The orphaned children were sent into custodial care at the expense of the state. The court accepted the defense lawyer’s argument that the youngsters lacked the mental competence to have committed a crime in the eyes of the law. Her six children, however, received a judicial pardon. The mother was pronounced guilty and ordered to be hanged to death by her legs from the limb of the gallows tree. The justices considered the facts and the law and rendered a verdict and a sentence. Evidence was presented and legal arguments hotly debated.
Before a crowded room, witnesses were called.
Tyke the elephant buried trial#
A few weeks later a trial was convened in Savigny’s seigneurial court. The defendants were indigent and the court appointed a lawyer to represent them.
They were arrested, indicted on charges of infanticide and held in the local jail for trial. The seven suspects, a mother and her six children, were soon tracked down by local authorities, who discovered them still stained by the boy’s blood. A local family was accused of this frightful crime by local residents who claimed to have witnessed the murder. A five-year-old boy had been killed and his body partially consumed. In the spring of 1457, a gruesome murder took place in the French village of Savigny-sur-Etang.
Note: I’m hiking in Wales for the next week and offer this essay on animal resistance to human domination as an uplifting substitute for the usual depressing chronicle of our weekly descent toward oblivion in Roaming Charges. Angry elephant, medieval bestiary, Koninklijke Bibliotheek, KB, KA 16, f.
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