So I recently played the game Kingdom Come: Deliverance, which introduced me to the idea of executioners being "unclean" due to their work and being shunned for it. This concept interested me so I researched it further and found that it seems to have been the same amongst many different societies. What I find unusual is that their work (i.e killing/torturing people) is considered unclean, but soldiers also killed people and don't seem to have been shunned for it. In fact, noblemen were trained from their youth to be soldiers and regarded in the highest possible esteem in medieval societies.
At first I thought that the difference was that executioners killed "helpless" people (although to be sentenced to death you had to commit a pretty heinous offence) but to my knowledge, in most medieval battles most of the deaths were when the losing side routed and were ran down. Although I can certainly see that the winning side would want to kill them to prevent them from regrouping, it certainly seems like they are helpless while they are routing. Is that what made societies view of them different? was it something else? or was there really not much of a difference and this apparent hypocrisy was just a neccessary thing people learned to accept?
According to Joel F. Harrington's fairly popular book on this sub "The Faithful Executioner: Life and Death, Honor and Shame in the Turbulent Sixteenth Century", the unclean aspect was related not to the killing, but the handling of the dead.
The executioner was relegated to an area outside of town, or, at least, a specific area within a town/city that likely also contained the undertaker/mortician, those that prepared bodies for graves, the tanners and hide-makers.
The key here seems to be these peoples contact with dead people, dead animals, and the by-products of the dead and dying.This may have been an outreach of 'miasma theory'. This theory being that disease was brought about by contact with poisonous vapors in the air, likely created by dead or decaying matter. In addition to being 'culturally' unclean due to their handling and maneuvering of dead matter, these citizens would have been viewed as literally more 'at risk' due to being within clouds of miasma produced by dead and decaying matter.