If an ox gore a man or a woman, that they die: then the ox
shall be surely stoned, and his flesh shall not be eaten; but
the owner of the ox shall be quit.
In the Code of the Spartan lawgiver, Lycurgus, and in that of the
Athenian legislator, Draco, provision was made for the formal trial of
animals for misdemeanors.[509] A vestige of the unreasonable belief that
brutes and even inanimate objects were accountable for their actions is
to be found in that now obsolete term of English law, _deodand_, meaning,
according to Blackstone, “a personal chattel which was the immediate
cause of the death of a rational creature, and for that reason given
to God; that is, forfeited to the Crown to be applied to pious uses.”
The _deodand_ was of Grecian ancestry, as appears from the ceremonies
connected with the offering of a sacrifice by the Athenians. When the
animal or victim had been dispatched by an axe in the hands of the
officiating priest, the latter immediately fled, and to evade arrest he
threw away the axe. This instrument was then seized by his pursuers, and
an action entered against it. The advocate for the axe pleaded that it
was less guilty than the grinder who sharpened it; the grinder laid the
blame on the grindstone which he had used; and thus the whole process
became a farce and a mockery of justice.[510]
We learn from the writings of the Benedictine monk, Leonard Vair, that
in certain districts of Spain, in the fifteenth century, when the
inhabitants wished to drive away grasshoppers or noxious vermin, they
chose a conjurer as judge and appointed counsel for the defendants, with
a prosecuting attorney, who demanded justice in behalf of the aggrieved
community. The mischief-makers were finally declared guilty, and either
duly anathematized or formally excommunicated,[511] the technical
distinction between the two sentences being doubtless to them a matter of
profound indifference. At this period, also, prosecutions of pigs or sows
guilty of devouring young infants were not uncommon.
Barthélémy Chassaneux, a famous French advocate of the sixteenth century,
first won distinction by the originality of his pleas in defense of some
rats in a notable trial at Autun. He represented to the judge that his
clients found it extremely difficult to obey the summons issued to them
by the court, owing to their being obliged to traverse a region abounding
in cats, who were, moreover, especially alert on account of the notoriety
of the legal proceedings.[512]
Chassaneux wrote that the people of Autun had long agitated the question
how best to rid the province of Burgundy of locusts, and he expressed
the belief that a sure method of accomplishing so desirable a result was
by the scrupulous payment of all tithes and ecclesiastical dues, and by
causing a woman to walk barefoot round the infested fields.[513]
After the seventeenth century, prosecutions of animals and the use of
incantations for their expulsion became less common. The Ritual of
Séez in 1743 forbade such practices without the special permission of
the church, but the same volume contains a formula for driving away
grasshoppers, maybugs, and other insects. Mr. C. G. Leland states, in
his “Gypsy Sorcery,” that exorcism has been vigorously applied in the
United States, not only against the Colorado beetle and army worm, but
also for the suppression of blizzards and the grape disease. It has not
had much success hitherto, probably owing, as he naïvely remarks, to the
uncongenial climate.