March 22, 2025 • 21 mins
(Host: Kristin)
Both feared and respected, the executioner was indispensable to the premodern system of justice in the West. The skill and the service he provided were essential to keeping order but: who were they, how did one become an executioner, and did he wear a mask? Find out this week on Footnoting History!
For further reading suggestions and more, please visit: https://www.footnotinghistory.com
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Episode Transcript
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(00:00):
The executioner was indispensable to the medieval and early modern systems of justice – executioners
were skilled and the services they provided were essential to keeping order, but who were they, how
did one become an executioner, and did they really wear masks? Find out today on Footnoting History!
(00:23):
Hello, Footnoting History friends, it’s Kristin, back with another cheery topic for you: the
executioner in the medieval and early modern West. It’s a subject that comes up for me quite a bit –
which, I don’t know what that says about me, but I’m sure someone out there will tell me. Execution
is a feature of European witchcraft history and one of my degree focuses was crime and punishment
(00:48):
in early modern Europe, so … yeah, it comes up a bit. More so for my work in the 15th through
the 17th centuries than for anything medieval that I do, which is something of a surprise to
people – but there you go. Many historians have written about the process of justice in these
eras – and Michel Foucault famously had a go at Enlightenment writers in “Discipline and Punish”
(01:13):
where he argued that justice didn’t “fall upon the body indiscriminately,” rather it was “calculated
according to detailed rules.” In other words, yeah, it probably strikes most of us as pretty
harsh and for want of a better word (01:27):
gorey but there was logic to it and people weren’t
just swinging axes around willy nilly. There were social functions to capital punishment that were
actually … positive? I’m not 100% sold on that, but there is most certainly a performative public
social aspect to executions in the medieval and early modern West, and the rituals have also been
(01:54):
interpreted as being about people’s deeply held beliefs about spiritual salvation and cleansing
of both the community and the culprit before the culprit met their maker. Historians have
written a lot about the meaning and function of executions, if you are so interested.
But there isn’t a whole lot written about executioners in particular – there are a
few works that are listed in the Further Reading as well as topics tangential to
(02:18):
the works of the executioner but they’re generally not the topic of study themselves
despite being so damn interesting. But if you want to talk about the mechanisms of
justice in the premodern, you can’t without talking about executioners.
First, let me say that medieval people were not “execution happy,” as the stereotype tends to go.
(02:41):
I dare you to watch a medieval themed movie and not report back on at least one scene of
a public execution before a jeering group of toothless peasants covered in mud. It’s
like the law for these movies. Yes, medieval and early modern people employed the death
penalty more so than most modern countries do today – and sometimes for things that we would
(03:03):
consider maybe not so bad like theft – but they understood how serious a punishment death was,
and it was often more of a last resort than a first. Some listeners might remember Sam’s
previous episode on avoiding the death penalty in medieval England – and if you don’t and think
it sounds interesting, you’re right, go listen! There were a few ways of avoiding the hangman
(03:24):
in England – and in England where there were juries, juries did often tend toward reluctance
to impose the death penalty. In Continental Europe, which had a different legal system,
there were other ways that mercy could be granted as well, and pardons were often sought and given.
And this is not even counting people who were able to skip out on trials altogether or justice
(03:45):
systems that were ill-equipped to nab and hold criminal suspects in the first place. The picture
changes a bit when we turn from medieval to early modern – because of factors like witch panics and
booms in population and religious and political upheaval, and changes in how states governed and
want to be viewed on the world stage, but even then, people did want to “get it right.” There
(04:08):
were moments in time when, say, witch hunting is at a frenzy and the executioner is a pretty busy
fellow – but there are also witch trials where the accused languished in prison for months,
sometimes years, while their cases go back and forth between universities and the evidence
is very carefully considered before any legal moves were made. People were not desensitized to
(04:31):
executions and in the bigger towns, there were probably only a handful in an ordinary year.
Richard van Dulmen put it well when he said that only a fraction of crimes ever actually made it
to court, let alone the scaffold. The biggest slam dunk was catching someone red handed,
but that’s not how most cases played out – people did have an obligation to report crimes but not
every person’s word was considered “good” or trustworthy and a lot of crimes happened in
(04:54):
secret so there’s a lot holding up arrests and convictions. Most pre- and early modern
governments didn’t have the machinery to get all the criminals – and even once you got them,
if they’re being detained, it’s for trial or while awaiting punishment. Occasionally prison sentences
did exist, but more often than not, the accused and the convicted aren’t hanging out for years.
