Beirne states that
For a century or so there has been a lively debate on the meaning of animal trials in early modern and medieval Europe. One unresolved issue in this debate is the geographical and jurisdictional incidence of animal trials, including their facticity in Britain. This essay explores some neglected evidence in this regard, namely, three British animal trials identified in E.P. Evans’ (1906/1987) authoritative text The Criminal Prosecution and Capital Punishment of Animals.He goes on to comment that -
From the imposition of Norman law in the late eleventh century and onwards, the significance of nonhuman animals to human social relationships is routinely documented in Britain in official state papers, judicial records and law books. From these it is clear that nonhuman animals — henceforth, “animals” — were used and abused by humans in the course of numerous aspects of British state formation including, for example, military practices, transport and the introduction of horse-powered postal and espionage systems. Animals’ importance is confirmed, too — ironically woven together with their sinews and clad in their skins for the eyes of posterity — as state-sanctioned manuals and regulations associated with the cultivation of wished-for husbandry methods, the regulation of so-called game, vermin and animal waste products, and the development of commodity markets in cattle, fish and woollens. On the smaller stage of everyday life, if often with no less drama, animals’ ubiquitous presence in humans’ social life is reflected in official records of interpersonal disputes to do with fences, wills, contracts and an emergent law of private wrongs.
a strong caution must be issued, namely, that the question of whether or not animal trials existed in Britain cannot be resolved at a purely empirical level. This is so not least because any accounting requires proper conceptual identification of the basic characteristics of animal trials. Whether there were precisely 191 animals trials in medieval and early modern Europe — as portrayed in Evans’ list, with one of this number in Scotland and two in England — or 91 or 1001, depends to a crucial extent on how a trial is defined. Do the characteristics of these trials lie in some Weberian-like construct whose legal thought can be categorized as formal and rational and whose institutions are staffed and enforced by a professional cadre of judges, lawyers, bailiffs and gaolers?The monkey might, of course, have been an unfortunate cabin boy.
Instead, might trials also consist in institutions of conflict resolution that are less formal and more ad hoc and impromptu? In this respect, consider, for a moment, a legend in the old fishing town of Hartlepool, County Durham, about some local fishermen who had hanged a monkey. During the Napoleonic Wars (1799–1815), at a time when many coastal dwellers feared a naval-led invasion from across the ‘English’ Channel, a French ship was apparently wrecked off Hartlepool in a violent storm. The ship sank and, looking through the wreckage, Hartlepool fishermen came across the ship’s sole and very wet survivor — a pet monkey dressed in a military-style uniform At a special trial held on the beach the fishermen questioned and perhaps tortured the monkey, mindful that the animal might be a French spy. The monkey was duly found guilty of espionage, sentenced to death by hanging, and to that end a makeshift gallows was summarily erected from a ship’s mainmast. (The Hartlepool legend perhaps has some credibility because, according to the Act Concerning Wrecks of the Sea, 1275, all ships and goods forced on shore were not to be considered wreckage if “a Man a Dog or a Cat escape quick out of the Ship” — in such cases the contents of the ship were to pass into the possession of members of the town where the goods were found).
