Let's talk about the Sow of Falaise! Wandering pigs were a presence in medieval cities of this period-- swine were kept within city walls and roamed freely eating street refuse and defecating where they might in other major cities of Europe. (Later in the 15th and 16th century there begins to be pushback on the free keeping of swine in conjunction with pestilences -- if you believe pestilence may be connected with foul odors, it makes sense to exile foul-smelling livestock outside the city walls.) Children being bitten by pigs seems to have been a very real hazard of this free range, especially under circumstances where a young child was left even briefly unattended inside their parent's house.
Month-old Joan de Ireaunde was allegedly bitten by a pig as she lay in her cradle in her father’s London shop. Two-year-old Henry Blysse [of Buckinghamshire], another pig victim, had likewise been left in bed with the door shut when his mother and her servants went to church on Sexagesima Sunday.
In the case of the sow referred to in this 1386 hanging, it comes up in the context of a receipt for the executioner of Falaise -- payment for services rendered.
Original receipt of January 9, 1386, passed before Guiot de Montfort, scrivener in Falaise, and given by the executioner of that town for the sum of ten sous and ten deniers minted at Tours for his effort and salary for having led and hanged at the tribunal of Falaise a sow aged three years or thereabouts that had eaten the face of the child of Jonnet le Maux, who was in a cradle and was about three months old, in such a way that the said child died of this, and ten sous minted at Tours for a new glove when the executioner had done the said execution.
The execution was apparently preceded by the animal's ceremonious maiming in the head and forelegs -- the areas of the body in which the animal had bitten the child. The age of the child -- an infant likely still immobile in its cradle -- suggests the death occurred under similar circumstances to the deaths of the Ireaunde and Blysse children. Later embroideries on the case, and indeed the way this case has been framed on Reddit, lean heavily on the "trial" aspect of this -- adding into the mix the idea of a jury of the sow's peers made up of other pigs, for instance, or the pig being dressed up in a suit of clothes for the special occasion -- but I think to understand the death of the sow, it might be more useful to understand the way instruments of accidental death and murder were both treated in the medieval court system. As part of the forfeit of property associated with the commission of a felony, the value of murder weapons is often noted alongside records of the crime itself as a deodand, an object forfeited to God (that is, to the church) because of its involvement in the taking of a life -- but the knife a man is stabbed with, or the barrel a woman is crushed by, doesn't receive legal representation. A pig, a donkey, a stork, or a colony of ants might receive representation, and it might not, depending on the nature of its offense. Under the deodand system, an animal such as a horse found culpable for trampling a human (even a child) would simply be forfeit, but under the animal trial system, the animal is treated as distinct.The animal is recognized as a different kind of actor, not necessarily the implement of a human actor but capable of doing destructive acts of its own volition. Is the sow a brute beast, acting in brute instinct, or is it a vessel of Satan being used by the Devil to enact violence? Is the sow acting in accordance to some kind of natural and permissible instinct, or not? Is the death of this three-month-old infant an accident or a crime, a mishap or a murder?
Animals or insects that were deemed to have caused a public nuisance would be tried in ecclesiastical court and would likely receive legal representation of their own; animals that caused injury or death to a human being were tried in secular courts, and likely would not. (Under these circumstances, I don't think we can surmise that the offending sow did receive legal representation in 1386 from the receipt alone; elaborations involving a jury of the sow's peers seem like later embroideries or surmises about how the case must have unfolded.) Both sets of circumstances were taken as serious enough for court because they were serious in medieval communities -- not only the obvious case of a stray animal causing the death of a young child, but more insidious cases like swarms of insects causing damage to crops that might provide a community's sustenance.