(05:16):
Eventually, the workhouse and the penitentiary will evolve in the later 17th and18th centuries,
but they don’t really overtake the justice system until well into the 19th century. All this is to
say that executions existed as part of the system of law and order for a long time in Europe.
Punishments were supposed to be carried out in a controlled way, in a demonstration of law and
(05:39):
order – and having them done “professionally,” or skillfully was often seen as a service that
these governments were providing. There are many interpretations as to the full purpose
of capital punishment beyond the obvious aspect of punishment: deterrence is a thing people raise a
lot. And historians have different interpretations of how the general public experienced executions.
(06:02):
Paul Friedland says that the French freaking loved going – they got super excited to watch,
rented out the best spots to get the best view – and I don’t know, probably have a glass of wine,
they’re French – and it was very much a spectator sport, and they probably weren’t thinking about
the political statement the king was trying to make. Richard van Dulmen talks about how
the process became more solemn and orderly in the 18th century (and he’s talking more about areas
(06:25):
of modern-day German, and not the carnival that was the guillotine during the French Revolution),
and Dulman says that yes, the condemned was subject to mockery and derision,
but also that the audience expressed pity and they prayed for the condemned, sometimes they
gave the condemned drinks along the route to the scaffold. In the days leading up to the execution,
the condemned were often transferred to better cells, some got new clothes,
(06:49):
better food and drink, some got a special last meal. They got to settle their estates,
make private goodbyes to family, and they were encouraged to focus on their souls. It did depend
on the crime and the criminal. In some ways, the condemned person had a leg up on making it
to heaven, which sounds a little weird to say, so let me explain. Medieval and early modern Europe
(07:11):
were largely Christian populations, and there was a lot of emphasis on “dying well,” like
Christ. But also the dying person knew they were dying – not every one gets a heads up like that,
so they had an opportunity to meet death with patience and humility, to prepare their
souls and confess all their sins and repent. Theoretically, they could end up in heaven in
(07:34):
no short order – maybe a stop over in Purgatory to atone, but the path was there. Not everyone
played this part so graciously, but that was the ideal. So, the experience could vary but the
finale was very public and there was an important guy who was getting things done: the executioner.
Yes, the man of the hour – and yes, they were always men. The “hangman,” the “headsman,”
(07:59):
the executioner, Choppy McChopster. I may have made that last one up. Before the 13th century,
a variety of people could carry out a death sentence:
it could be the victim or the victim’s family, judges, or sometimes even other criminals,
a practice that went on for some time in parts of Europe. In 14th-century Florence,
they selected a person condemned to death to do the job – and once he worked as an executioner for
(08:25):
four years, he was given his freedom. Professional executioners as such start to appear in the early
13th century in Europe around the same time that public spectacles of punishment are starting to
get a bit more elaborate. It seems that the region of Normandy was early to the party and someone
named Nicolas Jouhanne (nicknamed “la justice”) was a professional executioner in the vicomte
(08:49):
of Caux around 1202. And then all the cool kids started doing it too and Paris has a professional
executioner by 1275 – and the trend seems to be going on in other parts of Europe around the same
time as well and by the time you get to the 1400s, the executioner’s job had become professionalized
and the people who did it developed into a kind of caste, a people apart in society.
(09:14):
Executioners would come from dynasties, it was something you were born into – and sons learned
the trade from their fathers, in a sort of “take your kid to work,” kind of apprenticeship – and
then those sons would go on to marry the daughters of executioners in other towns because good luck
marrying your executioner son off to anyone else. They really occupied a strange sort of position in
(09:37):
society – they were feared, they were necessary, they were skilled, you hated them but you needed
them – and no one really wanted to interact with them, unless you were a family in the same
business, so they came to be a people somewhat apart. They really did become dynasties. That
Jouhanne guy was just the first in a long line of Jouhanne executioners working in northern France –
(09:59):
well into the 19th century. Friedland says that these stable executioner dynasties are pretty
established in France and other areas of Europe by the later part of the 16th century. The dynasties
could last a long time – but that didn’t always mean individual executioners lasted long in the
job. Some of them only lasted a few years before being removed – or finding out how that scaffold
(10:21):
looked from another perspective – or they left the trade. Starting in the 14th century in Dubrovnik
(which a city in modern-day Croatia), the post of executioner had a two-year term limit with the
possibility of being renewed – though Dubrovnik sometimes went for years without fulfilling the
post. Some executioners did last decades in the job, though. The famous Charles-Henri
(10:43):
Sanson who ran the guillotine during the French Revolution had been doing the job for decades
before the Revolution and came from a long line of Parisian executioners who started the job in 1688.
In the 18th century, when Enlightenment thinkers were trying to emphasize a new more “rational”
system of justice, they talked about the executioner more as a bureaucratic “agent of the
(11:06):
law,” a regular guy just doing his job. And this is different from how he was viewed for much of
the medieval and early modern eras (11:13):
executioners were respected but they were also creatures
apart – their touch was thought to carry power and if they touched ordinary people or objects,
those people and objects were affected and not for the better. The executioner wasn’t just in
charge of the final death blow – he was also the guy who, especially in the early modern era
(11:35):
and areas of Europe where inquisitorial procedure was being used, he was the guy who did the actual
torturing. Executioners mostly worked as hangmen – hanging was the usual punishment for ordinary
criminals – extraordinary crimes might require extraordinary punishments, such as burning;
or if you were one of the upper classes, you’d likely get beheaded, but hanging was the general
(11:58):
name of the game. Commutations of sentences were common – but that didn’t mean you were going free
or even being allowed to live. There are a lot of pretty severe punishments handed down – like
burning but also breaking on the wheel and other delightful endings, but mercy could be granted by
commuting those to hanging or beheading, which, though less elaborate than some other methods,
(12:21):
did still require skill. Executioners’ duties did not necessarily end with the death of the
convicted – sometimes the punishment required dismembering of the body or putting the head in
a visible location, like say a bridge or a city wall or gate. And their jobs could also include
disfigurement or maiming of some kind – eye gouging, hand-cutting-off-ness, fun stuff like
(12:46):
that. If someone were convicted of being whipped or pilloried, the executioner did that too.
He had special knowledge of the human body – he knew just how far to go in torturing
so that he didn’t kill the accused. If did, he was a bad at his job. You gotta save that part
for later. This intimate knowledge of the human body did, however, mean that ordinary
(13:08):
people sought out executioners when they were off the clock – people wanted medical advice,
or they wanted pieces of the gallows, or clothes of the victims that he was
in possession of – things that people believed carried magical properties.
They didn’t necessarily seek him out in the light of day, but they did go to him.
Executioners could make good money off of these side jobs. They were also paid
(13:31):
per execution or torturing session and they got on well financially. The city
of Bordeaux in France had an executioner price list – beheading cost 30 livres,
it was 20 for burning at the stake and cutting off a hand was a bargain at 6 livres. And this
was the town paying the executioner to do the job, not the victim paying the executioner,
(13:52):
though sometimes victims would give them a kind of tip to show they forgave the executioner and
to also do some last-minute sucking up so he wouldn’t make them suffer unnecessarily.
There were also Rent-An-Executioners, if you will. If an executioner had to travel
– not every town had their very own – they were compensated for their travel expenses.
(14:15):
Executioners were very public servants carrying out public tasks. They had an important public
role to fulfill and they had to do a good job. They were supposed to perform, as Nella Lonza put
it, a “clean and swift execution.” In Frankfurt, in 1772, when a woman convicted of infanticide had
her head struck off by the executioner “happily and well,” the overseeing judge proclaimed that
(14:39):
the executioner “fulfilled his task well, in accordance with the command of G-d and the
authorities.” Crowds didn’t always cooperate and the executioner didn’t always do a great job. So
much of the job depended on the crowd’s mood and the condemned person’s cooperation. Sometimes the
executioner and the condemned struck an agreement beforehand and the executioner
would make things as quick and painless as possible. In some areas of early modern Germany,
(15:04):
the condemned and the executioner – and sometimes the judges – would have a last meal together the
night before. Unsurprisingly, the condemned didn’t usually eat much at those ghoulish last suppers.
Sometimes on the scaffold, the condemned was not repentant or they panicked or cursed the
executioner which then meant a pissed-off and stressed-out executioner or one that
(15:26):
had a hard time doing an ultimately bad job. If things didn’t go smoothly, the audience got mad
and sometimes they attacked the executioner – best case scenario, he didn’t get paid.
Many executioners were literate, which was not something you could say for most people – but
was something you could say for the upper classes. Most of them could at least sign their names and
(15:48):
some of them even wrote letters. Executioners also had a special place to sit in church, they had
special clothes. Which is all to say that everyone knew who these guys were, they were not cloaked in
secrecy or a mask. It was kind of the opposite: executioners had to wear some identifying mark (16:00):
undefined
so people would know precisely who they were. This could be a cloak or a special stick they
carried. In the city of Amiens, there was a whole outfit the executioner wore that was half green,
half yellow – though the exact colors could change over the years. Sometimes executioners got into
(16:22):
fights with towns about having to wear something distinctive – or wear something distinctive where
people could actually see it – aka, not hidden under some other piece of clothing.
Ordinary, good people knew who they were and actively avoided the executioner and his family,
at least publicly. Some towns wanted that physical separation so much they made the executioner and
(16:42):
his family live on the very edge of town or outside town limits. In 16th-century Italy,
there was a saying (16:48):
“lonely as an executioner.” That special seat in
church wasn’t all it was cracked up to be (16:52):
no one wanted to sit next to them – and at inns,
they had to sit alone and drink too. And merchants wouldn’t even hand him
food directly. They’d put the stuff in a bag and hand it to him and there even evolved a
special executioner spoon. I’m not kidding you guys – some were tin-plated, some were wooden,
they had long handles, and that’s how they got their goods in the market and
(17:14):
how people avoided their touch. They’re in 18th century Encyclopédie, they were such A Thing.
Because their job was considered quite skilled – and not many people wanted to do it – executioners
were able to negotiate a lot of privileges for themselves and their families. In some areas,
they were also allowed to seize goods from sellers in the marketplace – in France this was
(17:35):
called “havage” which perhaps comes from an old Breton word meaning “a handful.” Towns had their
own lists of the things executioners could grab and who they could grab them from, but grab they
did and they could really pad their income and households with this privilege. They would go to
the marketplace and just point that long spoon at people to demand their goods and, well, that was
(17:58):
another reason people tended not to like these guys, as if you needed one more. As the office
evolved in the 18th century, the havage started to be replaced with more regular salaries – and
the figure of the executioner started to undergo change, and they stopped wearing the colorful
costumes and started looking like just anyone else in a powdered wig and normal clothes.
(18:21):
Executioners weren’t working every day, at least not in the executing or torturing capacity. They
were multitaskers. Beyond their medical services and selling charms, they did other things,
too. In France, their official title was “the master of high and low works.” “High works” meant
capital punishment, and “low works” could mean a lot of things – they were in charge of cleaning
(18:44):
the sewers, for removing dead animals, managing stray dogs. Sometimes they were a policing force,
in charge of enforcing regulations related to livestock or they were in charge of keeping
lepers out of the city, keeping the prostitutes in line or overseeing gambling houses. Basically,
a lot of stuff that no one else wanted to deal with and/or was considered morally problematic.
(19:09):
By the later 18th century, executing wasn’t quite what it used to be – the job wasn’t
nearly as lucrative, or frequently used, and a lot of executioners found themselves out
of work and somewhat destitute. This was particularly striking in France,
when the havage and other feudal privileges were gotten rid of in 1789, and soon after,
(19:32):
executioners are seen in the records begging towns for money and food. The
so-called “humanizing” of the European penal systems meant that capital penalties levelled
out and were less diverse – and jails and penitentiaries started to become more common.
He was a complicated fellow, that executioner, respected in that he was needed and what he did
(19:54):
was skilled yeah, but definitely not beloved, and he’s crucial to our understanding of the process
of justice in the medieval and early modern West – how that process evolved and what it meant and
what purpose it served. “The executioner” as a type of person is a somewhat exotic creature
to the modern audience, though a lot of us live in countries that still employ the death penalty
(20:20):
whether we agree with it or not. Many of the same rationales for its need are the same as
they were in the medieval and early modern eras – though we don’t always know the person ultimately
responsible for that judicially sanctioned end of life – and at least in the United States,
it’s a role that is hard to fill and fulfill. Modern executioners are masked,
(20:40):
at least metaphorically, but the executioners of the past were not.
