English
French
GermanTHE EXECUTIONER
An executioner is a person who carries out a death sentence for the state. The image that comes usually to people’s minds is of a hooded medieval executioner. The early Rheins and related families of Bourgard, Grosholtz, Herrmann, Lohr, Stoeckel, Wees, and Wolff were executioners in Alsace, in Lorraine, and in the Saarland in the Lower (Rhenish) Palatinate, all in the Holy Roman Empire prior to the Thirty Years War that ended in 1648. Following the war they were in Alsace and in Lorraine that were ceded to France. They were also in the Saar that became a French province in 1684 under the Truce of Regensburg, but in 1697, except for the town of Saarlouis, was returned to the empire. I have elected to discuss, in this section, the role of the executioner in early modern Germany during the period 1500 to 1800.
Social status was expressed in terms of honor in the early modern German society of orders (Standische Gesellschaft); to be denied status in this society meant to be denied honor. Throughout the empire, dishonorable tradesmen, such as linen-weavers, millers, skinners, and sow-gelders suffered various forms of social, economic, legal and, sometimes, political discrimination on a graduated scale of dishonor at the hands of the “honorable” guild artisans and in “honorable” society at large. Executioners, bailiffs, and other low–level police officers were at the center of dishonor. The degree of discrimination varied throughout the empire and the trades and the officials in lower ranking positions varied. The Guilds formed an important part of the economic and social fabric in that era. Among other things, they sought to control town or city governments, particularly in their heyday in the 11th to 16th centuries, in order to further the interests of the guild members and achieve their economic objectives. Dishonor occurred almost exclusively in cities until the mid-eighteenth century when peasants began to imitate the honor pretensions of city folk and it became most severe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Dishonor inherently was not the creation of either political or religious authorities.
The Executioner and Development of Judicial Procedures
The office of professional executioner in the empire did not exist in the early middle ages but seems to date back to the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries with the development of new judicial procedures and more elaborate corporal punishments that were to shape criminal justice through the early modern period. Historians have been unable to find sources that shed light on the origins of the executioner’s dishonor in the late middle ages. Prior to this time the court basically arbitrated a private settlement between the victim and the offender in which the victim or his family received a compensation that corresponded to the victim’s social status. When executions did occur they were carried out by a variety of people, all of whom were amateurs: by the accuser himself, by a member of the family, sometimes the youngest judge or juryman or by the beadle (servant of the court). In the latter middle ages, governmental authorities began to become more actively involved in criminal proceedings. Increasingly bloody corporal punishments resulted from the attempt by public authorities to pacify society at large and to monopolize the legitimate use of violence in the hands of government. The creation of the office of the professional executioner was a consequence of these developments. This new criminal justice system first took root in the cities. Maintaining the peace within the city walls was an urgent task in the densely populated towns, and the urban governments, such as Augsburg and Strasbourg, with their well-developed bureaucracies, were better able to administer new criminal procedures than the incipient territorial states in the empire. Death penalties were used extensively, to punish lesser crimes than murder such as theft, robbery, forgery, blasphemy, or even adultery.
Imperial Decrees
In 1373 in Augsburg, the denigration of the executioner was expressed more clearly but no legal consequences seemed to have derived from his low status. Later, in 1500 a Strasbourg ordinance imposed severe restrictions, making the executioner’s dishonorable status quite clear and requiring that he stand separately in church. The Bamberg criminal code of 1507 went even further, indicating that he might be denied the means of salvation altogether. At the imperial level, the police ordinance of 1530 listed executioners and Jews, among others, and prescribed special clothing for them. Although the imperial police ordinance provided local authorities with a loophole allowing them to adjust the provisions of the law according to local custom and circumstances, many governments followed the imperial lead. From 1452 on, Jews in Augsburg were required to wear a yellow ring on their clothing and about that time were expelled from the city and settled in nearby villages.
The imperial police ordinance of 1548 sought to rehabilitate various trades on the periphery of dishonor. The executioner was not mentioned. The ordinance cited the exclusion of
dishonorable people by artisanal guilds as an abuse, and ordered guilds to stop discriminating against linen-weavers, barber-surgeons, sheppards, millers, customs officers, musicians and bath masters and their children. The ordinance proclaimed all of these groups were of honorable origin. The fact that the ordinance attempted to rehabilitate other defiled trades does not mean that the dishonor of the executioner was in question. Instead, the ordinance reflects what would become official policy over the next centuries: containing dishonor within the dishonorable core group, while preventing it from affecting other trades.