In addition to fulfilling the practical function of the destruction of an animal involved in a lethal attack on a human child (something that still happens today -- the case of the pig might be more comprehensible to modern viewers if we compare it to a lethal attack on a child by a stranger's dog) putting the pig on trial in the first place also served a more abstract symbolic purpose of satisfying public outrage regarding a mundane transgression that was also potentially-Satanic. A child had died by shocking misadventure, but the infant's passivity and the pig's apparent exercise of free will in entering the house and biting the child presented challenges to legal understanding of the crime that wouldn't have been present if the child had died in some other household accident. This isn't a case of the sow being viewed on the same level of culpability as a person, but animals are still attributed some kind of individual activity separate from the activity of their owners. (The idea of animals with their own will is also evidenced in bestiality trials, where the animal might be destroyed along with its human sexual partner as if it were freely complicit in the unnatural act, or the animal might be treated as a victim of rape, depending on character testimony and the quality of its legal representation.) It's more strange to modern eyes that the pig's owner is not cited in the receipt above, or even remarked on as culpable for their negligence in allowing the pig to wander loose.
Animal trials are not unique to the Middle Ages; they have an antecedent in Plato's Athens, and they occur later in the Early Modern period in France and beyond. Pigs were tried and executed for the death of children in the French community of Fontenay-aux-Roses in 1266, near Saint-Marchel-le-Jeussey in 1379, in 1408 in Pont de Larche, and in 1567 in Senlis; it seems to have been a particularly strong tradition within France, but was also found elsewhere in Europe -- England and Scotland, Spain and Portugal, Belgium, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, and Russia.
Some reading:
The Sow of Falaise, covered at ExecutedToday.com with an interview with Paul Friedland
"The excommunication of caterpillars: ethno-anthropological remarks on the trial and punishment of animals", Peter Mason
"The Historical and Contemporary Prosecution and Punishment of Animals", Jen Girgen
"Murderous Sows in Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale and Late Fourteenth-Century France", Edward Wheatley
We know of more than 200 accounts of the trial of individual animals, or groups of animals, dating to the medieval and early modern periods, of which the case that you cite, which took place in Falaise in Normandy, is certainly among the most spectacular. As an article on the subject of animal trials published at medievalists.net points out,
Before its execution, the beast was dressed in a waistcoat, gloves, pair of drawers and a human mask on her head, and was chained up before it was hanged. The local government paid ten sous and ten deniers to deliver this spectacle, including buying the hangman a new pair of gloves.
There were a number of different types of animal trial. E.P. Evans argues in his century-old classic The Criminal Prosecution and Capital Punishment of Animals, following a distinction originally made by the German legal scholar Karl von Amira in the 1890s, there seem to have been broadly two distinct varieties - secular trials of individual animals such as horses, pigs and cows for committing "crimes" that would have been punishable by law had the perpetrator been human (almost exclusively killing people), and ecclesiastical trials of swarms of "rats, mice, locusts, weevils, and other vermin, in order to prevent them from devouring the crops."
Neither type were show trials, with entirely pre-ordained outcomes. Great effort seems to have been put into ensuring fair play, and animals were defended by human lawyers. Indeed, secular trials, Evans contends, were based on the theory that
animals, which were in the service of man, could be arrested, tried, convicted and executed, like any other members of his household.
and were carried out at least in part because it was believed that any homicide, left unpunished, "was supposed to furnish occasion for the intervention of devils, who were thereby enabled to take possession of both persons and places." Evans cites contemporary Catholic doctrine on exorcism in support of this view, though later in his work he also suggests that
the ancient Greeks held that a murder, whether committed by a man, a beast, or an inanimate object, unless properly expiated, would arouse the furies and bring pestilence upon the land.
Ecclesiastical trials, on the other hand, had as an underpinning motive an attempt to tame uncontrollable nature and bring it within the purview of a religiously-mandated legal process and, ultimately, divine authority. It was believed that insects and rodents were either instruments of God's wrath, sent for punishment or the sinful, or were sent by Satan, and that, either way, they "were not subject to human control and could not be seized or imprisoned by the civil authorities" but were properly the business of the Church, "whose bishops and other clergy were empowered to... prescribe the penances and propitiations necessary to produce this result." This meant, in turn, that their depredations "demanded the intervention of the Church and the exercise of its supernatural functions," often the exorcism of an entire swarm. Only such "sacerdotal conjuring and cursing" could prevent the ravages of such animals. Evans cites a decree issued by the Council of Worms, in 864, ordering that bees
which had caused the death of a human being by stinging him, should be forthwith suffocated in the hive before they could make any more honey, otherwise the entire contents of the hive would become demoniacally tainted and thus rendered unfit for use of food.
