I am under the impression that in Europe, during the days of widespread execution, the man carrying out the execution usually wore a mask or hood. According to common knowledge, this is because no man would want other people to know him as a killer, so the mask allowed the executioner to go about in public without people being able to recognize him as the man who cuts off peoples’ heads.
First of all, given that great masses of people would attend these public executions, how would any person who had himself been there to witness the spectacle of bloody death be able to hold himself in judgment above the executioner, were he to recognize him in public? How is it okay to go to a hanging or beheading for kicks, but not okay to be the man who does the deed?
Why would the executioner be seen as a bad person and not a good man for carrying out justice, serving the King, and giving criminals what they deserved? I could see this being the case if the executioner himself lived in the village out of which many of the condemned people were being drawn in a percieved unjust manner (and therefore seen as a traitor by his neighbors and very likely his own family.) But then how could the executioner himself, in good conscious, do his job?
Did executioners only wear a mask in Christian Europe? I assume public execution also occured in Asia, Africa and the Middle East - did the people carrying out the task in those places feel compelled to hide their identity, or were they instead respected by the community?
The names of executioners were often well known in 17th Century UK. They were much like sports heroes today (since executions were something akin to a sport).
One hangman, Goodman Derrick, had is name made part of the language (according to the OED).
Well, if you believe Dumas (not generally a source of reliable historical information), the executioners in The Three Musketeers and La Reine Margot were both social outcasts. (The executioner in La Reine Margot was also a torturer and it turned out to be a really, really bad idea to discriminate against someone because of his profession…)
But then they ferquently put a hood of the condemed for that purpose.
Other than that, I think you’re right. Generally the executioner was executioner by profession (at least if you the one being killed you would hope so) so I doubt it secrecy was an option. My guess is it was symbolic…like the black cloth the judge wears when handing out the sentence…to show it was not the man but the Law that was doing the killing.
I think the suggestions made reflect our modern sensibilities. I would suggest that there’s another approach - that the execution wore a black mask as part of a policy of state terror. After all, the punishments were designed to terrify: hanging, drawing and quartering; beheading; burning at the stake. All ugly, horrible ways to die. And then in the case of quartering and beheading, the various body parts were nailed up in public; in hanging simpliciter, the corpse was sometimes left hanging at a public crossroads. It was all intended as a grim warning - don’t cross the King, or the Duke, or whoever the local authority was.
Having the execution wear a black mask was just part of that psychological policy of terror to encourage respect for authority. An anonymous, black-masked guy chopping off heads - that’s the stuff of nightmares.