What happened
In 1603 Jean Grenier, a poor shepherd boy of about thirteen from south-western France, stood before the Parlement of Bordeaux. Girls tending cattle accused him of attacking them, and he readily told people he was a werewolf: the Lord of the Forest had given him a wolfskin and an ointment, in which he roamed the countryside, and he had already killed and eaten several children. The court established that children had indeed disappeared in the area. But the boy contradicted himself and also blamed his father. The Parlement concluded it was dealing with a simple-minded child whose mind had been clouded by poverty and neglect, and instead of a death sentence confined him for life to the Franciscan friary in Bordeaux. Some years later the judge Pierre de Lancre visited him and described the boy as animal-like. Grenier died in the friary around 1610–1611.
Witnesses
The girls who accused the boy, witnesses and the judges of the Parlement of Bordeaux; the main account was left by Pierre de Lancre in his 1612 treatise on witchcraft.
Explanations and hypotheses
The trial records have not survived, and the case is known mainly from de Lancre's account. Historian Jan Machielsen sees Grenier as perhaps the youngest person ever convicted of lycanthropy and points to the innovative verdict: the court treated the wolf stories as a symptom of disorder rather than proof of a pact with the Devil. Modern scholars attribute them to the fantasies of a neglected, probably intellectually disabled child; it is not certain that he killed anyone.
Explained The phenomenon has a widely accepted, down-to-earth explanation.
Sources
- Pierre de Lancre, Tableau de l'inconstance des mauvais anges et démons (Paris, 1612)
- Montague Summers, The Werewolf (Kegan Paul, 1933)