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(21:02):
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Please like and subscribe and remember: the best stories are in the footnotes. (21:06):
undefined
The executioner was indispensable to the medieval and early modern systems of justice – executioners
were skilled and the services they provided were essential to keeping order, but who were they, how
did one become an executioner, and did they really wear masks? Find out today on Footnoting History!
(00:23):
Hello, Footnoting History friends, it’s Kristin, back with another cheery topic for you: the
executioner in the medieval and early modern West. It’s a subject that comes up for me quite a bit –
which, I don’t know what that says about me, but I’m sure someone out there will tell me. Execution
is a feature of European witchcraft history and one of my degree focuses was crime and punishment
(00:48):
in early modern Europe, so … yeah, it comes up a bit. More so for my work in the 15th through
the 17th centuries than for anything medieval that I do, which is something of a surprise to
people – but there you go. Many historians have written about the process of justice in these
eras – and Michel Foucault famously had a go at Enlightenment writers in “Discipline and Punish”
(01:13):
where he argued that justice didn’t “fall upon the body indiscriminately,” rather it was “calculated
according to detailed rules.” In other words, yeah, it probably strikes most of us as pretty
harsh and for want of a better word (01:27):
gorey but there was logic to it and people weren’t
just swinging axes around willy nilly. There were social functions to capital punishment that were
actually … positive? I’m not 100% sold on that, but there is most certainly a performative public
social aspect to executions in the medieval and early modern West, and the rituals have also been
(01:54):
interpreted as being about people’s deeply held beliefs about spiritual salvation and cleansing
of both the community and the culprit before the culprit met their maker. Historians have
written a lot about the meaning and function of executions, if you are so interested.
But there isn’t a whole lot written about executioners in particular – there are a
few works that are listed in the Further Reading as well as topics tangential to
(02:18):
the works of the executioner but they’re generally not the topic of study themselves
despite being so damn interesting. But if you want to talk about the mechanisms of
justice in the premodern, you can’t without talking about executioners.
First, let me say that medieval people were not “execution happy,” as the stereotype tends to go.
(02:41):
I dare you to watch a medieval themed movie and not report back on at least one scene of
a public execution before a jeering group of toothless peasants covered in mud. It’s
like the law for these movies. Yes, medieval and early modern people employed the death
penalty more so than most modern countries do today – and sometimes for things that we would
(03:03):
consider maybe not so bad like theft – but they understood how serious a punishment death was,
and it was often more of a last resort than a first. Some listeners might remember Sam’s
previous episode on avoiding the death penalty in medieval England – and if you don’t and think
it sounds interesting, you’re right, go listen! There were a few ways of avoiding the hangman
(03:24):
in England – and in England where there were juries, juries did often tend toward reluctance
to impose the death penalty. In Continental Europe, which had a different legal system,
there were other ways that mercy could be granted as well, and pardons were often sought and given.
And this is not even counting people who were able to skip out on trials altogether or justice
(03:45):
systems that were ill-equipped to nab and hold criminal suspects in the first place. The picture
changes a bit when we turn from medieval to early modern – because of factors like witch panics and
booms in population and religious and political upheaval, and changes in how states governed and
want to be viewed on the world stage, but even then, people did want to “get it right.” There
(04:08):
were moments in time when, say, witch hunting is at a frenzy and the executioner is a pretty busy
fellow – but there are also witch trials where the accused languished in prison for months,
sometimes years, while their cases go back and forth between universities and the evidence
is very carefully considered before any legal moves were made. People were not desensitized to
(04:31):
executions and in the bigger towns, there were probably only a handful in an ordinary year.
Richard van Dulmen put it well when he said that only a fraction of crimes ever actually made it
to court, let alone the scaffold. The biggest slam dunk was catching someone red handed,
but that’s not how most cases played out – people did have an obligation to report crimes but not
every person’s word was considered “good” or trustworthy and a lot of crimes happened in
(04:54):
secret so there’s a lot holding up arrests and convictions. Most pre- and early modern
governments didn’t have the machinery to get all the criminals – and even once you got them,
if they’re being detained, it’s for trial or while awaiting punishment. Occasionally prison sentences
did exist, but more often than not, the accused and the convicted aren’t hanging out for years.
