Casting Justice Before Swine: Late Mediaeval Pig Trials as Instances of Human Exceptionalism

Abstract

In recent years, several cases about the legal personhood of nonhuman animals garnered global attention, e.g. the recognition of ‘basic rights’ for the Argentinian great apes Sandra and Cecilia. Legal scholars have embraced the animal turn, blurring the once sovereign boundaries between persons and objects, recognising nonhuman beings as legal subjects. The zoonotic origins of the Covid-19 pandemic stress the urgency of establishing ‘global animal law’ and deconstructing anthropocentrism. To this end, it is vital to also consider the extensive premodern legal history that humans share with other animals. Over 200 so-called animal trials have been documented in premodern Europe. In these proceedings, certain nonhuman animals—particularly domestic pigs—were prosecuted, often resulting in their capital punishment or anathema. This paper takes a history of ideas approach to these historical instances where Western philosophy of law and philosophical anthropology intersect, problematising the notion that such trials constitute wholesome precedents of the kind of legal personhood presently debated in jurisprudence. My counter-hegemonic analysis of the legal prosecution and execution of several pigs in fifteenth-century France demonstrates that late mediaeval notions of criminality transcended the alleged human-nonhuman divide whilst reaffirming and reifying human distinctiveness. I propose that pig trials were local laboratories where Christian communities reflected upon the natural hierarchy of God’s creation. Ensuing the apparent breach of the prescribed boundaries of nature, these communities renegotiated and re-naturalised everyday interspecies sociability by utilising the offending animals to exemplify particular norms about what it means to be human, generally to the animals’ detriment.

Introduction

The history of legal personhood is rife with monkey business. As an example, I here paraphrase a trial record that was published by Jacques Berriat-Saint-Prix (1829). On the tenth of January 1457, Sustitia and her six children faced justice in the jurisdiction of Savigny-sur-Étang for having been caught while murdering a five-year-old child. The mother and her suspected accomplices were found covered in the boy’s blood, eating from his body. The court convened, summoned witnesses—among whom one Jehan Bailly, a close relative of Sustitia’s—yet they could not obtain a reasonable explanation for why they had committed this gruesome murder. Sustitia was therefore found guilty of manslaughter, and she was sentenced to be hanged upside down until death. After this solemn ordeal, the court reconvened to decide on what was to be done with Sustitia’s children. As it could not be proven that they had also eaten from the murder victim, the court was willing to let Jehan Bailly bail out Sustitia’s children, provided that he vouch for their future conduct. Upon Bailly’s decisive refusal, the court declared that Sustitia’s children were to be remitted to the custody of the Lady of Savigny.

Sustitia and her young accomplices were not human in the slightest. Despite my initial narration of these events, Sustitia and her children were members of an altogether different species: the domestic pig, Sus scrofa domesticus.¹ These legal proceedings mark but two of numerous historical instances in which nonhumans were tried, convicted, and/or punished by law.² Scholars such as Jacques Berriat-Saint-Prix (1829), Léon Ménabréa (1846), Karl von Amira (1891), Carlo d’Addosio (1892), and Edward Evans (1906) have collected over 200 examples of these ‘nonhuman trials’.³ Though the earliest records date back to the Antiquity,⁴ the majority of trials occurred in premodern Western Europe, particularly in the late mediaeval Francophone world.⁵ Only a minority of these proceedings was fictitious.⁶ Diverse species were tried: horses, dogs, locusts, dolphins, snails, donkeys, weevils, and so on. However, one specific kind of animal appears to have been the main ‘star’ of this judiciary bestiary: the domestic pig.⁷ Sustitia’s kind amounts to over 25% of all nonhuman trials and more than half of all legal actions against nonhumans in premodern France.⁸

A common early theory is that nonhumans were legally prosecuted because premodern people were ignorant, superstitious, cruel, and barbaric (Berriat-Saint-Prix, 1829, 20; Evans, 1906, 41; Frazer, 1919, 445).⁹ This conclusion has largely shifted towards an interpretation that seemingly competes with the former: such trials demonstrate what one might call a ‘prehumanist’ or ‘proto-posthumanist’ relationality. They betray a ‘tendency to reduce the ontological distance between man and beast’ (Dinzelbacher, 2002, 420; also see Dinzelbacher, 2006, 152), blurring the imagined lines of distinctiveness that separate humans from nonhumans (Salisbury, 2010, 115).¹⁰ As premodern people considered nonhumans ‘their equal’, they imbued them with legal personhood, so all animals ‘had to answer for their crimes to tribunals’ (Daboval, 2003, 68).¹¹ This interpretation often inspires hopeful musings that premodern trials constituted promising precedents of present efforts to recognise the legal personhood of nonhumans: maybe the Enlightenment’s separation of humankind from nature which attributed moral and legal status solely to the former ‘was just a brief parenthesis, marking the boundaries of an era that is now coming to a close’ (Ferry, 1995, xvi). Or perhaps animal advocacy will lead ‘back to the middle ages’ (Newman [1978] 2017, 93–4) and ‘it is time for a return of some form of the animal trials of years past’ (Girgen, 2003, 133). While these two perspectives (bygone brutality vs. wholesome examples of pre-/posthumanist values) apparently clash, both actually depart from modern conceptions of criminality: only human persons can commit crimes and be held legally accountable. Assuming that nonhuman trials ‘anthropomorphised’ nonhumans, ‘elevated’ them to human status, perhaps tells us more about scholars’ perception of law and nonhumans than about the reality of these trials.

What different conclusions might we draw if we start out by considering the possibility that it was not a prerequisite to be a (legal) ‘person’ to be declared a ‘criminal’ in the Middle Ages? What historical set of expectations, motivations, and hopes do nonhuman trials imply if we do not position ourselves as astonished ‘modern’ observers (with the preconceptions of animality and criminality that this implies)—and revisit these practices from the vantage point that they seemed perfectly reasonable to those humans communities who organised and participated in them? This paper considers nonhuman trials as historical instances where Western philosophy of law and philosophical anthropology intersect and, from the bottom-up, (re)invented particular notions about human distinctiveness. I investigate late mediaeval legal actions against pigs from a history of ideas perspective, concentrating on the case of Sustitia and her piglets. The trial’s procès verbal is preserved with remarkable completeness and exemplifies a typical secular nonhuman trial: it took place in Burgundy, featured porcine defendants, and insisted emphatically on observing legal custom and judicial procedure (Cohen, 1986, 11). I will develop the following argument: legal actions against pigs constituted (1) elaborate anthropopoietic rituals in which a multiplicity of motivations and narratives converged, among which that of ‘the pig’ itself—the nature of the beast and its significance to mediaeval Christians; (2) sites where human communities debated, performed, and (re)stabilised notions of human exceptionalism by appealing to what I coin the myth of the Homo Legifer (‘Legislative Human’). This is, briefly defined, the notion that humans are exceptional animals because they exercise an allegedly unique capacity for reason and morality through the invention and enforcement of laws, by which they purport to protect an anthropocentrically imagined universal value of Justice.¹²

