The Eagle: Worst Prologue Text Ever

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Bad Prologue Texts, Hadrian's Wall, Movies I Love, Roman Britain, Roman Empire, Roman Scotland, Rosemary Sutcliff, The Eagle, The Eagle of the Ninth, The Ninth Legion

The Eagle (2011, dir. Kevin McDonald, based on Rosemary Sutcliffe’s The Eagle of the Ninth is at least the third movie set in Roman Scotland (along with King Arthur and Centurion), and it’s by far the best of the three. There’s a lot of things to like about this film, but the prologue text is not one of them. It might, in fact, be the worst prologue text to a historical film I’ve ever seen, because virtually every element of it is problematic.

Here it is:

“In 120 AD, the Ninth Legion of the Roman Army marched into the unconquered territory of Northern Britain. They were never seen again. All 5,000 men vanished, along with their treasured standard…The Eagle. Shamed by this great loss, the Emperor Hadrian ordered the construction of a giant wall that cut off the North of Britain forever. Hadrian’s Wall marked the end of the known world.”

Normally in historical films, a prologue text is used to provide important historical background for audiences unfamiliar with a particular historical setting. Some films also use them to set a mood or establish the film’s viewpoint on the setting, but they almost always provide a little basic fact to orient the viewer.

With that in mind, let’s take this prologue text an element at a time.

“In 120 AD, the Ninth Legion of the Roman Army marched into the unconquered territory of Northern Britain. They were never seen again. All 5,000 men vanished, along with their treasured standard…The Eagle.”

As I’ve discussed before when I looked at Centurion, this isn’t historical fact at all. It’s entirely the invention of British children’s author Rosemary Sutcliff. When she wrote The Eagle of the Ninth, she offered an interesting explanation for what happened to the 9^th Legion, which disappears from the historical record in the early 2^nd century AD after being stationed in Britain. Her theory that the Legion was sent into Scotland and subsequently destroyed is certainly a possibility, but there’s literally no evidence for it. It’s more likely that it was destroyed during a rebellion in Roman Britain. There’s a bit of weak evidence that it was redeployed to the Rhineland. Perhaps it was just disbanded for administrative reasons. But it’s important to realize that the film’s scenario is entirely made-up.

Rosemary Sutcliff

“Shamed by this great loss, the Emperor Hadrian ordered the construction of a giant wall”

If the Legion’s debacle in Scotland didn’t happen, it should be obvious that it wasn’t the reason Hadrian built his famous wall. We don’t actually know what Hadrian was thinking when he ordered the construction of the wall for the simple reason that we don’t have any documents about that decision. We can certainly make some reasonable inferences based on Roman policy toward its European frontier, but it’s not provable what the intention was.

Also, calling it a ‘giant wall’ is a bit misleading. It was a very long wall, but ‘giant’ suggests size more than length, and as far as we know, the wall probably wasn’t more than 10-12 feet tall. The surviving ruins don’t allow us to know much about its height or battlements, but what survives doesn’t really suggest that the wall was unusually tall, just very long.

One of the mile castles on Hadrian’s Wall

“that cut off the North of Britain forever. Hadrian’s Wall marked the end of the known world.”

This is just nonsense. Hadrian’s Wall did no such thing. The Wall is the best surviving example of what the Romans called a limes, which as essentially a wall marking a frontier. But it’s not unique. Similar structures (at least in function) existed in North Africa and in Eastern Europe. Although it was garrisoned at small posts called ‘mile castles’ along its length, it probably was not primarily intended to repulse an invasion, for the simple reason that the small garrisons were a mile apart, and the individual garrisons were probably not staffed by more than a half-dozen men at a time. It would have been very easy for an invading force to simply climb the wall in between mile castles, and it would not have been too challenging for a decent force to overwhelm the garrison at a particular post. Furthermore, sailing around it wouldn’t have been too difficult. As a military structure, the Wall would simply have slowed down an invasion a little, giving the Roman forces stationed further south advanced warning of an attack.

Instead, a limes was much more like a customs station than a truly defensible position. Each mile castle had a gateway running through it (although some of the gateways opened onto such steep slopes that they can’t have been seriously intended to handle much traffic). Those gates (one of which the film shows) allowed regular passage between Roman Britain and what we’ll anachronistically call Scotland. It served to allow the Romans to control (and perhaps tax) trade with the tribes to the north of the Wall.

The Romans had no intention of cutting off all contact with the tribes of Scotland. Their first line of defense against those tribes was to maintain regular contact with them. It was standard for the Romans to reward a few tribes beyond a limes with the Roman version of ‘most favored trading status’. By singling out a couple of neighboring tribes to receive trade and periodic diplomatic gifts; this gave the rulers of those tribes privileged access to exotic goods from within the Empire, like wine, silk, and silver tableware. In exchange those tribes provided the Romans with intelligence on the other tribes and might ally with the Romans against hostile tribes. If an allied tribe became a problem, the Romans would simply make one of their enemies the most favored trading partner. By playing the tribes off against each other this way, the Romans rarely had to actually defend their frontiers.

Far from marking the end of the world, Hadrian’s Wall regulated Roman interactions with southern Scotland.

Also, Hadrian’s Wall didn’t create a permanent boundary (except in the sense of a physical wall that still survives). His successor Antoninus Pius decided to push the Roman frontier northward. He built a second wall, the so-called Antonine Wall, that ran between the Firth of Forth and the Firth of Clyde. He ordered construction to start in 142 AD. For unknown reasons, the Antonine Wall was abandoned around 162 AD, when the Empire pulled back to Hadrian’s Wall. Then in 208, Septimius Severus decided to re-occupy southern Scotland and ordered the Antonine Wall repaired. This occupation was abandoned just a few years later, at which point Hadrian’s Wall became the permanent frontier for the rest of the Roman period.

Remains of the Antonine Wall

Whereas most films use prologue texts to establish the actual historical context, this movie uses its prologue text to assert a set of blatant, nonsensical falsehoods.

Let me summarize the problems with this by rephrasing the prologue text to demonstrate just how nonsensical it really is. “In 2017, the American army marched into the unconquered territory of Mexico. They were never seen again. All the men vanished, along with their traditional standard, the American flag. Shamed by this great loss, President Donald Trump ordered the construction of a giant wall that cut off Mexico forever. Trump’s Wall marked the end of the known world.”

Want to Know More?

The Eagle  is available on Amazon. Sutcliff’s original novel (and its two sequels) is too.

If you want to know more about Hadrian’s Wall, you might try Patricia Southern’s Hadrian’s Wall: Everyday Life on the Roman Frontier. Amazon also has a lot of guides for walking the Wall; it’s one of England’s top tourist destinations. Having visited the Wall myself years ago, it’s definitely worth the visit if you’re in Northern England.

King Arthur: The Sarmatian Theory

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Bad Prologue Texts, C Scott Littleton, Clive Owen, King Arthur, Linda Malcor, Lucius Artorius Castus, Roman Britain

King Arthur (2004, dir. Antoine Fuqua, screenplay by David Franzoni) opens with a prologue text, narrated, we eventually learn, by one of Arthur’s knights.

“By 300 AD, the Roman Empire extended from Arabia to Britain. But they wanted more. More land, more peoples loyal and subservient to Rome. But no people so important as the powerful Sarmatians to the east. Thousands died on that field and when the smoke cleared on the fourth day, the only Sarmatian soldiers left alive were members of the decimated but legendary cavalry. The Romans, impressed by their bravery and horsemanship spared their lives. In exchange, these warriors were incorporated into the Roman military. Better they had died that day. For the second part of the bargain they struck indebted not only themselves but also their sons and their sons and so on, to serve the empire as knights. I was such a son. Our post was Britain, or at least the southern half. For the land was divided by a 73-mile wall, built three centuries before us to protect the Empire from the native fighters of the North. So as our forefathers had done, we made our way in the cortege of the Roman commander in Britain, ancestrally named for the first Artorius, or Arthur.”

This opening signals that the film is drawing off the so-called Sarmatian Theory about King Arthur. This theory has two parts, one focused on Lucius Artorius Castus and the other involving an ancient people called the Sarmatians.

Lucius Artorius Castus

Artorius is primarily known from two large fragments of a late 2^nd or early 3^rd century sarcophagus that were used in building a wall of a church in Croatia at some point prior to the late 19^th century. (This is less strange than it sounds; pre-modern peoples frequently re-used stonework like this.) The two surviving fragments commemorate Lucius Artorius Castus by describing his military career. According to the inscription, Artorius served in Syria, Judea, the region around modern Budapest and Romania, Italy, either in Armorica (modern Brittany) or more probably Armenia, and most importantly (for this theory) in northern England, before eventually being named governor of modern Croatia. The inscription does not explicitly say he served in Britain; rather it says that he served as Prefect of the Sixth Legion Victrix, a legion that during the period in question was stationed at Eboracum (modern York). The exact dating of his career is unclear; dates range from the mid-2^nd century (with his governorship occurring sometime between 167 and 185) to the period between 215 to 232 AD.

One of the fragment’s of Artorius’ sarcophagus. The first line reads “L Artori…”

In 1924, a medieval scholar named Kemp Malone pointed out that a man with the name of Artorius serving in northern England could in theory have inspired the character of King Arthur. As we saw in my last post, if Arthur was a historical person at all, he probably acted as a general in at least one major battle in southwestern England around 495 AD. Artorius, however, is at least 250 years too early to be that man, and as Prefect of the Sixth Legion Victrix would not actually have participated in battles, since a Legion’s Prefect was an administrative officer and usually an older man rather than a leader of troops.

So What About the Sarmatians?

The Sarmatians were a confederation of Iranian peoples who initially occupied Sarmatia, the region north of the Black Sea, but who gradually migrated westward during the Roman period. They were primarily known as cavalry warriors. In 175 AD, the emperor Marcus Aurelius stationed 5,500 Sarmatians in Britain. This unit may have remained there for generations; a 5^th century Roman document mentions a ‘Sarmatian formation’ serving in northern Britain, although by that point it may well have been manned by men with no ethnic connection to the Sarmatians who founded the unit.

In 1975, Helmut Nickel floated a theory that perhaps Artorius led a unit of Sarmatians and somehow formed the basis for the stories of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. In 1994, two scholars of folklore, C. Scott Littleton and Linda Malcor, proposed an entirely hypothetical reconstruction of Artorius’ career, apparently independently of Nickel’s ideas. They proposed that Artorius had fought against the Sarmatians during his time in eastern Europe and that because he had experience with Sarmatians, the emperor assigned him to command a unit of Sarmatians that fought a campaign around Hadrian’s Wall against a group of invading Caledonians. His unit being destroyed, he then returned to Eboracum and was subsequently sent with a cavalry unit to Armorica.

Dr. Linda Malcor

The primary evidence Littleton and Malcor offer in support of this hypothesis is that certain elements of the late medieval Arthurian legend have parallels in legends that derive from the Caucasus region, not far to the east of Sarmatia. These ‘Nart Sagas’ are of uncertain dating, being only recorded in the 19th century AD, although elements of them seem to go a long way back into the Ancient period. The most interesting parallels include

• A Nart warrior’s sword must be thrown into the sea when he dies. One particular character asks a friend to undertake this task for him, but the friend twice lies about doing it before finally throwing it into the sea. This same scenario occurs in Thomas Malory’s 15^th century description of the death of Arthur at the battle of Camelot, in which Bedivere is ordered to throw Excalibur into a lake.
• Two Nart heroes collect the beards of their foes to make into cloaks. Different versions of the Arthurian legends describe him fighting an enemy who does the same thing.
• The Cup of the Narts appears at feasts and grants each person what they most like to eat. It can only be touched by a warrior without a flaw. The Holy Grail does this when it appears at Camelot. It is finally attained by the pure Sir Galahad.
• A magical woman dressed in white and associated with water appears both in the Nart Sagas and in Arthurian legend (where she is called the Lady of the Lake).
• The Sarmatians are closely related to the Alans. Various names containing ‘alan’ occur in various Arthurian stories, including Alain le Gros, Elaine, and most importantly Lancelot, which according to Littleton and Malcor could be a corruption of Alanas a Lot (“Alan of Lot River’).
• The Sarmatians were noted cavalry warriors, and so too were Arthur’s knights.

So here essentially is the Sarmatian Theory. Artorius led a group of Sarmatians in northern Britain briefly. At some point after his death, he was fused with various Sarmatian heroes and acquired a collection of stories and characters around him that ultimately evolved into the character of King Arthur. And that’s basically what King Arthur claims is the historical truth behind Arthur.

So Does the Sarmatian Theory Actually Work?

No. It’s riddled with problems. The biggest problem is that Littleton and Malcor offer literally no evidence connecting Artorius to the Sarmatians sent to Britain. It’s unlikely that Artorius commanded Sarmatian troops in battle, since by the time he was stationed with the Sixth Legion Victrix he was old enough to not be leading troops in battle, and they would have been with a different unit anyway.

Dr. C. Scott Littleton

In addition to not offering any actual evidence to connect Artorius and the Sarmatians, they also don’t explain why Artorius should have become the focus of an enduring legend. In their hypothetical reconstruction of Artorius’ career, the Sarmatians are eventually destroyed, so if he did lead them, he wasn’t a successful general. Nor did he die in Britain. He died years later in Croatia. Nor do they explain why his legend would have been passed down for centuries from Romanized Sarmatians to Romanized Celts to Anglo-Saxons and eventually to Norman English, other than a general tendency of people to repeat old stories.

Additionally, this theory ignores the story about Arthur leading troops at the battle of Mt. Badon. Why would a long-dead unsuccessful commander from the 3^rd century become attached to a battle fought two centuries later in an entirely different region of Britain?

