Barry Lamb
speaker
704 appearances
4 recordings
1 series
first heard Jan 2022
last heard Apr 2023
Barry Lamb’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Burgundy, France, in a city named Atun, early Renaissance.
Even then, Burgundy was famous for its wine.
But Atun sits on soil that's only good for growing barley and wheat.
Well, in 1522, rats got into the barley crop, ate through much of it, and that could very well destroy the livelihood of the peasants who grew it, maybe even lead to starvation for the people who rely on the grain for food.
This is a big problem for the people in charge, which back then were the clerics.
That's Gabriel Rosenberg, historian at Duke University.
What possessed the bishops to put the rats up for trial as a solution to this particular problem?
Was there precedence for this?
Whatever their reasons, the decision was made to take the rats to court.
But luckily for them, the French were big fans of due process.
Even rats deserved the best lawyer they could get.
And because they couldn't afford one, they had to have one appointed to them.
In this case, a young one.
Getting assigned a Chazenu was a little bit like getting assigned a young Ruth Bader Ginsburg, someone who would eventually become a legend in jurisprudence.
So the Chazenu had the perfect strategy.
If you're going to treat the rats as being legally responsible, you've got to give the rats the same kind of legal rights you'd grant a person.
That argument won the day.
Nobody, it turned out, wanted to pay the taxes needed to help the rats defend themselves in court.
It wasn't clear in the historical record whether the rats were formally acquitted or if the court just decided to let it go.
But that wasn't the last time De Chazeneau was going to break ground in defending animals in court.
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