Significantly, the procès-verbal records the names of many human individuals present during the proceedings:

• The judge (‘noble man Nicolas Quarroillon, esquire’)¹³

• Nine named and ‘multiple other witnesses’

• ‘Huguenin Martin, prosecutor of the noble lady Katherine de Barnault, lady of the said Savigny’

• The defendant (Jehan Bailly)

• The victim (Jehan Martin) and his father (Jehan Martin senior)

• ‘the honourable and wise man, master Benoist Milot from Autun,¹⁴ licensed in law and bachelor in decree, counsellor of milord the duke of Burgundy’

• ‘Huguenin de Montgachot, clerk, public notary of the court of milord the duke of Burgundy’

• And finally the executioner, ‘master Etienne Poinceau, master of high justice, residing at Chalon-sur-Saône’¹⁵

This can be seen as a kind of roll call of the main cast in this trial, if you will, with titles indicating the capacity in which these people attended the proceedings (e.g. judge, prosecutor). These names attest to the lawful, public nature of the case and the involvement of the local nobility of Savigny (‘noble man’, ‘esquire’, ‘noble lady’). The records also leave no question as to within whose jurisdiction this trial occurred: Catherine de Barnault, Lady of Savigny-sur-Étang, which was part of the territories of the duke of Burgundy, here represented through his counsellor, Benoist Milot, and his clerk of the court, Huguenin de Montgachot. Additionally, these names—especially those of the witnesses—attested to the reliability of the proceedings. The reputation (fama) of witnesses ‘was crucial in establishing if they were appropriate for legal cases’ as fama functioned as an essential form of social capital in the late mediaeval French legal system (Hutchison, 2018, 258).¹⁶

By contrast, neither Sustitia nor her six infants were named in the original record, even though the trial essentially revolved around their potential guilt and punishment. Perhaps the pigsty, Jehan Bailly, never found a reason to name his pigs, or perhaps they did have a name, but it was omitted from the record for some reason.¹⁷ Domestic animals such as dogs, cats, pigs, horses, sheep, and birds could and did bear personalising names—albeit of a generally different kind than human names (Cohen, 2008, 41). Nonhumans that were tried rarely had a name, especially if they were pigs.¹⁸ However, that can also be attributed to the limitations of the sources. Most nonhuman trials are recorded in administrative documents, mainly receipts, which due to their formal nature rarely allowed nonessential information. In any case, the Savigny pigs’ namelessness tacitly contributes to their discursive objectification. Names are a form of social currency: even if often the bearer did not choose their proper name, names inevitably accumulate tremendous meaning, both for the individual and for the society in which they participate. On a literary level, namelessness reflects powerlessness (Bal, 1988, 23).¹⁹ Unnamed animals ‘are objects, not subjects. They have no history, no biography, no intentions, and no emotions’—by contrast, having a name ‘incorporates that creature into our social world’ (DeMello, 2012, 49). The name ‘Sustitia’, a contraction of Sus (‘pig’) and Justitia (‘justice’), is a literary invention I assigned to the unnamed sow of the Savigny-sur-Étang trial records.²⁰ I realise that any alteration to the source material, however minute, teeters on anachronism, yet this intervention also opens up new possibilities. By preposterously naming this otherwise nameless sow, I seek to establish a field of creative tension within the vast spatiotemporal gap between present observers and the world of meaning encoded in the mediaeval trial records. I deliberately forego a Rankean history Wie es eigentlich gewesen ist for a narrativist vision of history: interpretation of the past—based on rigorous source analysis—forged into a narrative that interweaves the ‘hunger for fact’ with the intangible mental and relational processes of that past (Davis, 1992; see also Ankersmit, 2012). My intention is to fashion a history that welcomes the pre-posterous as ‘a way of “doing history” that carries productive uncertainties and illuminating highlights’ (Bal, 1999, 7).²¹ Carefully examining the preposterous reveals that ‘the presentation of an order authorized as “natural” is actually ‘rhetorically produced’, raising awareness for ‘the workings of “smooth discourse”—the histories it forges and the authority it creates’ (Parker, 1992, 213). Naming Sustitia enables a change in perception by retrospectively levelling the ontological playing field. Sustitia’s name thus facilitates reading her trial counter-hegemonically: no longer merely an unknown ‘mute beast’, an anonymous historical object of knowledge surrounded by human protagonists, Sustitia becomes an agential partner in knowledge. This allows me to avoid a normative, humanist reading of the reality of Sustitia’s trial—which would instrumentalise Sustitia’s ordeal to celebrate that humans have abandoned the crude silliness of prosecuting nonhumans—in favour of a posthumanist interpretation that challenges and decentres anthropocentrism by conjugating with the nonhuman, recognising the value of its alterity (Marchesini, 2016a, 164–5; 2016b, 224–5, also see Barcz, 2015, 256).

A Brief Historiography of Legal Actions Against Nonhumans

Scholars commonly distinguish the nonhuman trials by their procedure. Ecclesiastical cases debated what to do about particular (groups of) critters who had damaged the livelihood of a specific human community.²² In secular cases, royal, urban, and seigneurial authorities prosecuted specific domestic animals that had injured or killed a human.²³ Some also discern a third, hybrid procedure: secular prosecutions of individual nonhumans for spiritual transgressions, preternatural or diabolical behaviour (Cohen, 1986, 33–4).²⁴ Theories for why humans have taken legal actions against other animals can be clustered in five primary drives.²⁵

• 1. Upholding tradition:

  • 1.1. Biblical prescriptions

  • 1.2. Roman law

• 2. Evening the scales:

  • 2.1. Retaliation

  • 2.2. Retribution

• 3. Maintaining law and order:

  • 3.1. Deterrence

  • 3.2. Intimidation

• 4. Protecting the community:

  • 4.1. Incapacitation of a threat

  • 4.2. Psychosocial coping

• 5. Increasing affluence:

  • 5.1. Profit (prestige, tithings, etc.)

  • 5.2. Material/financial compensation

A pervasive theory holds that communities organised such trials because of abiding ancient legal traditions, e.g. persistent adherence to the Mosaic injunction that if an ox lethally injures any human then that ox must be killed (Ex. 21:28–32) or to Roman law, i.e. the chattel law principle of noxae deditio: if a person’s property had caused harm to a human being, the latter person was entitled to take ownership of the noxious property (Fath, 1906, 8–10; 23–5). Legal custom departed entirely from this principle as injurious nonhumans were often penalised. Offending nonhumans were rarely, if ever, extradited to the injured party as local authorities usually executed or confiscated them instead (Cohen, 1986, 26–7). Likewise, although the Mosaic laws certainly provided a Biblical justification (e.g. Pape, 1541, 268, art. 238), it is unlikely that they incited the prosecution of nonhumans. In fact, the purposes of Mosaic law are every bit as contested as the theories for the nonhuman trials (see Finkelstein, 1981; Wise, 1996, 485–6 and n. 95). Moreover, the ‘oft-quoted prescription in Ex. 21:28 to kill the ox that gored had only peripheral importance during the Middle Ages’ as capital punishment of nonhumans was never stoning: they were usually hanged, burned, or suffocated (Dinzelbacher, 2002, 419).