Another huge problem is that the various motifs Littleton and Malcor cite are comparatively late additions to the Arthurian legends. Arthurian stories were circulating in Wales at least by the 8th or 9th century, and they remained Welsh story-matter until the mid-12th century when Geoffrey of Monmouth incorporated Arthur into his History of the Kings of Britain, thus bringing Arthur to the attention of the Anglo-Norman nobility. Since the Anglo-Normans were Frenchmen who had conquered England in 1066, this meant that the ‘Matter of Britain’ crossed over to France and began to circulate there, and French stories about these characters eventually crossed back to England and embedded themselves definitively in the corpus of Arthurian stories.

Most of the details that Littleton and Malcor cite as supposed evidence of Sarmatian influence don’t occur in the Welsh stories or in Geoffrey’s History. Instead, they trace back to late 12th century French stories or later English works. The Grail first appears in the late 12^th century in a work by the French author Chretien de Troyes, where it is a serving platter, not a cup at all. “Elaine” is a French variant on “Helen”, and it traces back to ancient Greece (Helen of Troy, y’all). Lancelot first appears in another of Chretien de Troyes’s French works. The stories about Excalibur being thrown into a lake at the end of Arthur’s life and the various characters called the Lady of the Lake are 13th and 14th century additions. The first appearance of the beard-collecting foe is Geoffrey’s Historia, where he’s a giant. The Sarmatian Theory claims that these details are part of the core Arthurian story, but doesn’t explain why the earliest stories about Arthur don’t make any mention of these details, nor does it do a very good job of explaining how they eventually got folded back into the Arthurian legends after being absent for the better part of a thousand years. It makes far more sense to see these elements as having been independently created in the 12^th through 15^th centuries, as scholars traditionally think.

Early Welsh warfare emphasized fighting on foot far more than fighting on horseback, since Wales is quite hilly terrain, which would make things like cavalry charges extremely difficult. And the Welsh Arthur seems to be fighting more on foot than on horseback. It’s only when the cavalry-using Anglo-Normans conquered England that Arthur and his ‘knights’ begin using horses. But the Sarmatian Theory holds that all the emphasis on cavalry warriors is an echo of Sarmatian cavalry warfare a millennium earlier rather than a reflection of the cavalry warfare employed by the culture in which the stories were being written down and favored by the men who were the patron of those authors. This is sort of like saying that the popularity of Cop Films in American culture is due to medieval stories of law enforcement; after all, the Sheriff of Nottingham is a famous late medieval character, so he was obviously the inspiration for 20th century Buddy Cop pictures.

Finally, the Nart Sagas were only written down in the 19th century. Exactly how old they are is unprovable. While some parts of them do seem to draw on ancient Iranian material, there’s no way to be certain that the stories were actually composed during the Roman period; 19th century nationalists were definitely not above fabricating supposedly old texts to support their claims of cultural identity. One could, in fact, argue that any similarities between the Nart Sagas and Arthurian legend are because whoever composed them borrowed from Arthurian literature. And the Nart stories aren’t actually Sarmatian or from Sarmatia; they’re from Ossetia, on the eastern side of the Black Sea.

As for ‘Lancelot’ originating from ‘Alanas a Lot River’…excuse me, I can’t actually type that with a straight face. Malcor and Littleton demolish a fringe theory that ‘Lancelot’ is a Welsh name, but ignore the far more common theory that it is a French diminutive of  ‘Lanzo’. Their evidence that it might actually be from ‘Alanus’ is, and I AM NOT JOKING, an email from somebody who suggested it to them.

So the Sarmatian Theory suffers from a complete lack of genuine evidence; it’s entirely speculation. It fails to explain why this obscure career military officers would have become the focal point of a group of legends borrowed from an ethnically unrelated people and why those stories would have managed to survive for a thousand years. It takes fairly obvious facts (like the idea that Chretien de Troyes invented both Lancelot and the Holy Grail) and replaces them with far more complex scenarios in violation of Occam’s Razor, and it relies on an undatable collection of stories being almost 2000 years older than their first actual documentation and being used by a people only indirectly connected to those stories.

The Sarmatian Theory in the Film

In Fuqua’s King Arthur, the main characters are descendants of the original 3^rd century Sarmatians (although no effort is made to make them look ethnically different from the Romans and Romanized Celts around them). The opening narration says that after their defeat, the Sarmatians agreed to bind their descendants to perpetual military service to the Roman Empire, so that they are sort of hereditary military serfs, of a type that actually never existed in Roman society. But, in true Hollywood fashion, these last Sarmatians are due to get their discharge papers, ending their centuries of servitude, until the asshole bishop Germanus (Ivano Marescotti) tells them that they have to go (say it with me now) on One Last Mission to rescue some Roman citizens inexplicably living north of Hadrian’s Wall. This is sort of like a Cop Film where the cop is on his last day of service, only he’s actually a vampire who’s been serving on the force since the American Revolution; you just know he’s going to get staked by the villain early in the film so his buddy can avenge him. (Spoiler: don’t expect all of Arthur’s men to make it to the closing credits.)

