Judgment and excommunication of the animals

One knows a hundred for France of the judgments and the Excommunication S concerning of the animals. The seventeenth century would count with him only forty it. The last one was returned, in 1741, against a cow.

The procedure practiced against the animals as well as the punishment that one made them undergo were appreciably the same ones as those employed with regard to the man. Thus about 1650, around Saint-Dié, a sow appeared before the criminal court under the charge to have devoured a child with the cradle. Justice had constituted to him of office a lawyer, which did not prevent the defendant, by a duly justified sentence, to be condemned to the torment of the Hart (bond which was used to strangle a prisoner). The sentence accepted its execution on one of the public places of the city.

In 1386, according to a sentence of the judge of Cliff, one had already condemned a sow to be mutilated with the leg, then with the head and finally hung to have torn and have killed a child. Eight years after one hung a pig with ravaged Mortaing and to have killed a child in the parish of Roumaigne. In 1474, a cock was condemned to be flaring by sentence of the magistrate of Basle, to have laid an egg.

Some cases reveal that the Church was opposed to the damage of the harmful insects, here are the principal ones:

In 1498, the vicar-generals of Autun mandent with the priests of the diocese to enjoin a kind of Charançon during the offices and processions to cease their devastations and to excommunicate them.
Twenty years afterwards, the official publishes a sentence against charançons and the grasshoppers which devastated the territory of Millière, in Contentin.
In 1554, the leeches are excommunicated by the bishop of Lausanne, because they destroyed fish.
In 1585, Nicolas Chorier (1612-1692), historian from the Dauphine, reports that the vicar-general of Valence orders with the caterpillars to appear before him, gives them a lawyer to be defended and to finally orders them to leave the diocese.

The secular capacity is not in remainder: in 1690, the judge of a canton of Auvergne names with the caterpillars a curator. The cause is contradictorily pled the judge and them enjoint to withdraw itself in the small ground indicated in a stop to finish their poor wretch existence there.

Source

Albin Humbert (1885), agricultural Bulletin of insectology , 11 (6): 81-83.

Random links: