Hey Historians.
I'm writing a story featuring an executioner in a medieval European setting. I've come across some books, namely The Book of Execution: An Encyclopedia of Methods of Judicial Execution by Geoffrey Abbott (Paperback).
I'm looking for research material concerning the lives of Executioners, torturers and undertakers in medieval Europe. I'm specifically looking at year 1000 +-200 years, but I'm also reading some very interesting things from the Renaissance period.
Some specific questions:
- I understand that many executioners were amateurs and poor, taking the unwanted task for a small amount of money. True? How common was this?
- I understand that there were professional executioners, often an inherited position. How common were these families? Was this more common than secretly hiring the town shitbird to perform the undesirable task?
- How well were their identities protected? I'm assuming that everyone knew the identities of the professional executioners.
- I have heard stories about crowds killing the executioner, before/after the execution was performed. Why did this occur? Botched execution? Popularity of the condemned?
- At some time periods, the executioner had the right to the executed peoples clothes. Did this extend to other possessions? Was this across European history, or limited to a specific time?
Joel F Harrington' s The Faithful Executioner is a very good account of a 16th c. German executioner Franz Schmidt, his life and his eventual desire to be made a respectable citizen of his town of Nuremberg. Schmidt's own journal, that Harrington used as the core of the book, has been in print for some time in German, and I notice it is now in English as well.
In the case of 16th c. Nuremberg, the executioner was one of several employees of the town that did disagreeable tasks. They tended to be shunned by the citizens. Schmidt's father was pressed into service by a previous prince, protesting loudly about losing his place in normal society. Once cast down, his son had no other choice.
A bad job would sometimes result in a riot. One in the Swiss canton of Chur resulted in the crowd stoning the swordsman...but it does seem as though killing the executioner for botching the job was not common.
Giving the executioner the clothes and jewelry, etc. of the condemned seems to have been pretty common practice. Mary Queen of Scots had a brief tussle with her executioner , who prevented her from giving her crucifix to a friend. You can find executioners claiming this right even in 18th c. England. One particularly arrogant criminal is recorded in The Malefactor's Bloody Register as arriving at the gallows splendidly dressed, and then taking off most of his finery and tossing it to the crowd, cheating and so greatly infuriating the hangman. But this stripping of the corpse conflicted with the practice of gibbeting, hanging up the corpse of the hanged man as a warning. They were left clothed. Schmidt at one point had the unpleasant task of putting more clothes on a gibbeted criminal after thieves had stolen his clothes and left him hanging only in his socks.