Arthur (Clive Owen, looking very Clive Oweny) is not the original Artorius Castus. Rather, he is the descendant of the original Artorius Castus “ancestrally named for the first Artorius or Arthur”. Like every other time Hollywood tries to use Roman names, this film doesn’t understand Roman naming conventions, because it thinks that ‘Artorius’ is a given name and ‘Castus’ is a family name, when in reality ‘Artorius Castus’ is a pair of inherited family names and Owen’s character’s given name is never mentioned. But it’s the 5^th century and the whole damn Empire is breaking down, so it’s ok that people are forgetting how to name their children. If I had to spend my time frantically trying to rescue Roman citizens living in other countries while my entire government was falling into the hands of douchebag clergymen, I’d probably forget my given name too.

Arthur and his men have become world-famous, or at least world-famous in Britain, because Guinevere (Kiera Knightley), living to the north of Hadrian’s Wall and not even being part of Roman society, has heard stories of Arthur and his men. So these Sarmatian troops are real bad-asses, even though they never actually fight from horseback the way that Sarmatians are supposed to.

So the film has nicely solved one of the Sarmatian Theory’s problems. The famous Artorius Castus is not the 3^rd century Roman but his 5^th century Sarmatian descendant, and it’s the distorted events of his life that we remember today. It’s a sign that your scholarly theory isn’t very strong when a Hollywood film can actually improve on it.

But that’s pretty much the only thing this film manages to do right. The rest of the film, as we’ll see next time, is just a mess.

Want to Know More?

King Arthuris available on Amazon.

If you really want to dig into the Sarmatian Theory, you’ll find it in From Scythia to Camelot: A Radical Reassessment of the Legends of King Arthur, the Knights of the Round Table, and the Holy Grail (Arthurian Characters and Themes). I don’t recommend it, unless you’re especially interested in alternative theories about the Matter of Britain.

The Advocate: An Ok Film Hurt by Miramax

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Bad Prologue Texts, Colin Firth, Crappy Prologue Texts, France, Leslie Megahey, Medieval Europe, Medieval France, The Advocate, The Hour of the Pig

Several weeks ago, I got a request to review The Advocate (original title, The Hour of the Pig, 1993, dir. Leslie Megahey). The film is a fun little picture about the late Middle Ages that is by no means perfect (it lacks any sort of real dramatic climax, for example), but is better than many movies set in the Middle Ages. It deals with an interesting and unusual subject, the curious tradition of legal trials for animals, and gets a surprising amount of the details correct. But the American release of the film was sadly mishandled by Miramax and the result seriously hurts the overall film.

One version of the film’s cover

The Facts Behind the Film

The Advocate/The Hour of the Pig (hereafter, just “The Advocate“) was originally a joint British/French production written and directed by Irish film-maker Leslie Megahey. I haven’t been able to find out anything about how Megahey got interested in the film’s subject matter, but he seems to have done a moderate amount of research into late medieval legal practices.

The protagonist of the film, Richard Courtois was very loosely modeled on Barthelemy de Chasseneuz (1480-1541), a French lawyer and jurist, chiefly remember for an influential treatise of French law that he produced in 1517. As a young lawyer in Autun, France, in the early sixteenth century, he made his reputation by engaging in a clever defense of a group of rats that had been put on trial for destroying the barley crop in the district. Chasseneuz insisted that the rats in question had to be summoned into court to answer for their crimes. When the rats predictably failed to show up, he argued that since they were dispersed in the countryside, it was necessary to advertise the summons more widely than had been done. After they failed to answer the second summons, he argued that they had failed to show up because they had not been given a guarantee of safe passage, and were in fear of the local cats. This resulted in the case getting dismissed.

Colin Firth as Richard Courtois

This remarkable trial brings us into very curious and obscure legal territory, namely the idea of animal trials. This is not a phenomenon that has been highly studied. Virtually all the scholarship done of this topic has drawn heavily off the work of Edward Payson Evans, a Victorian scholar who published two articles and a subsequent book, The Criminal Prosecution and Capital Punishment of Animals (1906). (If I had to guess, I’d say that Megahey ran across Evans’ book somewhere and used it as the basis for the film.) Starting in the late 90s, perhaps as a result of The Advocate, a small trickle of articles has come out that have explored the issue from different angles, but overall it’s still a rather arcane issue.

