The Weevil's Advocate

I've been reading John Aberth's An Environmental History of the Middle Ages lately, and one of the sections in it concerns animal trials. In the late Middle Ages, the Church began conducting legitimate legal hearings and executions against animal defendants accused of crimes. Pigs were the main defendant among domestic livestock, since they were abundant in city streets and apparently had a predilection to eat human young. One such pig was dressed in human clothes before being hung in a proper gallows. It's absurd, but in one read, it prefigures modern attempts to grant legal rights to animals - citizenship is a two-way street, after all.

But what's fascinating, and revealing, about these trials is that they were extended to "vermin" as well. "rats, mice, moles, eels, serpents, locusts, worms, flies, caterpillars, beetles, leeches, snails, and weevils" were brought to trial, where lawyers were appointed as prosecution and defense.

Aberth outlines one such trial in detail, and it is a royal hoot. It all started when some pest - the court record describes them as "green flies;" Aberth suggests they were cherry weevils, but this doesn't seem like a great guess to me, though he's probably right that they weren't actually flies - destroyed the vineyards in St. Julien, France. The viticulturists, depending on the grapes for their livelihood, naturally took the case to the bishop's court and sued the flies. Two lawyers, Anthony Filliol and Peter Rembaud, were appointed as their public defenders.

The prosecution wanted the flies excommunicated. Excommunication is "an institutional act of religious censure used to deprive, suspend, or limit membership in a religious community or to restrict certain rights within it." It's not entirely clear what that might have meant for the flies, but fortunately, they never had to find out. The defense argued that since the flies were acting "by their natural instinct alone," excommunication "would be an unaccustomed and unusual mode and form of proceeding" since that punishment is only earned by behavior in active contempt of the Church.

The prosecution argued that men were " created and established that he might rule other creatures and dispose of the terrestrial orb [as he see fit]" - the flies had violated the natural order! But the defense were savvy evolutionary ecologists. Recognizing coevolution when they saw it, they pointed out that natural law "demanded that the said animals live as well as they can off of these plants, which seem to have been created for the use of the said animals."

This was a persuasive case. The prosecution was sweating in their wigs. Rather than chancing a judge's decision, they decided to settle with the flies out of court! The townspeople agreed to set aside a preserve at the outer edge of the village for the flies to live in. The settlement agreement specified the exact boundaries and plant species to be established within. Folliol and Rembaud were not satisfied, however. They contested the settlement, claiming that the land designated "is not sufficient nor suitable for the nourishment of the said animals since it is an infertile place and renders nothing,"

The story ends there, unfortunately, because the rest of the record was eaten by insects. :/

This trial is remarkable for a number of reasons. It resulted in what is probably the first insect sanctuary on record. It shows that "vermin" were granted effective defense attorneys, while in the same time period people tried for heresy, like witches and Jews, had no legal protection at all.

Aberth puts forward the argument that these trials were largely symbolic, acknowledging a transgression of the proper hierarchy of man over beast, and formally reinforcing the natural order. But no one really knows, so we can infer a much more interesting story if we want to. Maybe one of the weevils was an amateur law scholar and sat on Folliol's shoulder during the trial like the rat in Ratatouille.

Here's Aberth's telling of the story:

“To modern minds, one of the more bizarre and incomprehensible aspects of the Middle Ages are the animal trials that reached their apogee towards the end of the medieval period during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. One cannot help but be bemused by the spectacle of domestic animals such as pigs (by far the most frequent defendants in such trials), cows, oxen, goats, horses, donkeys, dogs, and roosters being put in the dock and solemnly sentenced to death; how much more risible to us is the entirely separate category of Church proceedings that targeted a host of lowly “pests” and “vermin” such as rats, mice, moles, eels, serpents, locusts, worms, flies, caterpillars, beetles, leeches, snails, and weevils, in which it was hardly likely that the animals could be brought to the bar of judgment but where the legal argumentation back and forth between prosecution and defense was even more elaborate, and which often ended in excommunication and exorcism of the accused.”

“In this view, the trials were intended, not as a punishment of animals per se, but rather as public spectacles with a message directed exclusively at their human spectators, namely, that human justice was reasserting its primacy over the animal world and the divinely ordained hierarchy was being re-established, which had temporarily been overturned or challenged by the animal crime.”

“. . . in 1587, the community and parish of St. Julien in the Savoy region of France sued the "green flies" (perhaps cherry weevils) that destroyed their vineyards before the bishop's court at Maurienne. Central to the argument for the defence of the weevils by their advocates, Anthony Filliol and Peter Rembaud, was a principle already enunciated throughout the Middle Ages from St. Augustine to St. Thomas Aquinas and going even further back to Aristotle: that brute beasts are judged to live and act "by their natural instinct alone," since they "are lacking in the sense and use of reason." Therefore, to excommunicate the flies for their supposed crime of devouring the vineyards, as the syndics of St. Julien wished, would be an unaccustomed and unusual mode and form of proceeding," since according to canon law as enunciated by Gratian's Decretum, such a sentence can only be promulgated "by reason of the contumacy" of the accused, but "it is certain that the said animals cannot be established to be in contempt [of the Church], since reason and justice do not rule the said animals." 

Filliol and Rembaud were, in fact, making a very modern-sounding argument that animals should not be tried before the bar of human justice at all, since they could not be expected to follow its rational procedures and obey our laws. To the prosecution's argument that "man was created and established that he might rule other creatures and dispose of the terrestrial orb [as he see fit] in equity and justice the defence responded that both and natural law, which were eternal and could not be changed, as well as dictates of reason "demand that the said animals live as well as they can off of these plants, which seem to have been created for the use of the said animals." Apparently, the syndics and community of St. Julien were wary enough of their chances of a favorable judgment to attempt an out-of-court settlement with the flies. On the 29th of June, at an assembly in the town square where a settlement was recorded and read out in French (as opposed to the formal Latin of the rest of the trial record), the townspeople agreed to set aside a piece of land, called Le Grand Feisse, especially for the tenance and for them to live in which lay on the outer edge of the village and whose exact boundaries and species of plants were specified. 

Nevertheless, the counsel for the defense of the weevils still contested the settlement on the grounds that the assigned land "is not sufficient nor suitable for the nourishment of the said animals since it is an infertile place and renders nothing," What the end result was we will never know, for this is the last record that we have on a case that had dragged on for nearly six months: In a sublime piece of irony, or perhaps justice, insects or vermin had the last word on the whole affair by eating and gnawing through the last page of the document recording the trial!

What is remarkable about all this legal back and forth just for the sake of some weevils is how it contrasts with a series of witch trials in nearly the same region and on almost the same charge, destroying vineyards by an act of nature, from a century before. In that case, the accused witches were burned at the stake for destroying the wine harvest through a killing frost, heavy rains, and storms, whereas the flies who were actually caught in the act of eating the crop were treated almost with kid gloves, being provided with a nature sanctuary all their very own (perhaps the first one of its kind for insects, which is now quite common in the modern world). One could say that the witches were associated with the devil in their trials, while the weevils were portrayed by the defense as God’s agents, acting out his natural laws, although witches were not even allowed defense representation, on the basis of a precedent established in heresy cases.”