In the early fifteen hundreds, the rats of a French province were put on trial for destroying the barley crop. The court appointed them a defense lawyer. And here is the uncomfortable part: he was brilliant, and the rats never lost.

First, understand that this was not a joke. For about three hundred years, European courts really tried animals. Pigs were arraigned for their crimes, insects were prosecuted by whole dioceses, and the accused were entitled to counsel, because the law was the law, whoever you were. So when the rats of Autun, in Burgundy, ate the barley and were formally charged before the church court, somebody had to defend them. The brief went to a rising young advocate named Bartholomew Chassenee, and instead of blushing, he went to work.

His clients, naturally, failed to appear. Chassenee rose and attacked the summons: one citation, he argued, could not possibly bind rats dispersed across dozens of parishes. Every defendant must be summoned. The court agreed, and ordered the summons proclaimed from the pulpits and published at the rat holes themselves, which is how a court crier came to stand in a Burgundian field, reading a legal document aloud to the mouths of burrows. The rats still did not come. And now Chassenee produced his masterpiece. The law, he reminded the judges, excuses any defendant whose journey to court would place his life in evident danger. His clients would gladly attend. But every road to the courtroom was patrolled by the plaintiffs' cats. Let the plaintiffs first give bond for the good behaviour of their cats, and the defense would produce its rats. The court took the point under solemn consideration, the case drowned in adjournments, and the rats of Autun were never convicted of anything.

The defense made him. Chassenee rose to the parlement of Dijon, and by 1532 he was president of the parlement of Aix, one of the highest judges in France. And when the crown later moved against the Waldensian heretics of Provence, the old man who had once demanded due process for vermin used his power to shield actual people, holding the decree at bay while he lived. The animal trial archives, by the way, still exist. In one later case against insects, the final page of the judgment is missing. It appears to have been eaten.

Dead serious. I do one of these every day. Subscribe.