No Face behind the Mask: Hangmen in Medieval and Early Modern English Culture

What is it about?

Just as the grim stage of the scaffold made celebrities of the punished, it often brought fame to the punishers. Many of England's executioners developed a notoriety to rival that of their reluctant fellow co-stars: in many cases, their infamy perseveres to this day, with names such as Thomas Derrick, Pascha Rose and above all Jack Ketch still immediately recognisable in the popular imagination. Yet these figures are without exception post-medieval; within the English Middle Ages, not only there are no characters of comparable renown to Derrick or Ketch, but it often proves difficult to uncover the names of the hangmen and headsmen active in the period. More remarkably, the literary record tends to replicate this anonymity: from popular ballads and drama to the work of such key figures as Chaucer and Lydgate, there is a general tendency to obscure these agents of justice, as the men on the other end of the axe or rope are seldom individualised or specified. This article considers the strange invisibility of the medieval English executioner, surveying references to executioners in literary and documentary sources in order to understand why they remain such fugitive figures; at the same time, it will also think about what this curious absence can tell us about attitudes to punishment in the period, and larger power shifts as the medieval gives way to the modern period.

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Photo by Alireza Jalilian on Unsplash

Photo by Alireza Jalilian on Unsplash