It was an otherwise ordinary day in 1386 when the citizens of Falaise, a town in Normandy, France, gathered to see justice visited upon a sow. The defendant was duly convicted of murder in a court of law for mauling a baby who died from the wounds. The pig was sentenced to be hanged in the town square. But before being strung up, in keeping with the Old Testament policy of “an eye for an eye,” the pig was made to suffer the same wounds it inflicted on the child: Its face was lacerated.
According to an account by Hampton L. Carson, published in 1917 in The Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, local farmers brought their own pigs along to watch the execution, presumably to deter them from committing similar crimes.
(Credit: Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons/Chambers Book of Days)
Trial of a sow and pigs at Lavegny