Animal trials are exactly what they sound like, full legal trials for animals. Among the types of animals put on trial have been pigs, donkeys, dogs, birds, horses, snails, snakes, insects, and cows. Mostly, they were accused of some form of homicide or violent assault, but bestiality charges were also common. Another major category of charge was destruction of crops, a very serious charge in an agricultural society. These trials generally treated the animal as a human legal defendant, holding it in custody (often at considerable expense to the state), and according it a day in court, legal representation to speak for it, and a full trial. Most animal defendants appear to have been found guilty and executed, but at least a few of them were acquitted; however, it has been suggested that the sources may primarily be recording cases that resulted in conviction, thereby skewing our understanding of the phenomenon. Sentences usually mirrored the penalty a human would have received; hanging and burning seem to have been most common. One Russian goat was sent to Siberia for its crimes.

Historians (primarily Evans) have identified around 200 animal trials running from the 9^th century down (a group of moles) to the 20th century. 1906, a Swiss dog was tried and executed. In 1929, Kentucky found a dog guilty of attempted murder and sent it to the electric chair. In 2005, Ontario passed legislation to regulate pit bulls that included a provision for the dogs to be cited for dangerous behavior (the dogs themselves, not the dogs’ owners). While most of these trials occurred in Western Europe, especially France and Italy, they have also been conducted in the United States, Canada, Russia, Brazil, and Australia. But notice that the numbers are exceptionally low—200 cases across 1,000 years from all across Western civilization. This is an extremely rare phenomenon.

Obviously, the idea of putting an animal on trial like a human seems bizarre to the modern mind. So what’s going on here? The few scholars who have seriously considered animal trials have offered a range of explanations for them. Evans, as a good Victorian, saw animal trials as a relic of medieval superstition, a sort of vestigial legal procedure. Some scholars have tended to see animal trials as a reaction to a significant crisis that aimed to reassure a frightened community and re-assert law and order; so when a swarm of rats or locusts destroyed a village’s crop, authorities could conduct a trial as a way to reassure an anxious community that the problem was being addressed. Other scholars have argued that animal trials are evidence of an underlying debate over competing views about the natural world, how God, humans, and animals relate, and the moral status of animals. In an interesting blog post about The Advocate, Philip Johnson has asserted that animal trials ultimately derive from a theological argument that because God created animals, they possessed a limited form of rights and could not simply be destroyed without some sort of legal process. So while scholars have not settled on a general explanation for the phenomenon, they agree that it is worth serious consideration for what it can tell us about medieval and early modern culture (what it can tell us about modern culture has generally been ignored).

It has also been pointed out that animal trials rest on a notion that animals possess a limited form of personhood, and therefore these trials fall into a category of legal debates about who has personhood and under what circumstances. When seen from this light, the issues don’t seem quite so foreign. Modern Americans can appreciate questions about whether slaves are persons (the Constitution says they are only 3/5^th of a person), whether brain-dead people such as Terry Schiavo are persons, whether the fetus is a person, and whether corporations have sufficient personhood to have political and religious rights. My point here is that when you actually start to dig into the phenomenon, you quickly realize that it’s not really that irrational an idea, at least in theory.

Legal systems as diverse as those of ancient Babylon, Republican Rome, and modern America have wrestled with the question of who is legally responsible when an animal inflicts injury or damage to someone else. The current American solution to the question is to say that an animal’s owner is responsible, and because that seems familiar to us, we find the Babylonian and Roman solutions to the same problem to be the ‘obvious’ solution, and we are consequently puzzled when we discover that some other legal systems have preferred to say that the animal itself is legally responsible.

It is also important to understand that just because an animal was put on trial does not mean that everyone involved in the process automatically accorded the animal full personhood. Chausseneuz devoted some time in his legal treatise to a case in which locusts have been excommunicated by an ecclesiastical court. Following Thomas Aquinas, Chausseneuz argued that lower creatures (those devoid of any capacity to reason) were agents of divine will, and therefore should not be excommunicated, because that would be blasphemous (because the ultimate target of the excommunication would be God); rather, he felt that the excommunication ought to be directed more generally against whatever devil had motivated the insects’ misbehavior. In a 16^th century French case, in which a group of weevils were sued by a group of vineyard owners, the vineyard owners’ counsel argued that because God had made animals subject to human authority, it was reasonable to excommunicate them. The weevils’ court-appointed counsel responded that it was improper to invoke canon law against beasts that are subject only to natural law. So even contemporaries could be deeply divided about the issues at play.

The Film

The film’s protagonist is the fictional Richard Courtois (Colin Firth), who as I noted before, was very loosely inspired by Chausseneuz. The story is set in 1452 in Abbeville, which is located in modern northern France, but at the time was technically within Ponthieu and therefore under the formal authority of the kings of England. Exactly why Megahey chose this setting I have no idea, but the film understands that the legal situation in Ponthieu was complex because it wasn’t technically part of France.

