'Attitudes toward professional executioners were highly ambiguous. Related: Medieval Torture's 10 Biggest MythsĮxecutioners, therefore, were a conundrum: crucial for maintaining law and order, yet shunned because of their unsavory work. That only boosted public suspicion of executioners and their families. This social isolation meant that executioners were left to consort with others forced to occupy society's underworld, 'undesirables' such as prostitutes, lepers and criminals. 'Some schools would not even take the children of executioners.' Marriage has to be done at the executioner's home,' Harrington said.

Many executioners were not allowed to go into churches. 'People wouldn't have invited executioners into their homes. So executioners were typically consigned to the fringes of society - and even forced to literally live at the edge of town. People whose professions revolved around death were people that the rest of society did not want to associate with. People were trapped in this family cycle of employment because, in reality, they had few other opportunities to work, according to Harrington. Over time, this passing of the baton from father to son created what Harrington called long-standing 'execution dynasties' that spread across Europe during the Middle Ages.īut the existence of those dynasties also reveals the poor image executioners had at the time. His father had unwillingly received the job when randomly ordained by a prince as a royal executioner. Even the diarist Schmidt was descended from an executioner. But typically, executioners came into the jobs through family ties most in the profession were men whose fathers had been executioners before them, Harrington explained. In some cases, butchers were roped in to become executioners, or convicts were offered the job as an alternative to their own deaths. In fact, those who ultimately became executioners didn't choose the job for themselves. 'So when they did catch them, they really liked to make a good example and have a public spectacle' - hence the need for public executioners to carry out that work.īut people weren't exactly lining up for the job of hanging, beheading or burning criminals at the stake most people understandably saw this as undesirable work. The problem was that things were 'a little like the American Wild West, in that most criminals got away,' Harrington told Live Science.

Dead space brute execution