Barnes. Pdf

3. THE WARS OF RELIGION 
[p. 61] 

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J
ULIAN 
B
ARNES
: A History of the World in 10 ½
 
Chapters 
20
Source; the Archives Municipales de Besançêon (section CG, boîte 377a). The following case, hitherto unpublished, is of 
particular interest to legal historians in that the procureur pour les insectes was the distinguished jurist Bartholomé Chassenée 
(also Chassanée and Chasseneux), later first president of the Parlement de Provence. Born in 1480, Chassenée made his name 
before the ecclesiastical court of Autun defending rats which had been charged with feloniously destroying a crop of barley. 
The following documents, from the opening ptition des habitans to the final judgment of the court, do not represent the entire 
proceedings - for instance, the testimony of witnesses, who might be anything from local peasants to distinguished experts on 
the behavioural patterns of the defendants, has not been recorded - but the legal submissions embody and often specifically 
refer to the evidence, and thus there is nothing absent from the essential structure and argument of the case. As was normal at 
the time, the pleas and the conclusions du procureur épiscopal were made in French, while the sentence of the court was 
solemnly delivered in Latin. 
(Translator's note: The manuscript is continuous and all in the same hand. Thus we are not dealing with the original 
submissions as penned by each lawyer's clerk, but with the work of a third party, perhaps an official of the court, who may 
have omitted sections of the pleas. Comparison with the contents of boîtes 371-379 suggests that the case as it exists in this 
form was perhaps part of a set of exemplary or typical proceedings used in the training of jurists. This conjecture is supported 
by the fact that only Chassenée among the participants is identified by name, as if students were being directed to examine the 
instructive dexterity of a distinguished defence counsel, regardless of the result of the case. The handwriting belongs to the 
first half of the sixteenth century, so that if, as may be, the document is a copy of someone
[p. 62]
else's version of the trial, it is still contemporary. I have done my best to render the sometimes extravagant style of pleading - 
especially of the unnamed procureur des habitans - into a comparable English.) 
Pétition det habitant 
We, the inhabitants of Mamirolle in the diocese of Besançon, being fearful of Almighty God and humbly dutiful to his spouse 
the Church, and being furthermore most regular and obedient in the payment of our tithes, do hereby on this the 12th day of 
August 1520 most pressingly and urgently petition the court to relieve and disburden us of the felonious intervention of those 
malefactors which have infested us already for many seasons, which have brought upon us God's wrath and a shameful libel 
upon our habitation, and which threaten all of us, God-fearing and obedient in our duties to the Church as we are, with 
immediate and catastrophic death being flung down at us from above like clamorous thunder, which will surely come to pass 
unless the court in its solemn wisdom do not speedily and justly expel these malefactors from our village, conjuring them to 
depart, hateful and intolerable as they are, under pain of condemnation, anathema, and excommunication from the Holy 
Church and the Dominion of God. 
Plaidoyer des habitans 
Gentlemen, these poor and humble petitioners, wretched and distressed, come before you as once did the inhabitants of the 
isles of Minorca and Majorca before the mighty Augustus Caesar, begging him in his justice and power to rid their islands of 
those rabbits which were destroying their crops and ruining their livelihood. If Augustus Caesar was able to help those dutiful 
subjects, how much more easily may this court lift the oppressive burden which lies upon the shoulders of your petitioners as 
heavily as when the great Aeneas did carry his father Anchises from the burning city of Troy. The old Anchises was blinded by 
a bolt of lightning, and these your petitioners are
[p. 63]
even now as if blinded, cast into darkness out of the light of the Lord's blessing, by the felonious behaviour of those who stand 
accused in this case, and yet who have not even appeared before the court to answer the charges, being contemptuous of this 
tribunal and blaspheming toward God, preferring instead to bury themselves in sinful darkness rather than face the truth of 
light. 
Know, gentlemen, what has already been put before you by witnesses of humble faith and unimpeachable honesty, simple 
petitioners too trepid of this court to let anything but the clear fountain of truth flow from their mouths. They have testified to 
the events of the twenty-second day of the month of April in this year of Our Lord, which being the day of the annual 
pilgrimage of Hugo, Bishop of Besançon, to the humble church of Saint-Michel in their village. They have described to you, in 
detail which burns in your memory like the fiery furnace from which Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego came unscathed, how 
as in every year they had adorned and beautified their church to make it worthy for the eye of the Bishop to behold, how they 
had caused flowers to be placed upon the altar and the door to be made freshly safe against the irruption of animals, but how, 
though they might bar the door to the pig and the cow, they were unable to bar the door to those diabolic bestioles which crawl 
through the smallest hole even as David found the chink in Goliath's armour. They have told you how they lowered by rope 
from the rafters the Bishop's throne, which is tethered there from one year's end to the next and is descended only for the day 
of the Bishop's pilgrimage, lest any child or stranger might by chance sit on it and thereby profane it, this being a humble and 
devout tradition, fully worthy of the praise of God and of this court. How the throne, being lowered, was placed before the altar 
as it has been every year since the oldest Methuselah in the habitation can remember, and how the prudent villagers set a guard 
upon it through the night before the arrival of the Bishop, so heedful were they that the throne be not defiled. And how the next 
day Hugo, Bishop of Besançon, did come in his annual pilgrimage, like Gracchus coming among his beloved people, 
[p. 64]

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J
ULIAN 
B
ARNES
: A History of the World in 10 ½