Some proffer that nonhuman trials were motivated by a deep-seated, infantile need for vengeance (Von Amira, 1891, 9; Evans, 1906, 186; Hyde, 1916, 698; Frazer, 445; Carson, 1917, 410; Newman [1978] 2017, 93). However, the notion that even the highest layers of institutionalised justice invested considerable time and effort debating which sentence to pass on injurious nonhumans because of petty retaliation is rather facile (Cohen, 1986, 16). A nuanced vengeance interpretation abides: mediaeval culture was still ‘immersed in the lex talionis’ (Enders, 2002, 211), i.e. the Mosaic law to ‘award life for life, eye for eye’ (Ex. 21:22–25).²⁶ There is, however, no evidence that this injunction was invoked for any situation of interhuman or interspecies injury.²⁷ Contrariwise, Scripture insists on charity and forgiveness (e.g. Lev. 19:18; 19:34; Mt. 5:38–39).²⁸ Alternatively, nonhuman trials have been interpreted as a form of societal retribution. Homicide (especially by nonhumans) unravelled communities’ social cohesion and tarnished their moral integrity, necessitating the culprit’s expulsion to restore order (Ayrault, 1591, 27v; Ménabréa, 1846, 123; Thonissen, 1875, 414; Hyde, 1916, 697–8; MacCormack, 1984, 349). Perhaps the trials were ritualistic attempts to restore the cosmic equilibrium after a nonhuman had disturbed the would-be insurmountable human/animal divide (Finkelstein, 1981, 73; Tester, 1991, 91) or, ‘like all other rituals involving animals’, symbolic gestures ‘to affirm the perception of justice in the universe’, restoring the imbalance of justice caused by nonhuman violations of the ontological order (Cohen, 1993, 110).²⁹

Penologically, the trials likely constituted deterrents: punishments that make an example of criminals. Some submit that the trials were intended to deter other nonhumans from committing similar infractions, much like the killing and public display of so-called nuisance animals to repel others of their kind (Jamieson, 1988, 58; Humphrey, 2002, 258–9; Girgen, 2003, 118 and n. 147). These are different categories of infractions and procedures, so I think it is unhelpful to equate the summary execution and display of nonhumans that encroached onto human property with the ritualised executions of nonhumans that killed a human. It is also presumptuous to assume that premodern courts believed that so-called irrational animals learned from the offending nonhuman’s punishment. Perhaps, instead, such punishments deterred the human keeper, so they would guard their charge(s) more diligently (Jamieson, 1988, 58; Beirne, 1994, 38; Girgen, 2003, 118–9; Rainis, 2011, 118; Dubois, 2018, 171); the victim’s parents, who might be punished for insufficiently monitoring their child’s safety (Ayrault, 1591, 24r; Dubois, 2017, 10; Rainis, 2011, 118); or even a spectacular antisemitic warning for Jewish people.³⁰ Others, however, propose that the trials were a general deterrent: ritualised exempla that demonstrated a performance of ‘good justice’ to all spectators (Pastoureau, 2000, 200). The fervour to subject any species to justice could also have been an expressive display of power, to intimidate people into believing that their authorities maintained unfaltering control over their environment (Humphrey, 2002, 249; Dinzelbacher, 2002, 406; Pervukhin, 2003, 14; Salisbury, 2010, 114; Van Bruaene, 2015, 35–6; Dubois, 2017, 10; MacGregor, 2019, 16).

Others suggest that nonhuman trials provided humans with a rational discursive framework and a spiritually moving ritual that allowed human communities to mend the social rift caused by the breach of societal norms, and restore order (Berman, 1996, 318; Friedland, 2012, 116; Frank, 2021, 5).³¹ The (quasi-)legal discourse provided a practical vocabulary to (re-)evaluate communal issues and adjudicate ‘among the multiple narratives that are invariably present in a heterogeneous society’ (Berman, 2000, 129–31). Legal courts publicly established the meaning of the offender and their actions (Humphrey, 2002, 251) and ascertained if the homicide was caused by a nonhuman or by human foul play (Dubois, 2017, 11). The ritualised nature and formality of legal discourse perhaps comforted perturbed human communities, functioning as an ‘intellectually acceptable form of the recourse to magic that was so prevalent during that epoch’—in other words, ‘efforts to address and relieve the menacing, inexplicable and uncontrollable elements of the medieval world’ (Dinzelbacher, 2002, 420; 2006, 154; also: Berman, 2000, 129–31; Slabbert, 2004, 178–9; Fudge, 2016, 37; Newman [1978] 2017, 92–3). This functionalist interpretation enlightens little more than it obscures.³² It presupposes that the mediaeval world was exceedingly harsh and inherently frightening, an assumption that is as common as it is unhelpful.³³ The notion that late mediaeval people prosecuted nonhumans simply because it gave them a sense of stability and order in what was—allegedly—an unendingly turbulent world arguably says more about the scholar entertaining this notion than about the actual people being studied. Functionalist theories based on the notion of a ‘mediaeval anxiety culture’ ultimately only explain away the legal actions of a mediaeval culture that entertained complex, dynamic, and sometimes paradoxical world views.³⁴

Some scholars attribute the trials to avarice. For instance, after dismissing the contributions of ‘noneconomists’ in a footnote, Peter Leeson (2013) proclaims that the Catholic Church deliberately propagated such ‘superstitions’ among the supposedly ignorant and easily manipulable common folk to increase ecclesiastical tithe revenues (813–4). Enders (2002) already suggested that pig trials imply ‘the same kind of persecuting mentality which stimulated so many accusations of witchcraft for the purpose of economic gain’ (221). Even mediaeval jurists like Philippe de Beaumanoir, who wrote the influential Coutumes de Beauvaisis (1283), reasoned that the trials were driven by local authorities’ desire for personal profit (Beaumanoir, 1899, 481).³⁵ Beaumanoir himself vehemently condemned the nonhuman trials, maintaining that animals who possess neither knowledge of good and evil nor malicious intent cannot be held responsible for their actions (482). Yet for all of their censure, customary jurisprudents like him appear to have had little influence on the nonhuman trials. The high cost of incarcerating an offending nonhuman, the executioner’s time and travel costs, and the legal process itself suggest that it was unlikely that secular trials were driven by an economic rationale. Moreover, the persistence of ecclesiastical trials ‘was due mainly to indirect popular pressure voiced by hired lawyers’ as theologians and jurists often opposed the notion of prosecuting nonhumans (Cohen, 1993, 115; 126).

