I am reading the "Transformation of War" by Martin van Creveld and I have encountered quite a strange statement which is not explained further:
Thus, in modern countries that have the death penalty, the identity of those who administer the electric shock or open the valves of the gas-chamber is always carefully concealed. Since previous societies were more intimate and carried out their executions in public they were unable to preserve anonymity, though masks were often used. The solution was to entrust the job to the members of certain families. They were considered unclean and lived in seclusion; in London, for example, their house was located on the south bank, away from “good” society and downriver from everybody else. In some cases they required a special license to enter the towns where they worked, risking assault if they showed themselves on other occasions. The hangmen themselves before proceeding to their gruesome business used to beg for the victim’s forgiveness. Often they found it hard to get married, with the result that in sixteenth-century England, for example, they received permission to cohabit with the dead.
Was this a common practice? Would this cohabitation be sexual in nature?
Related question: seeing as, if this source is accurate, hangmen seemed to be very remorseful of having to kill people, were they just picked at random for the job? How did they pick executioners?
I'm pretty sure van Crevald, or possibly his source, is taking two different characteristics of the executioner profession in the early modern era, overdramatizing one of them, and misinterpreting the other. This leads him to a connection that, fortunately, just wasn't there.
First, the difficulty with marriage possibilities. It's absolutely true that there was strong social stigmatization of executioners in the late Middle Ages and early modern era. For fear that they were somehow morally or even physically tainted by their profession, executioners typically had to live in certain parts of town or outside it, wear distinctive clothing, were barred from certain churches or forced to sit in un-prestigious places within it, avoid taverns and other social gathering places, and so forth. In other words, they were to a large extent legally excluded from mainstream social life of their city. This indeed limited the marriage pool, but it hardly led to necrophilia. Instead, we witness a highly endogamous marital practice among executioners (and sometimes similarly ill-viewed professions, like the skinners of Augsburg)--that is, a close-knit community whose descendants keep intermarrying among a small group of families. As with other professions in the early modern era, sons tended to follow their fathers' line of work; daughters married within the craft.
Second, this matter of taking possession of the corpse. Yes, executioners could and did on occasion request permission to take the body of their victim before burial. You see, executioners weren't just executioners. One of the reasons that some scholars have started to argue executioner was often a chosen profession in each new generation, despite the stigma, was the other responsibilities that went along with the role. In particular, executioners generally doubled as one more type of medical practitioners, and especially, one with legal permission to both prescribe treatments and sell them. Substances and elixirs made from pieces of cadavers, like ground-up hearts, were one of the remedies that could be purchased. Executioners would draw their cures from the bodies of those they killed. In other cases, corpses were dissected for learning or scientific purposes, or the executioner might sell the corpse to a university for its medical students to witness an autopsy on. It does seem to be the case that executioners needed to request permission to take the body each time; it wasn't a given. This isn't long term cohabitation of any kind, but it absolutely is permission to keep a corpse in one's house. That, in all likelihood, also contained a household involving a quite living spouse and children.