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Executioners - Blog Posts

wardenwyrd
8 months ago

Whats the history of executioners as a societal class? Im ready

In some cases, butchers were roped in to become executioners, or convicts were offered the job as an alternative to their own deaths. 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. Even the diarist Schmidt was descended from an executioner. His father had unwillingly received the job when randomly ordained by a prince as a royal executioner. 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.
But the existence of those dynasties also reveals the poor image executioners had at the time. People were trapped in this family cycle of employment because, in reality, they had few other opportunities to work, according to Harrington. People whose professions revolved around death were people that the rest of society did not want to associate with. So executioners were typically consigned to the fringes of society — and even forced to literally live at the edge of town.
"People wouldn't have invited executioners into their homes. Many executioners were not allowed to go into churches. Marriage has to be done at the executioner's home," Harrington said. "Some schools would not even take the children of executioners." 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. That only boosted public suspicion of executioners and their families.
Executioners, therefore, were a conundrum: crucial for maintaining law and order, yet shunned because of their unsavory work. "Attitudes toward professional executioners were highly ambiguous. They were considered both necessary and impure at the same time," said Hannele Klemettilä-McHale, an adjunct professor of cultural history at the University of Turku in Finland who has studied representations of executioners.

this article provides a pretty good quick but in-depth summary on the subject. it's a really interesting case study in social exclusion and class/caste system dynamics!

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