In 1394, a pig was hanged at Mortaign for having sacrilegiously eaten a consecrated wafer; and in a case of infanticide, it is expressly stated in the plaintiff’s declaration that the pig killed the child and ate of its flesh, “although it was Friday,” and this violation of the _jejunium sextae_, prescribed by the Church, was urged by the prosecuting attorney and accepted by the court as a serious aggravation of the porker’s offence.
Nothing would be easier than to multiply examples of this kind. Infanticidal swine were hanged in 1419 at Labergement-le-Duc, in 1420 at Brochon, in 1435 at Trochères, and in 1490 at Abbeville; the last-mentioned execution took place “under the auspices of the aldermanity and with the tolling of the bells.” It was evidently regarded as a very solemn affair. The records of mediæval courts, the chronicles of mediæval cloisters, and the archives of mediæval cities, especially such as were under episcopal sovereignty and governed by ecclesiastical law, are full of such cases. The capital punishment of a dumb animal for its crimes seems to us so irrational and absurd, that we can hardly believe that sane and sober men were ever guilty of such folly; yet the idea was quite familiar to our ancestors even in Shakespeare’s day, in the brilliant Elizabethan age of English literature, as is evident from a passage in Gratiano’s invective against Shylock:
“thy currish spirit Govern’d a wolf, who, hang’d for human slaughter, Even from the gallows did his fell soul fleet, And, whilst thou lay’st in thy unhallow’d dam, Infus’d itself in thee; for thy desires Are wolfish, bloody, starv’d, and ravenous.”
That such cases usually came under the jurisdiction of monasteries and so-called spiritualities and were tried by their peculiarly organized tribunals, will not seem strange, when we remember that these religious establishments were great landed proprietors and at one time owned nearly one-third of all real estate in France. The frequency with which pigs were brought to trial and adjudged to death, was owing, in a great measure, to the freedom with which they were permitted to run about the streets and to their immense number. The fact that they were under the special protection of St. Anthony of Padua conferred upon them a certain immunity, so that they became a serious nuisance, not only endangering the lives of children, but also generating and disseminating diseases. It is recorded that in 1131, as the Crown Prince Philippe, son of Louis the Gross, was riding through one of the principal streets of Paris, a boar, belonging to an abbot, ran violently between the legs of his horse, so that the prince fell to the ground and was killed. In some cities, like Grenoble in the sixteenth century, the authorities treated them very much as we do mad dogs, empowering the carnifex to seize and slay them whenever found at large. On Nov. 20, 1664, the municipality of Naples passed an ordinance that the pigs, which frequented the streets and piazzas to the detriment and danger of the inhabitants, should be removed from the city to a wood or other uninhabited place or be slaughtered within twelve days on pain of the penalties already prescribed and threatened, probably in the order issued on Nov. 3, of the same year. It would seem, however, that these ordinances did not produce the desired effect, or soon fell into abeyance, since another was promulgated four years later, on Nov. 29, 1668, expelling the pigs from the city and calling attention to the fact that they corrupted the atmosphere and thus imperiled the public health. Sanitary considerations and salutary measures of this kind were by no means common in the Middle Ages, but were a gradual outgrowth of the spirit of the Renaissance. It was with the revival of letters that men began to love cleanliness and to appreciate its hygienic value as well as its æsthetic beauty. Little heed was paid to such things in the “good old times” of earlier date, when the test of holiness was the number of years a person went unwashed, and the growth of the soul in sanctity was estimated by the thickness of the layers of filth on the body, as the age of the earth is determined by the strata which compose its crust.