‘Not Having God Before his Eyes’: Bestiality in Early Modern England

In February 2006, the BBC briefly reported an odd news item from the Sudan.1 A certain Mr Alifi alerted the authorities when he witnessed his neighbour, Mr Tombe, having sex with Alifi's goat.2 The matter was taken before the local Sudanese elders and they ordered Mr Tombe to pay Mr Alifi a dowry of 15,000 dinars (roughly forty pounds sterling). According to the elders, this was an appropriate punishment because Tombe had used the goat as he would have used his wife. While the BBC reported the item because it seemed strange and somewhat noteworthy (the quaint actions of a rustic and traditional people), none of the people directly involved found it so. Indeed, Alifi appears to have accepted the judgment of the elders as eminently fair and reasonable and Mr Tombe willingly paid the dowry and still had the goat in his possession at the time the story was written. This anecdote is offered here as an entry point into the topic of bestiality, which still seems somewhat foreign and incomprehensible even in our present climate of often wide sexual tolerance.In modern western culture, a measure of ambiguity persists as to how bestiality should be viewed, and whether or not it should be tolerated, punished as a form of animal abuse, or perceived as a sign of mental disturbance. Piers Beirne has succinctly framed the question thus: 'how should we approach bestiality: is it an outrageous and perhaps perverse act or, as the law's increasing tolerance of it suggests, a relatively benign form of social deviance? Why have sexual relations involving humans and animals been so vociferously and ubiquitously condemned and so little studied?'3 Narratives of bestiality, indeed any discussion of the topic, have a disturbing and uncomfortable ring to modern ears, yet such contact has almost surely always occurred for as long as people have lived in close contact with their animals.4 While modern scholars do not shy away from examining the history of other areas of sexuality or other sexual crimes, bestiality remains largely outside the political agendas and ethical debates that occupy many scholars and, as such, it has remained within the background as a part of the seedy underbelly of early modern culture. We have been mostly content to observe such mentions of animal-human sexual contact as do survive either with passing prurient interest or harsh condemnation. In our animal-rights-minded age, not only does such behaviour seem a clear transgression of human sexual propriety, but also a gross violation of an innocent animal.5While inhabitants of early modern England were not particularly concerned with the concept of the nascent dignity of animals (and they did not commonly envision beasts as having souls or as being anything other than creations inferior to men, intended to be used to serve human needs), they too reacted with horror at the idea of men engaging in lewd acts with an animal.6 Most people considered it a victimless crime, although, if a victim had to be identified, it was the abstract notion of the correct manner in which humans were supposed to behave. As such, it was a crime against ideas, rather than people or property.7 As with all crimes, bestiality was tied to larger cultural and social perceptions and realities and, for people living in the period, bestiality (alongside other sexual behaviours viewed as lewd or subversive of the natural order) had a powerful cultural resonance.The cries of inhabitants of the period rigorously denouncing bestiality were a comparatively recent development. While animal-human sexual contact was condemned by earlier moralists, these condemnations achieved a new degree of ferocity by the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and this appears to suggest that social attitudes shifted between the medieval and early modern period with respect to bestiality. Using evidence such as the punishments mandated to those who confessed to bestial intercourse in medieval penitential manuals, Erica Fudge has found that bestiality was often held to be of the same level of sinfulness as masturbation and was also viewed less harshly if committed by a single, as opposed to a married, man. …