(05:16):
Eventually, the workhouse and the penitentiary will evolve in the later 17th and18th centuries,
but they don’t really overtake the justice system until well into the 19th century. All this is to
say that executions existed as part of the system of law and order for a long time in Europe.
Punishments were supposed to be carried out in a controlled way, in a demonstration of law and
(05:39):
order – and having them done “professionally,” or skillfully was often seen as a service that
these governments were providing. There are many interpretations as to the full purpose
of capital punishment beyond the obvious aspect of punishment: deterrence is a thing people raise a
lot. And historians have different interpretations of how the general public experienced executions.
(06:02):
Paul Friedland says that the French freaking loved going – they got super excited to watch,
rented out the best spots to get the best view – and I don’t know, probably have a glass of wine,
they’re French – and it was very much a spectator sport, and they probably weren’t thinking about
the political statement the king was trying to make. Richard van Dulmen talks about how
the process became more solemn and orderly in the 18th century (and he’s talking more about areas
(06:25):
of modern-day German, and not the carnival that was the guillotine during the French Revolution),
and Dulman says that yes, the condemned was subject to mockery and derision,
but also that the audience expressed pity and they prayed for the condemned, sometimes they
gave the condemned drinks along the route to the scaffold. In the days leading up to the execution,
the condemned were often transferred to better cells, some got new clothes,
(06:49):
better food and drink, some got a special last meal. They got to settle their estates,
make private goodbyes to family, and they were encouraged to focus on their souls. It did depend
on the crime and the criminal. In some ways, the condemned person had a leg up on making it
to heaven, which sounds a little weird to say, so let me explain. Medieval and early modern Europe
(07:11):
were largely Christian populations, and there was a lot of emphasis on “dying well,” like
Christ. But also the dying person knew they were dying – not every one gets a heads up like that,
so they had an opportunity to meet death with patience and humility, to prepare their
souls and confess all their sins and repent. Theoretically, they could end up in heaven in
(07:34):
no short order – maybe a stop over in Purgatory to atone, but the path was there. Not everyone
played this part so graciously, but that was the ideal. So, the experience could vary but the
finale was very public and there was an important guy who was getting things done: the executioner.
Yes, the man of the hour – and yes, they were always men. The “hangman,” the “headsman,”
(07:59):
the executioner, Choppy McChopster. I may have made that last one up. Before the 13th century,
a variety of people could carry out a death sentence:
it could be the victim or the victim’s family, judges, or sometimes even other criminals,
a practice that went on for some time in parts of Europe. In 14th-century Florence,
they selected a person condemned to death to do the job – and once he worked as an executioner for
(08:25):
four years, he was given his freedom. Professional executioners as such start to appear in the early
13th century in Europe around the same time that public spectacles of punishment are starting to
get a bit more elaborate. It seems that the region of Normandy was early to the party and someone
named Nicolas Jouhanne (nicknamed “la justice”) was a professional executioner in the vicomte
(08:49):
of Caux around 1202. And then all the cool kids started doing it too and Paris has a professional
executioner by 1275 – and the trend seems to be going on in other parts of Europe around the same
time as well and by the time you get to the 1400s, the executioner’s job had become professionalized
and the people who did it developed into a kind of caste, a people apart in society.
(09:14):
Executioners would come from dynasties, it was something you were born into – and sons learned
the trade from their fathers, in a sort of “take your kid to work,” kind of apprenticeship – and
then those sons would go on to marry the daughters of executioners in other towns because good luck
marrying your executioner son off to anyone else. They really occupied a strange sort of position in
(09:37):
society – they were feared, they were necessary, they were skilled, you hated them but you needed
them – and no one really wanted to interact with them, unless you were a family in the same
business, so they came to be a people somewhat apart. They really did become dynasties. That
Jouhanne guy was just the first in a long line of Jouhanne executioners working in northern France –
(09:59):
well into the 19th century. Friedland says that these stable executioner dynasties are pretty
established in France and other areas of Europe by the later part of the 16th century. The dynasties
could last a long time – but that didn’t always mean individual executioners lasted long in the
job. Some of them only lasted a few years before being removed – or finding out how that scaffold
(10:21):
looked from another perspective – or they left the trade. Starting in the 14th century in Dubrovnik
(which a city in modern-day Croatia), the post of executioner had a two-year term limit with the
possibility of being renewed – though Dubrovnik sometimes went for years without fulfilling the
post. Some executioners did last decades in the job, though. The famous Charles-Henri
(10:43):
Sanson who ran the guillotine during the French Revolution had been doing the job for decades
before the Revolution and came from a long line of Parisian executioners who started the job in 1688.
