August 13, 2011

Today’s Provincial Yet Truly Morbid Fact!

In olden times there was often a stigma attached to executioners. Provincial European executioners often lived out of town, in isolated though not necessarily inferior circumstances. In church, they and their families were generally assigned a separate pew; if they ate in the tavern, they were seated separately. In cities, this distance was more marked. The seventeenth-century Nuremberg executioner Master Franz Schmidt, known to posterity for the laundry list of a journal that he kept of his executions, was given a large stone tower on a spit on the Furth River. The property came with a gated portion of one of the two bridges connecting the spit to the city, which was his sole walkway for the early-evening constitutional. If the executioner had been drawn from the criminal ranks, the man was physically “marked”. In the Swedish town of Arboga, in 1470, a thief on the gallows, commuted for serving as hangman for his fellows, was branded with an iron. Two centuries later, a thief in the town of Gronso agreed to become his fellows’ hangman; both his ears were cut off.

Culled from: The Last Face You’ll Ever See