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
There really is no honor among thieves. Snitching each other off is pretty standard, but actually doing the hanging of your co=conspirators, now that’s something. They’d hardly need to be marked at all, I should think.
What about tortureres-all the witch trials and political prisoners were tortured to get those false confessions? Did they have to be marked as well or did the executioners freelance sometimes? If not were individuals who plied that trade marked out as well?