Basel's burned rooster

Evans’s 1906 book on the punishment of animals says that in 1474 the magistrates of Basel sentenced a cock to be burned for laying an egg.⁹ The earliest account we found does not mention magistrates. It is a few lines in a chaplain’s Latin diary, and it says only that the bird was handed to the executioner.⁴²³

The sentence in the books

Evans writes that “the magistrates of Bale sentenced a cock to be burned at the stake” for that crime, and that the burning took place on the Kohlenberg.⁹ He calls Gross’s three further eggs “of course absurd”.⁹ We did not find his quoted words in either of the two texts below that tell the story.

His appendix names three sources for the case: a travel book, a memoir of a French learned society and Gross.⁹ The memoir is Berriat-Saint-Prix’s report of 1829 on animal trials, and the page Evans gives is the page of its table.⁸ Under 1474 the table has a “Sentence du magistrat de Bâle en Suisse” that condemns a cock to be burned for having laid an egg, and says the egg was burned too.⁸ Its authority is a newspaper, the Journal du département du Nord of 1 November 1813, which in turn follows a travel book, “Promenades pittoresques dans l’évêché de Bâle”, printed at The Hague in 1808.⁸ No Basel document is named.⁸

We found the travel book. Hentzy, in a letter about Basel, turns to the basilisk of the Gerberbrunnen fountain and says that in 1474, on the Thursday before St Lawrence’s day, the magistrate of Basel had the executioner burn a poor cock “accused of having laid a basilisk’s egg all by itself”.⁷ The magistrate appears in his telling and in no earlier text we read: Knebel and Gross have none, and Hentzy uses no word for sentence or judgment.⁷²⁵ He names no source. His three further eggs and the executioner who opened the bird are in Gross; Knebel has two further eggs.⁷⁵⁴

Other nineteenth-century writers add their own turns. Georg Friedrich Jäger wrote in 1831 that the Kohlenberg court, which sat on that hill, sentenced to death by fire a cock that was convicted of having laid an egg, and sent his reader to Gross.¹¹ Osenbrüggen answered in 1868 that this sounds historical but is not, that Jäger names no source, and that the burning had nothing to do with that court.¹² Osenbrüggen’s own account has the cock burned alive on the Kolenberg because it was convicted of laying an egg, and personified as a heretic.¹³

Gross’s worm, 150 years on

Johann Gross printed his Kurtze Bassler Chronick at Basel in 1624, a century and a half after the event.¹⁴ The cock is on p. 120, under a margin note “Hanen-ey verbrennt”, the cock’s egg burned.¹⁵ The passage carries no year.¹⁵ The entry before it is dated 1474 in the margin and the entry after it 1475, which is how the burning gets its year from Gross.¹⁵

Gross says that on the Thursday before St Lawrence’s day a cock was burned on the Kolenberg together with an egg it had laid, because people feared a worm would come out of it.⁵ The executioner cut the bird open and found three more eggs.⁵ To explain the fear he cites Vincent in the Speculum naturale: an old cock lays an egg, a serpent hatches it in dung, and the basilisk is said to be half cock and half serpent.⁵ Gross names no source for the burning itself.⁵

Gross is the first writer we found who says why anyone burned a bird: they were afraid of what the egg would hatch.⁵

Wurstisen’s August

We looked for the cock in Christian Wurstisen’s Baszler Chronick of 1580 as well.¹⁶ On the page where it reaches August 1474 it reports Burgundian raiders in the Sundgau, a Basel garrison sent to Tattenried and a meeting of the allies at Basel on 18 August.¹⁶ There is no rooster on that page.¹⁶

What Knebel wrote

Hans Knebel was a chaplain at the Basel cathedral and a notary of the university.³ His diary survives in his own hand, and the first of its two volumes runs from September 1473 to June 1476.³ The editors who printed it, Wilhelm Vischer and Heinrich Boos, compare it to a modern newspaper: whatever its writer saw or heard in the last few days.³ In their edition of 1880 the entry on the cock is seven printed lines long.⁴

The cock was eleven years old, and the egg was long.⁴ The bird went to the executioner with its egg and lost its head first, and only then was it gutted, which is the order Osenbrüggen’s “burned alive” leaves out.⁴¹³ The Latin says that “all together” were burned near the executioner’s house, with many men and women watching.⁴ Grammatically that points at the eggs; we read it as covering the bird too, as Gross does.⁴⁵

That is the whole entry. It names no court, no judge and no charge, and it says nothing of a basilisk or a worm.² Knebel does not call it a trial. The one place where Knebel and Gross cannot both be right is the count of eggs: two more in the diary, three in the chronicle.⁴⁵

A danger, not a crime

Karl von Amira wrote in 1891 that almost all recent writers took the burning for an especially striking animal execution, and differed only on whether witchcraft or heresy was being punished.⁶ He thought the matter far simpler. In the popular belief of the Middle Ages and even later, he says, the feared basilisk egg is laid by a cock, so bird and egg had to be got out of the way, and fire does that best.¹⁷ On that reading it was a police measure and not a punishment.¹⁷ Evans, fifteen years later, rejected Osenbrüggen’s heretic as “far-fetched and wholly fanciful” and held that the bird was feared as an abnormal, inauspicious and so diabolic creature.¹⁸

The belief they all work from is old. Gross takes it from Vincent.¹⁰ Evans adds that the cockatrice egg was thought to come from a very old cock and to be hatched by a serpent, a toad or the sun, and that a French academician argued against the notion in 1710.¹⁰ Amira has the same belief for the Middle Ages and for later centuries.¹⁰

Point by point

We found no record made in Basel that says who ordered the fire. The 1829 table that Evans relies on cites a travel book, and the travel book names the magistrate without a source.⁸⁹⁷