In 1726 a super-regional journeymen’s boycott spread from Wurzburg, Stuttgart, and Munich throughout southern Germany and Austria and lasted for two years. This wave of strikes clearly demonstrated the impotence of local governments in conflicts with super-regional journeymen’s organizations. The imperial and local governments responded to the strike with the imperial ordinance of 1731 which set out to break the power of journeymen’s organizations once and for all by coordinating governmental measures of different territorial states and cities. It described artisan’s fear of pollution by dishonor as “madness”. It reconfirmed that those groups listed in the ordinances of 1548 and 1577 were honorable and extended the list to include beadles, bailiffs, grave-diggers, street cleaners, and the like. The rehabilitation of the executioner was implied in the ordinance and executioners were considered honorable in imperial law after 1731.
Skinners alone were considered dishonorable, until the second generation, under the condition that the first generation chooses a different honorable condition and remains in that condition for at least thirty years.
Duties and Status of the Executioner
The executioner, a skilled tradesman who had received years of training, was retained and paid by public authorities. As part of his compensation, the executioner was often furnished a house. Upon completing their training, apprentice executioners did a “masterpiece”, a beheading with a sword. If the execution went well, the young executioner was addressed as “Master”. No unskilled individual could easily be integrated into this professional group. They formed extensive marriage networks and transferred positions and property by marriage. Executioners in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were quite wealthy from the various services, including medical services they provided as well as exemption from the basic head tax, most property taxes, fees charged to finance city guards, military contributions and excise taxes on meat and alcohol. Servants and laborers who worked for the executioner often lived with the executioner and his family. In certain jurisdictions the executioner controlled the economic rights to skinning and leased out these rights to skinners (who often employed large teams of laborers) as a concession.
The offices of the executioner and skinner were linked. The skinner’s main function was to skin dead animals and to dispose of the carcasses. The skinner’s duties were clearly distinct from those of the butcher, who was an honorable artisan. The butcher, in contrast, slaughtered healthy livestock and skinned the animals on the spot. The skinner was also required to assist the executioner in torturing prisoners during interrogations and in carrying out criminal executions. Often the skinner carried out the “dishonorable” punishment of hanging, while the executioner reserved beheading, a more honorable form of execution for himself.
The civic code in the year 1276 in Augsburg, (one of the empire’s major cities with a population of around 45,000 in 1600) describes the executioner as a municipal employee with clearly defined rights and duties. His monopoly on executing death sentences and corporal punishment was clearly established. For beheadings and hangings, he was to receive five schillings. In addition, he was given everything the convict wore below the belt. He was to supervise public prostitutes and to arbitrate any conflicts that might arise between them and citizens. They were to pay him two Pfennig every Saturday, but he was “not to demand more”. He was also required to guard grain stored in the marketplace, for which he received a measure of corn, and to judge the quality of milk sold at market. He was to drive lepers out of town, for which he was paid five schillings every time a tax was levied, and to expel prostitutes who did not conform to the local rules of trade. Nowhere in Augsburg, is the executioner explicitly defined as dishonorable and the civic code mentions no legal disabilities or official discrimination against him.
In the imperial cities, the tenure was long and averaged about 24 years, much longer than in the communities or villages. There is little information available as to the number of executions performed or the number of cases of judicial torture. In the imperial city of Augsburg the average number of executions performed by the executioner and his assistant, the skinner, averaged between 1.8 per year between the years 1545 and 1699. In the eighteenth century, the number of executions began to decline as imprisonment became established as an alternative form of punishment. Enlightenment ideology and legal reforms resulted in a reduction of the use of torture as well.
The Executioner as Healer
The executioner’s symbolic role as one who was licensed to kill was offset by his role as a healer. The very man whose official function was to kill and maim spent much of his time “off duty” practicing medicine. Executioners’ gift of healing allowed them to come into contact with people of the highest social estate. Executioners’ practiced medicine in the homes of patricians and aristocrats, and at the courts of the territorial lords. While early modern Germans could choose among a wide variety of authorized and unauthorized medical practitioners, university-educated medical practitioners were at the top of the hierarchy. Executioners’ power to heal ran in families and they occupied a sanctioned niche as hereditary healers in the medical infrastructure of the early modern German town. Why did executioners have such an affinity for medicine? Their craft required a certain knowledge of human anatomy. Executioners had to judge the physical condition of prisoners when deciding which torture to apply, and they had to nurse them back to health afterwards. Their tasks in criminal justice provided them with greater opportunity to study the human body than university-trained doctors. Executioners derived many
ingredients for their medicines from the bodies of executed criminals – blood and human fat, used to cure a variety of ailments such as epilepsy, broken bones, sprains, or crippling arthritis.
