The Executioner: History's Most Necessary and Most Shunned Profession

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In the Ottoman Empire, a condemned grand vizier could be offered a foot race against the head gardener of the palace, who doubled as the state executioner. Beat him to the fish market gate and the sentence became banishment. That practice is one of many oddities in the history of a job that rarely involved killing. A typical town might see one or two death sentences in a decade, so executioners rode circuits to carry out floggings and brandings, and survived on the work nobody else would touch: disposing of animal carcasses, emptying latrines, collecting fees from sex workers, and policing gambling dens.

This episode looks past the scaffold to the people who held the warrant and to the societies that kept them at arm's length. In early modern Germany executioners were legally dishonorable, barred from guilds, courts, and even a shared cup in a tavern. Similar outcast status attached to the role in France, Korea, and Japan. Shut out of ordinary life, executioner families married each other and formed dynasties that lasted for generations, a pattern that shows how communities demanded harsh justice while refusing to own the violence.

• In 1822 Grand Vizier Haji Salih Pasha won his race against the executioner and was later made governor general of Damascus province.
• The Sanson family supplied six French executioners between 1688 and 1847, including the one who executed Louis XVI. The line of successors ran to Marcel Chevalier, who served until abolition in 1981.
• British hangmen such as the Pierrepoints were respected and even ran a pub, partly because an 1868 act moved executions behind prison walls. In France they stayed public until 1939.
• Ottoman executioners were buried under rough, uncarved stones with no names so that victims' families could not find and deface the graves.
• In Roscommon, Ireland, a condemned woman known as Lady Betty volunteered to hang her fellow prisoners when the hangman fell ill, and became the county's executioner in exchange for her life.