-Saxons an outlaw was said to have the head of a 
wolf, and the legal form of sentence against the offender 
was that “ he shall be driven away as a wolf and chased so 
far as men chase wolves farthest.” 
Beginald Scot, in his work on witchcraft, 1584, 
relates some stories as to the power of men to change 
themselves into wolves and other animals, but treats 
them with great ridicule. He concludes his chapter on 
these transformations with the remark— 
“But I have put twenty of these witchmongers to silence with, 
this one question, to wit, whether a witch that can turn a woman into 
a cat, etc., can also turn a cat into a woman ? ” (Discovery of Witch¬ 
craft , ed. 1654, p. 70.) 
There are numerous stories of unfortunate men and 
women being hanged or burnt for ravages imagined to be 
committed by them in their lupine shape. In France 
and Italy these executions occurred even so late as the 
year 1684. 
Trials of animals for crimes and misdemeanors 
prompted by simple natural depravity were also frequent 
in Europe in the Middle Ages. According to a writer in 
Notes and Queries (3rd series, vol. v. p. 218), a sow, in 
1403, killed and devoured a child at Meulan. All the 
forms of law were carried out, and the bill of costs was 
duly chronicled. A treatise was published so late as 
1668, by Gaspard Bailly, a lawyer at Chambery, on legal 
proceedings against animals, with forms of indictments 
and modes of pleading. Nothing corresponding to this 
