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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Why is it important?
While we might think of the death penalty as a relic of more unenlightened times, it continues to be practised around the world, with over a quarter of UN member states still carrying out executions on a routine basis. This article is not about the merits or ethics of capital punishment, but the ways in which popular culture has historically responded to it. In particular, it looks at an important transition in cultural understanding, and considers how it exposes larger shifts in the mechanics of power. In many respects, these are conditions that are still with us today, so the article helps to pinpoint where some of our accepted, 'common sense' opinions about the death penalty originated from.
Perspectives
While it might appear quite a macabre subject, I hope this article gives people the nudge to rethink our view of the Middle Ages, even just a little. After all, when we think about the period, we tend to do so in terms of our own hypocritical stereotypes about it - we see it as a time of cruelty, sadism, repression, as well as dirt and stupidity. Public executions loom large in this image - in most films set during the medieval period, a gallows, scaffold or block will inevitably be seen somewhere along the way. Hopefully, this article will show that medieval culture had a deeply complex relationship with its judicial practices, and they were by no means exclusive signatures of this point in time.
Dr Ben Parsons
University of Leicester
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: No Face behind the Mask: Hangmen in Medieval and Early Modern English Culture, November 2025, De Gruyter,
DOI: 10.1163/9789004742598_013.
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