Social Endogamy
By the early seventeenth century executioners and skinners had established a hereditary professional caste. One defining feature of this caste was a high degree of social endogamy. In contrast to artisans and other commoners who tended to marry locally, executioners and skinners often looked beyond their own locality to find marriage partners. Since there were usually only a small number of executioners’ and skinners’ children living in a city or community, they formed geographically extensive marriage networks. This intermarriage was also the result of family strategies to ensure the professional training of the young, the transfer of executioners’ positions, and the inheritance of wealth. Also, executioners tended to be well off in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and would have had little incentive to marry into economically weaker artisanal families. One historian has compared the genealogical structure of executioners’ dynasties with that of the aristocracy. There is not a single case of illegitimacy among Augsburg’s executioners and skinners in three centuries.
The Executioner’s Spiritual State
What was the executioner’s spiritual state? The medieval church had some difficulty developing a consistent policy. The early church opposed capital punishment explicitly and forbade Christians to hold offices that might involve the execution of a death sentence, but by the time In the 1700’s Europe remained predominantly rural and predominantly devoted to agriculture – except the more commercially advanced Dutch. The population of France was around 19 million in 1700 – more than three times the population of England, perhaps six times the population of the United Netherlands and six times the number of Finns and Swedes ruled by the King of Sweden. The population had grown to about 22 million by 1750, and France’s nobles, including wives and children were estimated at around 600,000. And the greatness of France benefited from Italy and Germany being divided lands, and from Spain’s demise as a great power. The Catholic Church in France supported the idea that the king’s power was derived from God rather than the will of his subjects. The Church still controlled education in France, including its universities, and the Church officiated concerning births, deaths and marriages. But its influence
was declining slowly.
In France, there were class tensions that no longer existed in England. The nobility enjoyed tax exemptions, and much of the tax burden was falling upon the peasants, who, with common townspeople, were siding with the bourgeoisie. And adding to the displeasure of the bourgeoisie and commoners was a lack of civil rights. The king could have anyone arrested without reason and imprison him as long as he wanted. The kingdom of King Louis XV had no uniform system of law.
But mostly it was the criminals that the French feared. French society was filled with swindlers, thieves, beggars, and vagabonds, and the average Frenchman delighted in witnessing their punishment. Justice was administered in police courts in the name of the king – the king reserving to himself the right to pardon, which King Louis XV rarely used. Some punishments were inflicted in public, for the pleasure of seeing the criminals suffer – not unlike the Roman spectators in the arena. Sometimes those deemed guilty of minor crimes were locked in place with a placard describing their crime. The guillotine had not been invented, and executions were done by beheading, hanging or splitting a body into parts. Capital punishment was still seen as the solution to crime. Many convicted of petty crimes were sentenced to death. At the time of the introduction of the guillotine, the corporation of executioners is vast and extends over all of France
The Guillotine
The guillotine was introduced into France in 1792 during the French Revolution. It consists of two upright posts surmounted by a crossbeam and grooved so as to guide an oblique-edged knife, the back of which is heavily weighted to make it fall forcefully upon (and slice through) the neck of a prone victim. A French physician, Joseph Ignace Guillotine, who was born at Saintes in 1738 and elected to the National Assembly in 1789, was instrumental in having a law passed requiring all sentences of death be carried out by “means of a machine”. The first execution using the guillotine was that of a highwayman on April 25, 1792, at the Place de Greve. An estimated 40,000 people traveled on the tumbrils through Paris to die under Madame Guillotine.
After the collapse of the Holy Roman Empire during the Napoleonic invasions, the system of discrimination against dishonorable people slowly dissolved. When the political framework of the empire collapsed many cities and principalities were incorporated into the larger territorial states, journeymen lost the leverage their super-regional network had provided under the old regime. Decrees abolishing craft associations were enacted in France in 1791 and in Austria and Germany in 1859-1860. The system of discrimination against dishonorable people came to an end in the first half of the nineteenth century.
Sources:
Extracts from “Defiled Trades and Social Outcasts” Honor and Ritual Pollution in Early Modern Germany, Kathy Stuart, 1999, Cambridge University Press. Published by The Press Syndicate of The University of Cambridge, The Pitt Building, Trumpington Street, Cambridge, The United Kingdom. The selected bibliography contains approximately 400 references, a number of which have been quoted in the commentary above.
The Encyclopedia Britannica
Excerpts from “Britain, France, and the Enlightenment in the 16th to 19th Centuries”, an Internet site by Frank E. Smith
Joseph P. Rhein
Sarasota, Florida
U.S.A.
December 26, 2005