Many of these theories attribute the prosecution of nonhumans to the cruelty, irrationality, and primitive superstition of a culture lacking the intellectual rigour to separate humans from beasts.³⁶ This cultural positivism indicates historical exceptionalism, an attitude that projects everything ‘antithetical to the modern world’—i.e. ‘violence, ignorance, backwardness, and filth’—onto a past framed as a distant ‘dark age’ (Fazioli, 2017, 155–7). Some dismiss the trials as actions of a human ‘race’ in its ‘infancy’: ‘In that hazy state of the human mind it was easy and almost inevitable to confound the motives which actuate a rational man with the impulses which direct a beast’, leading these ‘savages’ to take ‘deliberate vengeance’ on noxious nonhumans (Frazer, 1919, 445)—until the ‘progress of the Enlightenment banned measures contrary to reason and humanity’ (Berriat-Saint-Prix, 1829, 20). Significantly, however, the peak of nonhuman prosecutions lies between 1500 and 1700, clashing with ‘the picture of humanity advancing in linear progression from the superstitious middle ages to the rational nineteenth century’ (Cohen, 1986, 17; Girgen, 2003, 116).³⁷ Moreover, cultural positivism’s politics of time and species, like modernism, are grounded in a dual dissymmetry (Latour, 2002). Firstly, modernism pretends to rupture the regular flow of time as though its advancements have abolished its past.³⁸ The second dissymmetry is the parallel contrasting of past/future and nature/culture: time as a battle in which modernity inevitably vanquishes premodernity, thus creating ‘two entirely distinct ontological zones: that of human beings on the one hand; that of nonhumans on the other’ as premodernity becomes ‘the confusion of things and men’, whereas modernity ‘will no longer confuse them’ (10–1; 71). Presupposing that premodern people were so backwards as to sluggishly accept any nonsense ‘the Church’ allegedly spoon-fed them insinuates that those people were as savage and irrational as the nonhumans they persecuted. This attitude leans on two sinister convictions: (1) the a priori that nonhumans are irrational and slavishly docile (if led by a firm hand), and (2) humans who are part of cultures with a different normative scheme and set of conventions are essentially nonhumans.³⁹ This fusion of human and historical exceptionalism suggests that humans imagined guilty of ‘premodern’ sins are subhuman, less evolved than ‘modern Western Man’.⁴⁰

A single global motivation cannot explain all nonhuman trials. The purpose of any trial inevitably depended on a ‘variable configuration of temporal, national, gender, class, religious, and other factors’ (Beirne, 1994, 39). Some scholars propose a combination of explanations and factors to explain the nonhuman trials (e.g. Dinzelbacher, 2002, 421; Girgen, 2003, 121). Multifactorial theories are certainly fruitful, but arguably not for ‘the nonhuman trials’ as a whole. Despite their one shared distinctive feature (legal action against one or several nonhumans), the trials did not constitute a single curious tradition; they were not an idiosyncrasy of the mediaeval Occident. To seek a global (multifactorial) explanation for legal actions against nonhumans—a widespread, multiform practice throughout human history—anyway would be tantamount to seeking a ‘general theory of holes’.⁴¹ Elsewhere, Stuart Clark (1980) once remarked that ‘What is at stake are the criteria for interpreting a past world of thought without recourse to anachronism or reductionism’, as linguistic utterances are dependent of a particular context—or Wittgensteinian ‘language game’—within which they make sense (99–100). Likewise, I maintain that each nonhuman trial must be examined within its own linguistic and spatiotemporal context as no two trials were identical; each involved specific actors within a particular spatiotemporality. Every trial constituted a unique twilight zone where different categories, social classes, species, customs, and narratives encountered and challenged each other, the end result to be determined by the presiding human court. When embracing their individual multiplicity, each nonhuman trial can be perceived as a kind of social laboratory, providing entryways into the rich mental and behavioural worlds of premodern humans, other animals, and the ways in which they (re)negotiated interspecies sociability.

Seven Pigs on Trial in Savigny-sur-Étang, 1457

Despite the procès-verbal’s remarkable extensiveness, the local context of the trial remains elusive.⁴² The records do not specify Savigny’s location, but Savigny-sur-Étang (sometimes spelled Savigny-l’Étang or Sauvigny-l’Estang) was situated in the bailiwick of Autun.⁴³ When Catherine de Barnault married Guyot de Brasiers, she also became the Lady of Savigny-sur-Étang.⁴⁴ The trial records reveal little more, save that Huguenin Martin acted as her prosecutor in this case.⁴⁵ Apparently, Barnault’s justice was ‘not presently elevated’.⁴⁶ Late fourteenth-century juridical texts such as Le grand coutumier de France and Le coutumier bourguignon glosé distinguished three forms of justice: low, middle, and high justice. Most crimes were covered by low or middle justice (which included hanging), and high justice (haute justice) was reserved for the most severe transgressions that warranted spectacular punishments such as the pillory, burning, drawing and hanging, and execution on the fourches (a gibbet with three or more columns).⁴⁷Le coutumier bourguignon also reserved the management of ‘wild pigs and other large beasts of the nature of wild pigs’ for authorities with high justice.⁴⁸ The dukes of Burgundy utilised high justice as ‘a political tool, a means of establishing and reaffirming both jurisdiction and territorial control’ (MacGregor, 2021, 180) and only granted this power to select jurisdictions—the seigneurs of Savigny-sur-Étang apparently not included.⁴⁹ Involving the lawyer and counsellor Benoist Milot as well as the clerk and public notary, Huguenin de Montgachot, likely provided a loophole as the presence of these two functionaries of duke Philip the Good granted legitimacy to the trial and verdict.⁵⁰ Sustitia’s case thus reflects how Savigny-sur-Étang’s court navigated the precarious dynamic between seigneurial and ducal authority at this time.