In the 18th century, when Enlightenment thinkers were trying to emphasize a new more “rational”
system of justice, they talked about the executioner more as a bureaucratic “agent of the
(11:06):
law,” a regular guy just doing his job. And this is different from how he was viewed for much of
the medieval and early modern eras (11:13):
executioners were respected but they were also creatures
apart – their touch was thought to carry power and if they touched ordinary people or objects,
those people and objects were affected and not for the better. The executioner wasn’t just in
charge of the final death blow – he was also the guy who, especially in the early modern era
(11:35):
and areas of Europe where inquisitorial procedure was being used, he was the guy who did the actual
torturing. Executioners mostly worked as hangmen – hanging was the usual punishment for ordinary
criminals – extraordinary crimes might require extraordinary punishments, such as burning;
or if you were one of the upper classes, you’d likely get beheaded, but hanging was the general
(11:58):
name of the game. Commutations of sentences were common – but that didn’t mean you were going free
or even being allowed to live. There are a lot of pretty severe punishments handed down – like
burning but also breaking on the wheel and other delightful endings, but mercy could be granted by
commuting those to hanging or beheading, which, though less elaborate than some other methods,
(12:21):
did still require skill. Executioners’ duties did not necessarily end with the death of the
convicted – sometimes the punishment required dismembering of the body or putting the head in
a visible location, like say a bridge or a city wall or gate. And their jobs could also include
disfigurement or maiming of some kind – eye gouging, hand-cutting-off-ness, fun stuff like
(12:46):
that. If someone were convicted of being whipped or pilloried, the executioner did that too.
He had special knowledge of the human body – he knew just how far to go in torturing
so that he didn’t kill the accused. If did, he was a bad at his job. You gotta save that part
for later. This intimate knowledge of the human body did, however, mean that ordinary
(13:08):
people sought out executioners when they were off the clock – people wanted medical advice,
or they wanted pieces of the gallows, or clothes of the victims that he was
in possession of – things that people believed carried magical properties.
They didn’t necessarily seek him out in the light of day, but they did go to him.
Executioners could make good money off of these side jobs. They were also paid
(13:31):
per execution or torturing session and they got on well financially. The city
of Bordeaux in France had an executioner price list – beheading cost 30 livres,
it was 20 for burning at the stake and cutting off a hand was a bargain at 6 livres. And this
was the town paying the executioner to do the job, not the victim paying the executioner,
(13:52):
though sometimes victims would give them a kind of tip to show they forgave the executioner and
to also do some last-minute sucking up so he wouldn’t make them suffer unnecessarily.
There were also Rent-An-Executioners, if you will. If an executioner had to travel
– not every town had their very own – they were compensated for their travel expenses.
(14:15):
Executioners were very public servants carrying out public tasks. They had an important public
role to fulfill and they had to do a good job. They were supposed to perform, as Nella Lonza put
it, a “clean and swift execution.” In Frankfurt, in 1772, when a woman convicted of infanticide had
her head struck off by the executioner “happily and well,” the overseeing judge proclaimed that
(14:39):
the executioner “fulfilled his task well, in accordance with the command of G-d and the
authorities.” Crowds didn’t always cooperate and the executioner didn’t always do a great job. So
much of the job depended on the crowd’s mood and the condemned person’s cooperation. Sometimes the
executioner and the condemned struck an agreement beforehand and the executioner
would make things as quick and painless as possible. In some areas of early modern Germany,
(15:04):
the condemned and the executioner – and sometimes the judges – would have a last meal together the
night before. Unsurprisingly, the condemned didn’t usually eat much at those ghoulish last suppers.
Sometimes on the scaffold, the condemned was not repentant or they panicked or cursed the
executioner which then meant a pissed-off and stressed-out executioner or one that
(15:26):
had a hard time doing an ultimately bad job. If things didn’t go smoothly, the audience got mad
and sometimes they attacked the executioner – best case scenario, he didn’t get paid.
