Witchcraft or Weird? The Basel Rooster Trial of 1474 and the Biblical Creature Known as the Cockatrice

  It is the year 1474 in Basel, Switzerland.

Basel is a city that lies along the banks of the Rhine River near the Swiss border with both France and Germany.  It is a picturesque and cosmopolitan city that today is famous for its many art museums.  For centuries Basel has been considered one of the cultural capitals of Europe.

However, on this day in August of 1474, the city of Basel is about to be the site of an execution witnessed by a large, blood thirsty and fearful crowd of rural peasants and urban townspeople alike.  

They have come to see an accused witch burned alive at the stake.

The execution is conducted with, “great solemnity as would have been observed in the consigning of a heretic to the flames.”  (Evans 1906)  

Only days before, at the trial of the condemned, the prosecutor in Basel had asserted that, “it was not a case of (the defendant) making a compact with the devil, but that Satan had actually entered into them.”

The public defender countered that, “no evil animus had been proved and that no harm had come to either man or beast.”  But in the end, despite a believable and persuasive defense strategy, the accused was sentenced to death nonetheless.

For what heinous crime was the accused said to be possessed by Satan and sentenced to die before a large somber crowd in Basel’s city center?

Medieval Depiction of Basel from 1483

When describing the events of August 1474 the city’s own authoritative contemporary record the Chronicle of Basel, states, “In the month of August, in the year 1474, a cock of this city was accused and convicted of the crime of laying eggs and was condemned to be burnt with one of his eggs in the Kublenburg, or public square, where the ceremony took place in the presence of a vast concourse of spectators.”

The medieval city of Basel, Switzerland, has put on trial, convicted, and burnt at the stake a rooster, a male chicken, accused of the most unmasculine crime of laying an egg.  This rooster is burnt at the stake, having been found guilty of the most heretical of medieval crimes--witchcraft.  He is burnt along with the unnatural and Satanic offspring, the egg, that his compact with the devil has created.

During the Middle Ages folklore had it that an egg laid by a rooster was a prime ingredient in witch ointments and it was believed that from such an egg a monster called a cockatrice would grow.

Cockatrices are mythical beasts mentioned several times in the Old Testament.  Although the Bible is somewhat unclear in describing what a cockatrice actually looks like, it appears that the beast is some combination of a serpent and a rooster.

The English translation of cockatrice comes from the Hebrew word tsepha.  To this very day Biblical scholars debate what the meaning of the Hebrew word tsepha really is, but it is clear that the authors of the Old Testament definitely intended the cockatrice to reference some sort of serpentlike monster.

Cockatrices (tsepha) are mentioned by name four times in the Old Testament.  One reference of a cockatrice that hints at the coming of Christ occurs in the Book of Isaiah, “and the sucking child shall play on the hole of the asp and the weaned child shall put his hand on the cockatrice den.” (Isaiah 11:8 KJV)

Isaiah goes on to say that, “Cockatrices are said to live in a hole in the ground and are considered poisonous.”  (Isaiah 11:8 KJV)  And in the Book of Jeremiah, God speaks directly to the Israelites and says, “For behold, I will send serpents, cockatrices among you, which will not be charmed and they shall bite you, saith the LORD.” (Jeremiah 8:17 KJV)

Most Biblical scholars today believe that the word cockatrice as used in the Bible actually refers to a snake such as a cobra or a viper and would translate such Bible verses using the English word “cobra” or “viper” in place of the Old Testament passages that used to translate the Hebrew word tsepha as “cockatrice”.

But all present day Biblical scholarship aside, during the Middle Ages belief in cockatrices, half-serpent and half-rooster like beasts as mentioned in the Bible was not only widespread, but taken as literal fact based on fifteenth century knowledge of scripture.

Wary medieval peasants were always on the lookout for roosters that might have fallen victim to the snares of the Devil and laid an egg.  Once a rooster laid an egg it was a sure sign that a cockatrice was about to be born, and therefore, as happened in Basel in 1474 the egg, along with the hapless rooster, had to be burnt at the stake.

Though obviously hens, and not roosters lay eggs, there are several scientific explanations for what may have happened in Basel back in 1474 and caused the townspeople to descend into a chicken witch burning frenzy.

For one thing, it is possible that the owner of the Satanic chicken may, in fact, have owned a hen all along and simply not realized it.  Though there is no record of who owned the Basel possessed rooster (as far as I could find) such an explanation is not only plausible but also, I believe, the most probable.

It is also possible that an egg could have been misplaced, or even purposefully placed beneath a rooster, perhaps by a member of the clergy, to stir up religious feelings and emotions among a population in Basel, Switzerland, that most church observers in the year 1474 would have considered far too secular for the times.

Lastly, there appears to be a very rare circumstance where a hen will change its own gender and adopt the appearance of a male rooster.  A hen has two ovaries, and in some rare circumstances either as the result of a tumor, or an infection, one of the ovaries can become dysfunctional and begin to produce excessive amounts of testosterone enabling such a chicken to, at one and the same time, both lay an egg and look and sound like a rooster.

Gender bending chickens?  Overzealous monks?  Farmers who can’t tell hens from roosters?  Who knows?

Surprisingly, the residents of 15th century Basel are not alone in trying their animals as witches and executing them in the public square.  Apparently, from sometime in the early fourteenth century right on up to only around two-hundred years ago, so-called “animal trials” where chickens, goats, and most commonly pigs were tried, sentenced and executed as humans for a wide variety of crimes from witchcraft, to murder to petty theft was quite common throughout central Europe.

In his landmark  1906 historical study The Criminal Prosecution and Capital Punishment of Animals, which is quoted from at the start of this article, author E.P. Evans describes how the medieval mindset had various, and somewhat logical, reasons for trying animals as humans.

One reason animals were tried as humans, as is the case in the Basel Rooster Trial of 1474, was that the medieval worldview asserted that Satan, and his evil forces, were just as all-pervasive in the physical world as was God and His good will.  Therefore, so goes the thought process, animals just like men and women could easily fall prey to the Devil and the alluring snare of witchcraft.  For that reason (to purge the devil from them) animals had to be tried for witchcraft just like people.

Another, more practical reason though not necessarily applicable to the Basel Rooster Trial of 1474, that animals were tried for crimes, is that it was hoped that the owners of domestic animals (which in medieval Europe was mostly everybody) would be more likely to control the actions of their animals if they knew the animals themselves, which were very valuable, could be tried and executed for their actions.

Animal Trial from the 14th Century

Today, we may never know exactly what motivated the residents of one of the fifteenth century’s most cosmopolitan cities to try, condemn and burn a rooster at the stake for laying an egg.

Even now, at least in my opinion, the thought of a cockatrice being a real creature is simply terrifying.  So that it is easy to see how the citizens of Basel could have gotten caught up in a witch-hunt frenzy if they truly interpreted scripture in such a way that led them to believe that a supposed egg unnaturally laid by a rooster would cause the birth of some mythical half-serpent and half-chicken monster of the Devil.

 Perhaps, we shouldn’t laugh at our Christian ancestors from five and a half centuries ago.  After all, today, we might give a rooster a pass for laying an egg if such a thing were even possible, but we still readily work ourselves up into a frenzy of fear and anger over things that we simply don’t understand.