I here pursue a deeper examination of the trial of Sustitia and her six piglets, all charged with homicide. Shortly before Christmas 1456, Sustitia and her six suine accomplices were arrested and as of then,

prisoners of the aforesaid lady, as they had been apprehended in flagrante delicto [in blazing offence], having committed and perpetrated... murder and homicide onto the person Jehan Martin, aged five years, son of Jehan Martin, for the fault and blame of said Jehan Bailly alias Valot.⁵¹

Significantly, although the pigs’ incarceration might have resulted from a pragmatic concern to retain physical control over them, less expensive options were available to detain them. Imprisoning nonhumans, just like labelling their actions ‘homicide’, had a criminalising and ‘othering’ effect as it suggested that these nonhumans (ipso facto already ‘Other’) warranted incarceration because of their actions (MacGregor, 2019, 10). As prisonniers, the pigs were spatially separated from Savigny-sur-Étang’s community. This framed their aggression towards Jehan Martin as criminal, underlining the necessity to follow legal procedure. By contrast, the pigs’ owner, Jehan Bailly, had not been imprisoned, so the court clearly did not suspect him of having committed a criminal offence.⁵²

Though the records’ parlance safely adheres to the legal repertoire of the time, it is also full of unresolved tensions. The suids deliberately and purposefully (commis et perpétré) killed the child. Paradoxically, while these terms suggest agency and voluntary action, Jehan Bailly—the pigs’ guardian—is named as sole defendant (defendeur) and the pigs’ role remains undefined.⁵³ Bailly was clearly considered liable. In legal discourse, the term faulte (‘negligence’) indicated a person’s failure to act as a reasonable person, thus damaging other persons (Dalrymple, 1948, 62).⁵⁴ Likewise, culpe denoted ‘blameworthiness’ and ‘negligence’ (Ibid.), signifying the ‘failure to foresee and guard against what a careful person would foresee and guard against’ (Bell & Ibbetson, 2012, 52).⁵⁵ The records’ terminology indicates that if Bailly were an attentive custodian, the child’s death could have been avoided. In his negligence, Bailly had failed to act like a human (viz. reasonable animal). Contrariwise, Sustitia’s kind was not expected to behave reasonably. The human victim is regularly identified as a personne whereas Sustitia and her infants are never named, nor identified otherwise than by their species, familial interrelation, or human guardian.⁵⁶ The agential vocabulary for their actions (commis et perpétré... murtre et homicide) contradicts the objectifying terminology and genericity in which the pigs as living beings are cast. To me, this implies that the pigs were considered like to mute, interchangeable automatons that had severely ‘malfunctioned’ (behaved far outside the acceptable parameters of chattel behaviour).⁵⁷ Framed as ‘faulty livestock,’ the pigs remained ontologically inferior to humans. Thus, while porcine animals might kill humans (the apex of terrestrial animals in God’s creaturely hierarchy), the trial’s phraseology reassuringly maintained that such acts could not, in any definitive sense, upend the order of nature.

The terms used for the suids’ behaviour (commis et perpétré... murtre et homicide) signify evil, criminal acts.⁵⁸ They highlight the pigs’ deliberateness, their awareness of committing a crime. Within legal discourse, the concept of intentionality⁵⁹ became essential to European penology as of the twelfth century.⁶⁰ Late mediaeval French speakers distinguished multre (‘unlawful killing’) from homicide, a ‘man-killing’ (Williman, 1986, 76–7). The latter was a crime of passion, whereas multre designated a ‘premeditated, deliberate kill’, implying treachery and a secret grudge. Treacherous murder was understood as a ‘violent, non-accidental death through which the murderer violated a culture shared with the victim’ (Komornicka, 2018, 97–8). Linking treachery with murder spoke to a broader stratum of ideas about social order, framing the perpetrator as a pollutant that threatened social cohesion at large. Treacherous murder, a breach of trust and a personal offence, constituted an infraction of communal bonds that, if left unsanctioned, might pervert and undo the entire community. In using these labels, public authorities essentially (re)asserted the behavioural norms of their citizenry (99–101; 105; 108). Invoking murder and homicide, as in Sustitia’s trial, signalled that the case could be considered a so-called cas énorme (Gauvard, 2010, 800–3).⁶¹ Enormity indicated infringements of basic moral taboos like incest, heresy, sodomy, or infanticide. Public authorities (rather than private plaintiffs) typically acted as prosecutors. Convicted criminals received punishment suited to the crime’s ‘enormity’ (Monter, 1999, 10–1; Gauvard, 2000, 200–2). While Sustitia’s case is never explicitly typified as such, its terminology and procedure are comparable. Huguenin Martin, a public prosecutor of the Lady of Savigny-sur-Étang, pursued Sustitia’s case.⁶² Additionally, it warranted a veritable ‘assembly’ (jours)—though not quite a ‘grand assembly’ (grand-jours)—and the presence of many witnesses. On a regional scale, this trial was evidently considered of the utmost gravity.

The gravity of the case undoubtedly relates to the fact that Sustitia had killed a human child, a major moral taboo.⁶³ Though the first known invocation of the term infanticide in French dates to the sixteenth century, the concept and its practice were already known and reviled in mediaeval Christian Europe.⁶⁴ Women reportedly suffered gruesome punishments in hell if they aborted their unborn child or if they harmed or killed their infant after birth (Price, 2003, 19). This religiously informed aversion also suffused late mediaeval secular courts of law, which considered killing a human child homicide and potential grounds for burning, drowning, hanging, or burying alive the guilty party and any accomplices (Cohen, 1993, 99; Riddle, 1994, 140–1; Sandidge, 2011, 291; McDougall, 2021, 238).⁶⁵ Even when the cause of death was deemed an accident, urban courts sometimes sought to achieve satisfaction in other ways, for instance by seizing the nonhuman animals involved in the death.⁶⁶ In any case, when local authorities decided to investigate the killing of a child, they assiduously followed inquisitorial procedure and adapted this to the particular circumstances of the case as they were keen to ascertain whether or not the child’s death had been an accident or intentional (Beaulant, 2021, 18; 27). Thus, contrary to the notorious thesis that a dead infant ‘which had disappeared so soon in life was not worthy of remembrance’ (Ariès, 1962, 38), mediaeval religious imagination, legal practice, and infanticide literature clearly indicate that the killing of a child was not a matter of indifference but a cause of great consternation. Significantly, the majority of secular nonhuman trials in the Late Middle Ages concerned nonhumans that had been responsible for the death of a child (Gauvard, 2010, 826). This was especially the case in legal actions against pigs.

Before judge Nicolas Quarroillon pronounced the verdict for Sustitia and her infants, the court required a statement from the pigs’ legal guardian. The court summoned Bailly not one but three times to vouch for Sustitia and her six children yet he never answered the call. The judge insisted that he was ‘very eager to hear’ Bailly’s defence, whether ‘he wanted to say anything as to why justice should not be done’ to Sustitia and her children, who would otherwise face ‘the punishment and execution of justice’.⁶⁷ Quarroillon thus profiled himself as an impartial judge guided by reason.⁶⁸ At this point in time, reason was an essential aspect of human distinctiveness, one that legitimised superiority over other animals (Gins, 2021, 10–1). Bailly ultimately responded that he ‘did not want to say anything’.⁶⁹ Bailly’s silence served his own protection: him already being considered negligent, he likely chose to remain silent to save face and avoid punishment. As there appears to be no record of an investigation into how or why Sustitia fatally injured the boy, and because Sustitia could not utter human speech to defend herself, her only possible line of defence for acquittal arguably lay in Bailly, whose silence thus sealed her fate. According to some scholars, Sustitia ‘confessed (!) under torture that she had killed and partially devoured the young Jehan Martin’.⁷⁰ The trial records, however, provide no indication that Sustitia was tortured to extract any kind of confession from her.⁷¹ Her being caught in the heat of the murder, the boy’s blood on her skin, feasting on his flesh, combined with Bailly’s refusal to explain her actions sufficiently proved her guilt.