Abbeville

The film has three sequences involving animal trials, which gives viewers the impression that animal trials were common instead of rare oddities. The film opens with the public execution of a man and his donkey for committing bestiality. At the last minute, the donkey is saved because of character witnesses who have sworn that the donkey was of good character and would never willingly have done such a thing, but the man is hanged.

The first case

The second case involves a witch, Jeannine (Harriet Walter), who, among other things, is accused of sending rats to sicken a neighbor. Courtois successfully uses Chasseneuz’ trick of summoning the rats to appear in court as witnesses, and when they fail to do so, that charge against Jeannine is dropped. But because Courtois fails to understand the complex legal situation in Abbeville, Jeannine herself is convicted and executed, despite his dismay.

Finally, Courtois is, much to his surprise and frustration, appointed as defense counsel for a pig that has been accused of murdering a young boy. The pig is owned by Mahmoud and Samira, a pair of foreigners traveling through the region. The film can’t seem to figure out if these people are Moors, gypsies, or Jews; it says they are Moors, but also says that they came from “little Egypt” (suggesting they are gypsies), and in one scene shows them as victims of a forced baptism the way some Jews were. Courtois falls in love with Samira and while he doesn’t care about the pig itself, he tries to find a way to resolve Samira’s problem that the pig is her primary asset. He offers to pay her twice the pig’s value, but for some reason she refuses this. (The pig trial is probably based very loosely on a 1457 trial in which a sow and her piglets were accused of killing and eating a young boy.)

Courtois and Samira

At the same time, Courtois slowly begins to realize that the pig may in fact be innocent, which means that someone else killed the boy. As he searches for the truth, he gets tangled up in the interests of the local nobleman, the Seigneur Jehan d’Auferre (Nicol Williamson), who wants Courtois to marry his slightly deranged daughter.

At this point, the film tends to get a little lost. Several subplots are introduced, including the presence of a secret group of Cathars (more than a century after the last Cathars died out) and a spy for ‘the Inquisition’, but these plots don’t go anywhere. The murderer is finally revealed but not confronted, and just as Courtois decides to leave town, a new plot involving a knight with the Black Death gets introduced and them immediately abandoned. It’s hard to categorize this film; it’s been labeled a thriller, a murder mystery, and a black comedy, and certainly has elements of all three.

All in all, the film is most interesting when it’s wrestling with the legal cases at hand. It accurately depicts some of the legal complexities of the period. The trials are conducted before a judge, but with no jury. The film understands some of the complex legal procedures that Chasseneuz discusses in his cases. Courtois’ servant (Jim Carter) repeatedly tells people that his employer’s proper title is Maître, which is the correct French form of address for a man with a university degree. Courtois accurately distinguishes the charges that Jeannine worshipped the devil (diabolism) from the charges that she had harmed someone with magic (maleficia).

But other elements of the legal system the film gets wrong. I’m not an expert on medieval French law, but the cross-examination of the witnesses that happens in several scenes strikes me as far too modern. More seriously, the film lumps all its legal proceedings together into a single legal system, when in fact across France there were at least two court systems, civil courts, which handled cases under the jurisdiction of towns, nobles, and the king, and ecclesiastical courts, which handled cases under the jurisdiction of the local bishop. Depending on what venue the case was in, it could be judged by royal law, local custom, or canon law.

All of Courtois’ cases are heard in what appears to be the Abbeville town court, which is presided over by a magistrate. Toward the end of the film, however, the town court turns out to actually be the Seigneur’s court, because d’Auferre steps in and insists on his right to hear the pig’s case personally. Again, allowing for the fact that I don’t study medieval France, where jurisdictional issues are quite complex, this strikes me as definitely possible; a nobleman could definitely have granted a town the right to hear cases technically under his jurisdiction.

But many moral crimes, such as bestiality, would have been handled in an ecclesiastical court, not the town or seigneurial court. Chausseneuz’ rat trial was an ecclesiastical trial, conducted under entirely different laws than would have operated in civil courts. Depending on which charges were initially brought against Jeannine, she might have stood trial in either a civil court (for maleficia) or an ecclesiastical court (for diabolism). The collapsing of all the cases into a single courtroom setting is probably forgivable due to the challenge of explaining a complex legal system to modern viewers unfamiliar with it, but it does represent a significant bending of the facts; while it is possible that both Jeannine’s case and the pig’s case would have wound up in the same court, it seems unlikely.

As a side note, one thing the film does a good job of is the costuming. Most of the clothing (with the exception of Samira’s generic gypsy outfits) is a reasonable attempt at 15^th century clothing. Courtois sports a liripipe in some scenes (as in the picture up above). And in a particularly remarkable detail, the noblewomen in d’Auferre’s family follow the fashion for very high foreheads. Given that historical films almost always present women’s hairstyles according to contemporary tastes rather than historical accuracy, this is commendable.