Many executioners were literate, which was not something you could say for most people – but
was something you could say for the upper classes. Most of them could at least sign their names and
(15:48):
some of them even wrote letters. Executioners also had a special place to sit in church, they had
special clothes. Which is all to say that everyone knew who these guys were, they were not cloaked in
secrecy or a mask. It was kind of the opposite: executioners had to wear some identifying mark (16:00):
undefined
so people would know precisely who they were. This could be a cloak or a special stick they
carried. In the city of Amiens, there was a whole outfit the executioner wore that was half green,
half yellow – though the exact colors could change over the years. Sometimes executioners got into
(16:22):
fights with towns about having to wear something distinctive – or wear something distinctive where
people could actually see it – aka, not hidden under some other piece of clothing.
Ordinary, good people knew who they were and actively avoided the executioner and his family,
at least publicly. Some towns wanted that physical separation so much they made the executioner and
(16:42):
his family live on the very edge of town or outside town limits. In 16th-century Italy,
there was a saying (16:48):
“lonely as an executioner.” That special seat in
church wasn’t all it was cracked up to be (16:52):
no one wanted to sit next to them – and at inns,
they had to sit alone and drink too. And merchants wouldn’t even hand him
food directly. They’d put the stuff in a bag and hand it to him and there even evolved a
special executioner spoon. I’m not kidding you guys – some were tin-plated, some were wooden,
they had long handles, and that’s how they got their goods in the market and
(17:14):
how people avoided their touch. They’re in 18th century Encyclopédie, they were such A Thing.
Because their job was considered quite skilled – and not many people wanted to do it – executioners
were able to negotiate a lot of privileges for themselves and their families. In some areas,
they were also allowed to seize goods from sellers in the marketplace – in France this was
(17:35):
called “havage” which perhaps comes from an old Breton word meaning “a handful.” Towns had their
own lists of the things executioners could grab and who they could grab them from, but grab they
did and they could really pad their income and households with this privilege. They would go to
the marketplace and just point that long spoon at people to demand their goods and, well, that was
(17:58):
another reason people tended not to like these guys, as if you needed one more. As the office
evolved in the 18th century, the havage started to be replaced with more regular salaries – and
the figure of the executioner started to undergo change, and they stopped wearing the colorful
costumes and started looking like just anyone else in a powdered wig and normal clothes.
(18:21):
Executioners weren’t working every day, at least not in the executing or torturing capacity. They
were multitaskers. Beyond their medical services and selling charms, they did other things,
too. In France, their official title was “the master of high and low works.” “High works” meant
capital punishment, and “low works” could mean a lot of things – they were in charge of cleaning
(18:44):
the sewers, for removing dead animals, managing stray dogs. Sometimes they were a policing force,
in charge of enforcing regulations related to livestock or they were in charge of keeping
lepers out of the city, keeping the prostitutes in line or overseeing gambling houses. Basically,
a lot of stuff that no one else wanted to deal with and/or was considered morally problematic.
(19:09):
By the later 18th century, executing wasn’t quite what it used to be – the job wasn’t
nearly as lucrative, or frequently used, and a lot of executioners found themselves out
of work and somewhat destitute. This was particularly striking in France,
when the havage and other feudal privileges were gotten rid of in 1789, and soon after,
(19:32):
executioners are seen in the records begging towns for money and food. The
so-called “humanizing” of the European penal systems meant that capital penalties levelled
out and were less diverse – and jails and penitentiaries started to become more common.
He was a complicated fellow, that executioner, respected in that he was needed and what he did
(19:54):
was skilled yeah, but definitely not beloved, and he’s crucial to our understanding of the process
of justice in the medieval and early modern West – how that process evolved and what it meant and
what purpose it served. “The executioner” as a type of person is a somewhat exotic creature
to the modern audience, though a lot of us live in countries that still employ the death penalty
(20:20):
whether we agree with it or not. Many of the same rationales for its need are the same as
they were in the medieval and early modern eras – though we don’t always know the person ultimately
responsible for that judicially sanctioned end of life – and at least in the United States,
it’s a role that is hard to fill and fulfill. Modern executioners are masked,
(20:40):
at least metaphorically, but the executioners of the past were not.
This has been Footnoting History. If you like the podcast, please visit our website Footnoting
History.com where you can find hundreds of previous episodes, Further Readings lists,
and teaching resources. You can also find out how to support the work we do and keep
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(21:02):
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Please like and subscribe and remember: the best stories are in the footnotes. (21:06):
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