Other writers on the same topic have advanced theories of their own to explain some of the more bizarre – to us – aspects of such cases, such as the insistence of the court at Falaise on dressing a pig in human clothes and a mask of a human face before executing it. Eduard Osenbrüggen, a Swiss lawyer, suggested this was the product of a belief that, as only humans were capable of committing crimes, animals had to be treated as humans if they were to be charged and subjected to human penalties. (He adds that under old Germanic law, animals could be brought into a court as witnesses to acts for which there was no human witness, such as burglary.) Nicholas Humphrey, the Cambridge psychologist who provided an introduction to the 1986 edition of Evans's book, was fascinated by the insistence on following due legal process – warning, for example, a swarm of insects that had been damaging crops in Switzerland in 1478 that they had six days to leave the area if they wished to avoid being exorcised. Berman sees such cases as psychologically necessary "rituals of justice", and W.W. Hyde, arguing that the Greeks allowed the trial of inanimate objects - such as a javelin which killed a boy - similarly sees in the practice of securing some sort of verdict, and hence closure, a way of providing satisfaction in cases where the human perpetrator could not be found. Evans himself addresses the argument that the trial of animals was an attempt to redress an affront to the natural, and mandated, "order of things".
More recently, other explanations have been advanced by legal scholars such as Jen Girgen. It's been suggested that the trial of individual domestic animals was a product of the belief that they, like humans, not only enjoyed free will, but could distinguish between right and wrong, presumably as a result of living among humans – and that, moreover, as Humphrey says, "wickedness had a place within the human scheme of things, inexplicable accidents did not". It's also been argued that bringing justice to animals was simply a relatively easy and relatively satisfying thing to do; that individual lawyers used such trials as an opportunity to make their names by coming up with clever legal arguments in defence of their animal clients; that the dressing of animals as humans may have been intended to mock them, or to impart moral lessons to those who attended the trial and execution of an animal; and that animals trials were, at least in part, a product of a lost connection between man and beast - that is, that medieval and early modern people spent much more time than we do observing individual animals, and seeing that they were capable of making choices and in relating to one another.
There is something to be said in favour of such arguments. You won't read far into the literature of animal trials, for instance, before coming across Bartholomew Chassenee, a French lawyer of the 16th century who successfully secured the dismissal of charges brought against a plague of rats charged with eating a field of barley on the grounds that his clients dared not attend court for fear of the local cats. (Chassenee was the inspiration for the lawyer played by Colin Firth in the 1993 film Hour of the Pig). And Humphrey points out that, in his case of Swiss infestation, the prosecution dealt smartly with the defence's claim that God must have intended the "inger" - the insects responsible – to survive and multiply:
The inger, it was claimed in the indictment, were a mistake: they had not been taken on board Noah's ark. Hence when God had sent the great flood he must have meant to wipe them out. To have survived at all, the inger must have been illegal stowaways -- and as such they clearly had no rights, indeed it was doubtful whether they were animals at all.
But that there are so many different ways of explaining animal trials and punishments suggests, at root, that there is still la great deal that we don't understand about these cases. Berman – citing Humphrey – summarises the position thus:
It would be impossible to discover with any certainty the reasons for this seemingly irrational custom. No doubt the motivations - psychological, economic, religious - varied from community to community, and from one social class to another. Nevertheless... as one commentator has noted, the trial of an animal "was not a game" It was undertaken for the good of society, and if properly conducted it was intended to bring social benefits to the community.