The court also claimed to have consulted ‘with sages and practitioners’, considering ‘in this case the [habitual] usage and customs of the land of Burgundy, having God before [their] eyes’.⁷² This statement attests that the court of Savigny-sur-Étang was playing the Homo Legifer ‘game’.⁷³ Their phrasing befitted contemporary legal repertoire and underlined the court’s the intention to follow established legal procedures. While highlighting the jury’s legal diligence, the appeal to expertise (human specialists of jurisprudence) and tradition (customary laws of Burgundy) tacitly suggests that this case might not have been as ‘habitual’ as it was presented. Moreover, in relying on this linguistic repertoire, the jury implicitly distanced their verdict from the very humans that reached it, conferring final responsibility for their decision to anonymous or absent authority figures, to human tomes and human laws, even to a godhead. Such projection is a common human stratagem to escape the anthropopoietic task and its vast responsibility (Remotti, 1998, 27–8). By appealing to human vestiges of knowledge, tradition, and divinity, the human jury implicitly relegated their own accountability to ‘other’ entities—be it human, nonhuman, or superhuman—all of which inhabited a different, more transcendent spatiotemporal plane of existence than the humans of Savigny-sur-Étang’s court. Their explicit belief to have judged aïant Dieu devant nos yeulx also signalled that questioning the jury’s decision was tantamount to heresy, thus solidifying the power of the legal apparatus—thereby validating the narrative of the Homo Legifer.

Having emphasised the legitimacy of their capacity to judge nonhumans, the court subsequently pronounced its sentence for Sustitia:

we speak and pronounce by our definitive sentence, and by law, and... we declare the sow of Jehan Bailli, alias Valot, for the reason of murder and homicide by the said sow committed and perpetrated onto the person of Jehan Martin, of Savigny, to be confiscated by the justice of the lady of Savigny to be put to justice and to the final ordeal, and to be hanged by the hind feet to a bent tree in the justice of the lady of Savigny, considering that... this sow [is] to take death on the said bent tree.⁷⁴

Sustitia, framed as human property (la truye de Jehan Bailli), was convicted of having commis et perpétré both multre and homicide onto the young person Jehan Martin. As a result, she was condemned au dernier supplice, the death sentence, much like human offenders of other enormous cases. However, caught in the jaws of late mediaeval judicial machinery as she was, Sustitia never truly stood a chance of being released.⁷⁵ By contrast, human defendants accused of a capital offence often emerged relatively unscathed as they could apply for a letter of pardon, their charges might be lessened, or they were never even prosecuted to begin with (Gauvard, 2010, 2018; Porteau-Bitker, 1988).⁷⁶ In principle, letters of remission were issued solely by the king, but the Valois dukes of Burgundy, always keen to showcase their ambition for supremacy, regularly granted pardons to their subjects as well (Spierenburg, 2008, 56–7; Verreycken, 2014). Moreover, Burgundy’s customary tradition tended towards reconciliation: legal authorities were only to be involved if no reconciliation could be achieved through apology, pecuniary compensation, or other compromise (N. N. 1982, 49–50).

The method of Sustitia’s execution warrants further attention for two reasons. Firstly, mediaeval executions were intended to be impressive public spectacles that visually and dramatically enunciated extra-legal norms and beliefs to establish a ‘framework for the articulation of any micro-society’s self-perception, regarding its own structure and place within the larger configurations of humanity and the world’ (Cohen, 1993, 75; also see Friedland, 2012; MacGregor, 2019). Secondly, the records emphatically affirmed in an addendum that the sentence had been carried out exactly as the court prescribed by an executioner they had summoned from a village some 60 kms from Savigny-sur-Étang to take Sustitia on a cart to a gallows-tree:

Item,... let it be known to all... [that] we have made deliver verily and de facto the said sow by master Etienne Poinceau, master of high justice, residing at Châlons-sur-Saône, to put this one to execution according to the form and tenor of our said sentence, which deliverance of this one sow made by us, as is said, forthwith the said master Estienne has taken the said sow on a cart to a bent tree, being within the justice of the said lady of Savigny, and at this one bent tree, this one master Estienne has hanged the said sow by the hind feet.⁷⁷

Involving a professional in a nonhuman’s execution underlined the criminality of their offence. It legitimised the procedure by assimilating the nonhuman into existing legal frameworks, emphasising the punishment’s lawfulness (MacGregor, 2019, 11; 13). Étienne Poinceau, as maistre de la haute justice, handled spectacular sentences like execution, flagellation, and the pillory. Poinceau’s involvement validated the court’s justitial theatrics. As hands of justice, executioners handled unclean bodies: criminals, nonhumans, and corpses.⁷⁸ In policing the margins of society, executioners occupied an ambiguous position between revulsion and fearful respect. By touching unclean matter, their hands became carriers of corruption.⁷⁹ They were forbidden from touching law-abiding citizens because of the popular notion that the executioner was an ‘extraordinary being, someone whose touch was so profane that he could not come into contact with other people or objects without profoundly altering them’ (Friedland, 2012, 71–9; 93–4). Poinceau’s touch irrevocably separated Sustitia from ordinary human society, showcased her impurity to human spectators, and publicly (re)affirmed her culpability. To transport Sustitia to the gallows-tree, Poinceau used an open cart (charette). Such ignominious carts promulgated the criminal’s disgrace (Friedland, 2012, 94).⁸⁰ After arriving at a chaigne esproné within Savigny-sur-Étang, Sustitia was executed selon la forme et teneur of the sentence. Her hind feet were bound and affixed to this bent tree, where she was hanged.⁸¹ Using the lordship’s gallows-tree imbued executions with additional legal legitimacy (MacGregor, 2019, 15). The combination of all these procedural elements indisputably asserted Sustitia’s criminal status. Her arrest and incarceration removed her from her position as a living cohabitant of human society. The trial determined that her behaviour had no place in a human world. The hangman’s touch, cart, and the gallows-tree execution completed the spectacle of disgrace by stripping Sustitia of all purity and, finally, life itself.⁸²

