I listen to a lot of podcasts and thought you might like to know when I've heard a particularly interesting bit of history so that you can listen to it as well. This is TILFOP 1.
The second part of the first ever episode of Criminal mentions a 1490s case of a pig tried, found guilty, and executed for the murder of a child, and goes into a wider description of animals tried as if they were human actors and what the meaning of that might be. The cases mentioned are from E.P. Evans' The Criminal Prosecution and Capital Punishment of Animals from 1906. Being out of copyright, this is freely available to read via Archive.org, so I planned to write a quick post pointing people to the episode (and the podcast as a whole, which is consistently excellent) and to the free book. If you want to give money to someone then there's also an abridged version on Amazon which has the most delightful cover although I can't personally attest to the quality of the content.
I planned to write a quick post. Then I thought I'd see if there's a more recent source on the history of animal trials that I could point people to as well. Consequently, I have written something else entirely.
Why I'm frightened of The Sow of Falaise
In his introduction to Seeing Justice Done, Paul Friedland details the historiography of the most widely-discussed case of an animal on trial, the case of "the sow of Falaise" from 1386. There's a preview available via Google Books and I recommend reading the full introduction if you can because it's a brilliant bit of clear, well-balanced history writing. He starts with the original evidence of the execution of a pig for murder - which is just one document related to the executioner's expenses - and explains how subsequent accounts have added details based on the writers' assumptions about what must have taken place and what significance the event probably held for medieval participants. These assumptions are of course coloured by what capital punishment meant to a particular storyteller, in their time, as well as their understanding of medieval attitudes. Rather than simply criticising past historians for their mistakes, Friedland rather sportingly brings up his own less-than-rigorous use of the same story in one of his published articles.
According to Friedland, a significant amount of embellishment was added to this story by P.G. Langevin in 1814. Among other additions, Langevin writes that the pig went to the gallows dressed as its child victim and that the victim's father, the pig's owner and other local pigs were made to attend the execution so that they could all learn important lessons about responsibility. He claims that the entire incident, including the pig's costume, is depicted on a frieze on the wall of a church in Falaise, but that this has since been painted over and is no longer visible.
This is the best approach to referencing sources that I have ever heard and I will be adopting it forthwith. "Oh you want evidence? It's painted on a wall a few towns over. No, you can't see it now but you could twenty years ago and I'll be proved right once that paint peels off again, you'll see."
As Friedland explains:
"Langevin's rewriting of the story of the Sow of Falaise allowed an incomprehensible anecdote from the past to fit neatly into the modern paradigm of penal deterrence. Yes, it was true; they had punished a pig. But the real purpose of the execution was teach a lesson to the pig's owner and to the boy's father - and presumably to other pig owners and fathers - about negligence and about what can happen when pigs and little boys are left without proper supervision." (p.5)
Friedland's own interpretation of historical capital punishment is significantly different and his book has been added to my reading list for future consumption. What I want to cover here is his point about how and why this embellished and highly dubious account took root and spread:
"Over the course of the twentieth century, the legend of the Sow of Falaise appeared in countless articles, magazines and books, most of which have cited the numerous works that had told the story before them as if they were separate, corroborative pieces of evidence, rather than a long and increasingly distorted retelling of the same story derived from the same source, which, we should remember, is merely the executioner's receipt that does not reveal much more than the simple fact that a sow was dragged and hanged for killing a small boy." (p.9)
And further on the role of historians (which I suspect may sadly describe an ideal rather than a uniform reality):
"Historians, particularly present-day historians, are always on their guard against anachronisms, always careful not to allow their own modern-day assumptions to colour their readings of the past. But there are clearly certain visceral assumptions that, despite our best efforts, we historians have great difficulty not bringing along with us on our journeys into the past. Langevin played upon these assumptions by supplying the details, which enabled us to rewrite the story in a way that made intuitive sense to us. Thanks to him, we could understand the execution of the Sow of Falaise to be the story of our own cultural ancestors, caught between a primitive, almost crude form of retaliation and an early, almost infantile and simplistic attempt at modern penal deterrence. The people of fourteenth-century Falaise were shown to be what we so often assume the inhabitants of the past to be; coarser, more simplistic versions of ourselves." (p.10 - emphasis mine)
That last sentence is where I feel Friedland really knocks it out of the park because I've seen this play out in my own research into early-modern witch trials and in countless articles written for academic and popular consumption about seemingly "incomprehensible" events from history. In every case there seem to be two things that we want to see in these stories: evidence of where we came from and evidence of how far we've come. There's something seductive about these nineteenth-century embellishments, distortions and outright inventions which still speak to modern audiences and that makes books such as Evans' The Criminal Prosecution and Capital Punishment of Animals excellent hunting ground for people who are looking to write engaging material which scratches that weird history itch.
My worry is that the important work of contextualising - and in some cases thoroughly debunking - these older histories, which are very much historical documents in their own right, is never going to keep pace with the digitisation and wider distribution of material which is now out of copyright. In terms of academic publication and career progression, there's not a lot of benefit to historians in focussing on this sort of work, except for an occasional noteworthy example which might illustrate a wider point. At the same time, economic constraints in the media and in academia mean that this sort of intense digging doesn't make sense from a content-production or outreach perspective either. Quite simply: few people have the time or inclination to do this stuff for free, and less accurate work may well bring in more money.
Does it matter? Well, I think that accuracy is always worth striving for where possible. Our present attitudes inform our reading of historical events, as we've seen here, but the reverse is also true. In the case of Friedland's work on capital punishment, it's clear that our understanding of public execution as a deterrent (whether to humans or potentially murderous pigs) comes in part from historical examples. This in turn affects debates around capital punishment today; a continuous line is drawn from executions of the past in order to demonstrate both why it existed (and still exists), and how it became "less brutal". Our twin desire for precedent and progress is a very powerful force in politics and unquestioningly feeding that desire could lead to some very negative outcomes.
So that's why I couldn't just write a brief post linking to an old book. And that's why I'm quite frightened of the Sow of Falaise.