D’Auferre’s daughter, with her fashionable high forehead.

So What’s Miramax Got to Do with This?

The film opens with a prologue text. The original British/French production’s text reads, In medieval France animals were subject to the same legal processes as human beings, including trial in a court of law. This story is based on real life cases.

This text does a couple things. It situates the film in medieval France. It explains, without judgment, that animal trials were a genuine phenomenon (although it somewhat misleadingly implies that animal trials were common or even standard). And finally, it asserts an underlying historicity for the film by truthfully acknowledging that the film draws off of actual events (although naturally it de-emphasizes how heavily fictionalized it is). So while it sets the scene in a very general way, it makes little effort to shape how the audience will react to the movie.

When the film was marked in the US, however, Miramax not only changed the name of the film from The Hour of the Pig to The Advocate and trimmed out about 10 minutes (mostly for reasons of nudity, apparently), but it also completely changed the prologue text. The American version of the text reads as follows:

France—the 15^th century, the dark ages…

 The people were still gripped by ignorance and superstition, mortally afraid of the power of Satan, expecting God’s       punishment—the plague that was sweeping Europe.

In such uncertain times the Church, the State, and the Law should have been the guiding lights, but the Church was sometimes as corrupt as the State.

The local Lords, the Seigneurs, ruled with cruel self-interest and justice was reciprocated by a somewhat confused legal profession.

Each region had its own laws, but all had one extraordinary provision…

Animals were subject to the same civil laws as human beings. They could be prosecuted and tried in a court of law.

Unbelievable as it may seem, all cases shown in this film are based on historical fact.

There are so many things wrong with this text that I hardly know where to start. It employs the worst cliché about the Middle Ages, the notion that it was ‘the Dark Ages’, an era of ignorance, superstition, absurd beliefs and practices, and legal and spiritual corruption.

The concept of the Dark Ages was invented in the 19^th century, but no serious historian uses it as a synonym for the Middle Ages any more. To the extent that the phrase is still used at all, it is sometimes employed to refer to a period in which there is a complete or near-complete loss of written documentation, so that scholars might occasionally refer to the Greek Dark Age (the period from c. 1200 BC to c.850 BC after the collapse of Mycenaean culture) or the British Dark Age (the late 5^th to late 6^th century AD, immediately after the collapse of Roman civilization in England and Wales). But even this limited usage is uncommon.

The Miramax text tells us the same things the original text does, but it lards on a heavy dose of moral judgment. It tells us that the events are both true and ‘unbelievable’. The text presents animal trials as uniquely medieval, and ignores both the fact that they were not common in the Middle Ages and that they were not unheard of is modern Western society. The legal system is explicitly labeled ‘confused’, implying that there is an objectively correct position to take on legal issues and medieval lawyers couldn’t figure out what it was.

The text also rather oddly emphasizes the idea that animal trials were a partly due to the influence of a corrupt Church, ignoring the fact that the only hint of the medieval Church in this film is a decidedly worldly priest (Ian Holm) who befriends Courtois early in the film, and a passing reference to ‘the Inquisition’. Nor is the Seigneur d’Auferre presented as particularly cruel. The judgmentalism of the text is at odds with the film’s tone; Courtois is sometimes baffled by the legal situation he finds himself in, but the only time he rails against it is when he loses Jeannine’s case on a technicality.

The overall effect of the Miramax text is to undermine much of the film, by explicitly telling the audience that what will follow is a lot of superstitious nonsense. It destroys the possibility that medieval people might actually have had sensible reasons for assigning a degree of legal personhood to animals, and instead just tells the viewer that these people are idiots deserving of ridicule.

In doing so the Miramax text serves to establish a substantial intellectual distance between the audience and the medieval people we are watching, by suggesting that the viewers are much more intelligent, well-educated, moral, and reasonable than medieval people were. These medieval people are Not-Us, and they are to be looked down upon from a position of confident superiority. By flattering the audience so extensively, it discourages the audience from thinking of past people as normal human beings, and instead relegates them to the category of benighted freaks who had no reason for what they believed and did.

I give the movie credit for being above average in regard to some of the historical details and setting. In fact, given the weakness of the plot in the second half of the film, it is probably best watched for what it tries to tell us about late medieval society, or for the performances, most of which are quite solid. But the prologue text has to be ignored.

In an interview, Harvey Weinstein once remarked that of all the films he’s worked on, The Advocate was the worst, and that people shouldn’t see it. Sadly, had he not gotten involved in the project, it might have been a better film, if only because it wouldn’t have gotten such a lousy opening.

Want to Know More?

The Advocateis available on Amazon.