Significantly, the form of Sustitia’s execution aligned with Burgundy’s customs pertaining to homicidal nonhumans.⁸³ The Costumes et stilles de Bourgoigne (c. 1270–1360) prescribe that homicidal oxen or horses should be impounded by the lord of the jurisdiction where they had committed the crime so they could be sold for the lord’s profit. However, ‘if other beasts or Jews do it, they ought to be hanged by their hind feet’.⁸⁴ While this law differentiates oxen and horses from the entire remaining nonhuman world and Jews, there is no proof that the distinction was honoured in practice.⁸⁵ Significantly, however, the court of Savigny-sur-Étang did endorse hanging homicidal nonhumans upside down. While hanging in itself was no unusual punishment for mediaeval nonhumans (e.g. Ménabréa, 1846, 123–4), Burgundy appears to have been the only region where inverted hangings of nonhumans were common (Cohen, 1993, 116).⁸⁶ The authorities of Savigny-sur-Étang evidently saw justice in upholding this custom with Sustitia. Her inverted hanging must have appealed to a regional repertoire of penal iconography, allowing spectators to see and understand the lawfulness of her execution. After all, a felicitous ‘public execution justified justice, in that it published the truth of the crime in the very body of the man to be executed’ (Foucault, 1995, 44).⁸⁷

Hanging, which initially only sanctioned theft, ‘became “the punishment of the Jews” in the early fourteenth century’ (Fabre-Vassas, 1997, 125) and inverted hanging was an especially infamous form of execution (Cohen, 1993, 174). Based on the story that in Falaise, 1386, a sow was dressed up like a human, drawn, and hanged for maiming and killing a child, some scholars argue that inverted hangings humanised pigs whilst animalising Jews (Fabre-Vassas, 1997, 126; Enders, 2002, 230). Though the aforesaid sow was hanged, the original source material contains no indication that she was dressed up, nor that was she hanged upside down.⁸⁸ I cannot agree that inverted hangings humanised pigs or that ‘to kill a pig is to kill a Jew’ (Enders, 2002, 229). I propose that inverted hangings served to utterly degrade and animalise Christian society’s ‘others’. Hanging Jews like pigs (and a wide variety of other species) framed both as criminal, irrational, and above all subhuman beasts, highlighting that ‘human’ (i.e. Christian) criminals merited special treatment.⁸⁹ This was not a Circean transformation of humans into pigs but a public revelation of the imagined porcine nature of ‘the Jew’ (cf. Gins, 2021)—and a horrific subversion of Jewish dietary restrictions. It suggested that Jewish abstinence of pig meat was because Jews were actually pigs in human skin, now hanging just like pigs for slaughter.⁹⁰ Significantly, the laws of Burgundy lumped Jews together with all nonhumans (except for oxen and horses) for inverted hangings. Even if one did not see Jews as pigs, one would certainly see that to kill a Jew was to kill a nonhuman, a creature inferior to Christian humans. This equation of Jews to nonhumans excluded them from the ‘exceptional’ category of the human, making Jews ‘bear the burden of the failure of the operations of the human’ (Steel, 2011, 188–9).

In Christian iconography, punishing a sinner with corporeal inversion symbolically represented their moral inversion, signifying that sinners prioritised the base urges of their lower body (the nexus of carnality and sin) over the virtues of their upper body (the nexus of reason and spirit). For instance, according to the twelfth-century monk Bernard of Cluny, sinners were punished in hell by hanging them backwards and upside down, the filth on their feet now above their heads.⁹¹ Likewise, in the fourteenth-century English poem The Siege of Jerusalem, Christians avenged Christ’s death by hanging Jews upside down (Bayless, 2012, 94–5). Corporeal inversion also speaks to the image of uprightness, an essential feature of humanness in mediaeval Christian literature (Steel, 2011, 44–58), where this homo erectus topos ‘signified or enabled reason’, occasionally even ‘worldly dominance’ (51). Inverted hangings in Burgundy grouped Jews (who—in the mediaeval imaginary—failed to use human reason) together with nonhumans, animals devoid of reason because of their physical lack of uprightness. This calls to mind Basil of Caesarea’s influential assertion that any animal which has its head inclined downwards, to the ground—the base material from which all creatures were made—is a reasonless beast lacking spiritual purity, too subservient to its own carnal whims to lift its gaze towards God (Gins, 2021, 10–1). Sustitia, a pig with a downwards-oriented snout, was an easy victim to exemplify this lesson explicitly. I therefore do not subscribe to the theory that inverted hangings of nonhumans and Jews signified counter-reversals to restore the natural order after it was upended by the murder of a Christian human (Wise, 1996, 511; also see Finkelstein, 1981, 47; Cohen, 1993, 175).⁹² Rather, upside-down hangings plainly reaffirmed the notion that nonhumans and Jews remained irrational, subhuman animals in the order of nature, unworthy of a Christian’s death.⁹³

Christian murderers, by contrast, were usually hanged with their face up. Their suffering spoke to a complex constellation of religious doctrines, beliefs and devotional practices. Convicts’ public agony was a humiliating deterrent that could lead to communal catharsis (Komornicka, 2012, 209; 217–20). The recalcitrant, remorseless convict’s suffering embodied a ‘living exemplum of despair’, their final moments on earth ‘a foretaste of hell’s endless torments’ (Merback, 1999, 19). Meanwhile, the spectacle of a compliant, repentant convict’s agony resembled the penitent suffering of a pseudo-martyr, revealed ‘purgation and expiation’, and elicited strong sentiments of sympathy, identification, perhaps even compassion, among onlookers (20). While regular hanging often broke the neck quickly, death by inverted hanging was an excruciatingly long process. For days, blood pooled to the convict’s head, their organs weighing on their lungs, until finally they died of asphyxiation, haemorrhages, or heart failure (Byard, 2016, 208; Sauvageau et al., 2008, 51–4). Any creature in this position would be hard-put to appeal to an audience for sympathy. Sustitia, too, would unequivocally have resembled an exemplum of infernal despair. Still, domestic pigs are known to be sensitive animals, capable of emotional contagion, experiencing an arousal of emotion when witnessing emotion in another—which is suspected to be the basis for empathy (Marino & Colvin, 2016, 16–8). Before and during her execution, Sustitia was undoubtedly deeply distressed by the intensely emotional animals that surrounded her, yet her own suine capabilities did not enable her to intuit and partake in this Homo Legifer game of penitent shame. It is safe to say—without demeaning her suine intelligence—that to Sustitia, none of these penitentiary rituals signified anything of the above. All of the violence she endured likely elicited nothing other from her than squeals of terror, agony, and finally death.

