The DVD of the first season of HBO’s ROME has a historical pop-up-video type feature that gives details, analyses or just entertaining trivia about the scenes you’re watching. One pop-up during a torture sequence states that most state ordered tortures in ancient Rome were performed by undertakers as other than doctors (who were forbidden to do harm) they were the greatest experts on the human body. (Executions were usually performed by the military, it would seem.)
This made me wonder: who became torturers and executioners in other cultures? For example, those operating the strappado in Savanarola’s Florence or pulling the rack in Torquenada’s Spain or getting the court musicians to confess “Yeah, I shagged Anne Boleyne”- were they usually employees of the state, the church or the official/noble ordering the torture? And were they the same people who performed the executions?
In modern (last century or so) America most executions have been performed by either prison officials or, in some cases (such as the hangman in Capote’s In Cold Blood) free-lance civilians paid a set fee for the service. Is this true historically? Was there a usual class that supplied executioners or torturers?
(I’m sure that many were liberal arts majors who finally took a civil service job to pay the rent, but that can’t account for them all. )
PS- A bit off-topic, but my father witnessed an electrocution once. (His father was a prison guard and offered him the chance.) He said that in the one he saw there were two switches on the wall, one controlling the circuit and other one being a dummy, and they were pulled at the same time by two different men (neither being employed by the prison) as a sort of “only a 50/50 chance I’m the one who did it” conscience salve. He said everybody affiliated with the prison knew which was the live one. (He also said it was the most disgusting thing he ever witnessed in his life, though he remained in favor of capital punishment for certain crimes.)
There’s a really neat book on this subject, Lord High Executioner. (Note: There seems to be some mix-up in the Amazon reviews, because it is not printed on black paper with red lettering like the first review says.)
A good deal of people got the job because it was their father’s job before them.
Sampiro, that’s an excellent question. You would suppose that such a, um, specific trade would have a guild of sorts, in order to at least give some status and support to a rather nasty business. I’d think that the employment of undertakers would be that they were used to seeing the human body dead and decaying, so able to the task, plus, extry business.
Hope there’s good answers found here, but here’s a link if not: the Amsterdam Torture Museum I visited it while in Amsterdam, and everyone should go. It’s an eye-opening assault into the depths of nastiness human beings are capable of when riled to the killing state.
If no Doper has answers, the archivists there might. Note; it requires FlashPlayer…I don’t have it, so couldn’t see the link, but that museum is a base haunt of human low enterprise since the visit.
I haven’t read Engels book, but I wonder if he really says that torturers were a hereditary caste. Executioners certainly were, at least in England, but I hadn’t read that for those who did the torture.
For the most part, executioners and torturers were two different bodies of workers.
You’re quite right about torturers being different than executioners. Engel discusses the latter and gives biographical information on executioners, their methadology and some of their famous cases. He focuses primarily on England from about 1600 onward, though he does include chapters on the United States and Canda, and a brief overview of other areas.
Interviewer: What makes you think you’d be a good torturer?
Candidate: Well, all my life I’ve been on a mission to find the truth, and ever since I was a child I’ve enjoyed causing pain. This just seems like a natural way to bridge the two.
or the free-lance companies:
Gorg and Sons Torture Specialists
Best Prices Anywhere Around Your Prisoners Will Scream, but Your Purse Will Smile
First, Torquemada’s Spain wasn’t a single political entity. There were five separate political entities, each of which got its own Inquisición (Aragón, Castilla, Cataluña, Navarra and Vascongadas); the Inquisición was a Church institution only in Castilla (where Torquemada was the first Alto Inquisidor), but the two Salem-like witchhunts took place in locations where the Inquisición was secular and in much later periods.
Executioners were employees of the State. In some locations, soldiers would be used; in others it was an actual permanent job (Madrid was the first location to get an official and permanent Verdugo).
Torturer wasn’t a job, it was part of the job description (or not) for jailers/gaolers. Gaolers (jailers in Navy galleys) were actually expected to treat the galeotes semi-decently, they had to last!
Here is an excerpt from the story of George Maledon, hangman for the Federal Court for the Western District of Arkansas from 1872-1894, about how he came to have the job:
The job was often passed down in families. The Sanson family were executioners in France for about two hundred years. In England, there was a family named (IIRC) Pierpoint who were executioners for several generations.
I’ve read it, I concur that it’s an excellent source of information.
A few, yes, but it wasn’t the norm. Even the Pierrepoint dynasty consisted of two brothers and one son. The majority of executioners were not relatives of other executioners.
No. Their services were only occasionally required, and they had always other trades in their normal lives. Albert Pierrpoint, for instance, ran a pub.
I wonder if they were related to J. P(ierpont) Morgan.
There was one executioner in France- I know he beheaded the 16 nuns known as the martyrs of Compiegne during the Revolution- who was famous for his tulips and roses. He grew them on the grounds of the prison and gave them to lady prisoners (including the Carmelite sisters whose forgiveness he asked and received). I just always thought that was an odd bit of trivia.
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