Buggery (_offensa cujus nominatio crimen est_, as it is euphemistically designated in legal documents) was uniformly punished by putting to death both parties implicated, and usually by burning them alive. The beast, too, is punished and both are burned (_punitur etiam pecus et ambo comburuntur_), says Guillielmus Benedictinus, a writer on law, who lived about the end of the fourteenth century. Thus, in 1546, a man and a cow were hanged and then burned by order of the parliament of Paris, the supreme court of France. In 1466, the same tribunal condemned a man and a sow to be burned at Corbeil. Occasionally interment was substituted for incremation. Thus in 1609, at Niederrad, a man and a mare were executed and their bodies buried in the same carrion-pit. On the 12th of September, 1606, the mayor of Loens de Chartres, on complaint of the dean, canons, and chapter of the cathedral of Chartres, condemned a man named Guillaume Guyart to be “hanged and strangled on a gibbet in reparation and punishment of sodomy, whereof the said Guyart is declared accused, attainted and convicted.” A bitch, his accomplice, was sentenced to be knocked on the head (_assommée_) by the executioner of high justice and “the dead bodies of both to be burned and reduced to ashes.” It is furthermore added that if the said Guyart, who seems to have contumaciously given leg-bail, cannot be seized and apprehended in person, the sentence shall, in his case, be executed in effigy by attaching his likeness in painting to the gibbet. It was also decreed that all the property of the absconder should be confiscated and the sum of one hundred and fifty livres be adjudged to the plaintiffs, out of which the costs of the trial were to be defrayed. (_Vide_ Appendix L.) This disgusting crime appears to have been very common; at least Ayrault in his _Ordre Judiciaire_, published in 1606, states that he has many times (_multoties_) seen brute beasts put to death for this cause. In his _Magnalia Christi Americana_ (Book VI, (III), London, 1702) Cotton Mather records that “on June 6, 1662, at New Haven, there was a most unparalleled wretch, one Potter by name, about sixty years of age, executed for damnable Bestialities.” He had been a member of the Church for twenty years and was noted for his piety, “devout in worship, gifted in prayer, forward in edifying discourse among the religious, and zealous in reforming the sins of other people.” Yet this monster, who is described as possessed by an unclean devil, “lived in most infandous Buggeries for no less than fifty years together, and now at the gallows there were killed before his eyes a cow, two heifers, three sheep and two sows, with all of which he had committed his brutalities. His wife had seen him confounding himself with a bitch ten years before; and he then excused himself as well as he could, but conjured her to keep it secret.” He afterwards hanged the bitch, probably as a sort of vicarious atonement.