Sustitia’s inverted hanging suggests a degree of liminality between jurisdiction and the slaughterhouse.⁹⁴ However, the records carefully avoid any suggestion that Sustitia was eaten afterwards. I do not think this is because an ‘execution humanizes the pig to a sufficient extent that consumption of that pig would be tantamount to cannibalism’, but I do agree that nonhumans ‘subjected to such ordeals were unclean and could not be eaten’—indeed a ‘terrifying appropriation of Jewish tradition’ (Enders, 2002, 232). None of the procedures Sustitia was subjected to evince genuine interest in anthropomorphising or humanising her nonhumanity. As I have argued, Sustitia’s porcinity and nonhumanity was very clear to contemporary observers. One reason why she was not eaten is because prolonged upside down hanging (whilst alive and uncut) rendered much of her meat and blood unfit for human consumption.⁹⁵ Another reason, one that held more weight, was that it was impossible to disconnect the manner of her death from the moral considerations and legal rituals that led up to it. While Sustitia’s inverted hanging restored her to the familiar sight of a slaughtered pig, this had been accomplished by an executioner, not by a butcher. She had been hanged, not because of her suitability as human meal, but because legal procedures had determined her to be polluted (viz. unclean) by gorging on human flesh and blood. In its deliberate ambiguity, the image of Sustitia’s execution-slaughter asserted that this was a nonhuman murderer while reassuring human viewers that she nonetheless remained inferior chattel in the creaturely hierarchy.

The authorities were particularly interested in ascertaining whether the pigs had eaten human flesh. Anthropophagy violated human exceptionalism; consuming human flesh impossibly confounded the sacrosanct boundary between humans (who can only be murdered) and nonhumans (who can only be slaughtered). A human who was slaughtered and eaten lost the exemption from being eaten that defined its very humanity (i.e. non-animality), perhaps ceasing to be recognisable as an anthropos altogether (Steel, 2011, 124). Sustitia thus claimed human privilege by killing and eating from Jehan Martin as if he were a pig. Such an offence was intolerably transgressive, which is why nonhuman trials returned ‘humans, humiliated by having been killed by domestic animals, to the status of having been murdered’ (184). The six piglets received a very different verdict, however. Initially, a decision was postponed because ‘it appears in no way that these piglets have eaten from aforementioned Jehan Martin, however much they may have been found bloodied,’ so Jehan Bailly could bail them out, provided he return them ‘if it is found that they have eaten from the said Jehan Martin’.⁹⁶ At the time, the amount of blood shed in the enactment of a crime ‘could serve as evidence that a serious capital crime had been committed’ (Hutchison, 2018, 266). To save his own hide, Bailly utterly refused to publicly vouch for the piglets, stating that ‘he did not acknowledge them at all, and that he demanded nothing of the said pigs’, hence the court ruled that they should remain incarcerated.⁹⁷ The court’s initial clemency and their willingness to postpone a definitive sentence (until they ascertained whether the piglets committed anthropophagy) indicate that the piglets’ complicity in murder was pardonable. Any proof that they too had eaten the boy’s flesh would have necessitated high justice, however. That is why Sustitia had to die and could not be eaten by humans, and why her non-anthropophagous piglets were spared capital punishment. Indeed, after careful ‘deliberation with sages’, the court ruled ‘these pigs to be competent and to belong as vacant goods’ to the Lady of Savigny.⁹⁸ Though acquitted and confiscated by the Lady of Savigny, it is unlikely that Sustitia’s children lived happily ever after. With their mother out of the picture, the suckling piglets could yet again resume their primary role within the Christian hierarchy. They now safely qualified as ingredients for a luxurious dish such as roast suckling pig, which required piglets that had only been fed on mother’s milk (Rogers, 2012, 43).⁹⁹ Justice was served.

Conclusion

The prosecution of Sustitia and her infants was informed by a complex multiplicity of human motivations, pragmatic as well as conceptual:

• 1. To restore peace and order in the human community through a public ritual

• 2. Setting an unforgettable example to deter the inhabitants of Savigny-sur-Étang from leaving their children and/or pigs unattended

• 3. The desire of Savigny-sur-Étang’s local authorities—in response to the increasing centralisation of legal authority—to display their active pursuit of justice and order by their willingness to engage with so-called enormous cases, in strict adherence to the existing legal protocols of Burgundy

• 4. The deep-seated horror of Christians to the taboo of infanticidal anthropophagy, which violated the sacred integrity of human children, and the risk of eating from an animal that had consumed human flesh

• 5. A profound conviction that all creatures had their proper place in the world and that behaving otherwise than the norms one’s station prescribed violated the moral membrane of the whole community

• 6. A sense that the killing of a human upends a kind of balance

These motivations coincided within the ritualised space of the trial itself, fostering the human exceptionalist narrative that I call Homo Legifer, the notion that, by divine imperative, humankind conceives, encodes, and reinforces laws to protect anthropocentrically defined and measured universal notions of Justice. This anthropopoietic fiction translates to a Protagorean perspective that humans use to construct themselves as ‘rational’ human beings and to mould their environment—violently if need be. This way, the rituals of law and the cultural value of Justice function as a sort of ‘original myth’ that imbues humankind with an existential purpose (to impose order onto the world), expressed through a contextually dependent game of linguistic utterances and gestures that assume humanity’s superiority. Law—and its application in (nonhuman) trials—is thus ‘not a bounded set of norms, rules, principles, values, or whatever from which jural responses to distilled events can be drawn’, to borrow Clifford Geertz’s (1983) phrasing, ‘but part of a distinctive manner of imagining the real’ (173). Consequently, trials constitute liminal spaces where the model of the Homo Legifer is put to the test, performed, and—if felicitous—justified.¹⁰⁰

Premodern legal actions against swine were organised by humans solely for human concerns. They merely involved pigs and—rarely—at best acquitted them. That is why I cannot agree with the proposition that these procedures were anthropomorphic ‘rituals of inclusion’ (Cohen, 1993, 100) that reintegrated and incorporated nonhuman offenders ‘within one community of justice’ with humans (Berman, 1996, 321) by genuinely reducing the ontological distance between humans and other animals through anthropomorphism (Dinzelbacher, 2002, 420). I maintain that late mediaeval notions of criminality transcended the human-nonhuman binary whilst reifying the so-called human/nonhuman divide. The court of Savigny was well aware that Sustitia and her infants were pigs, lower beasts in God’s creaturely hierarchy, and legal property of the pigsty Jehan Bailly. The trial records do not evince any interest in anthropomorphising the suids, treating them as conspecifics, nor in bridging the human-nonhuman divide by considering the meaninglessness of this legal ritual to Sustitia.¹⁰¹ Pigs were involved in premodern trials because human contemporaries were aware that humans were beasts too—albeit reasonable, superior creatures—which is why they presided the trials, determined the narrative and the outcome, not pigs. The court’s diligence to procedure and their willingness to treat the killing of Jehan Martin as an enormous case underlined the court’s legal proficiency and capabilities and the fact that they favoured reason over petty retaliation, emphasising the exceptional rationality of human animals. Due to the decidedly anthropocentric terms of their prosecution, the pigs were essentially unwillingly co-opted into a (for Sustitia) deadly performance of the Homo Legifer—a model that legitimises the objectification and torture of animals under the pretext of ‘Justice’ and an anthropopoietic game that, without a persuasive human advocate, they could only lose.