Historisk Tidsskrift
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SUMMARY : 

TYGE KROGH 

The Defilement of the Executioner and the Nightman

(94:1, 56-57)

The present study discusses previous explanations of the historical concept of "defilement" (German: Unehrlichkeit; Danish: uærlighed) which stigmatized the profession of the executioner and his assistant, the 'nightman', and proposes a new explanation of the phenomenon. 

The concept of defilement (with the connotation of dishonourable, sullied and repulsive) was current in Central and Northern Europe from somewhere between the thirteenth and fifteenth century till the middle of the nineteenth. The executioner was seen as becoming defiled by the act of executing or publicly whipping a criminal. The nightman incurred defilement by assisting the executioner as well as by removing or skinning the carcasse of an animal that died by natural causes or by putting down a horse. Defilement was socially manifested in a fear of physical contact with the defiled that today can hardly be grasped and leaves research on the subject with numerous obscure aspects. 

For empirical reasons psychico-magical explanations of defilement must be rejected. These envisage the phenomenon as distorted remnants of ritual execution or other Germanic and Nordic religious beliefs (Karl von Amira, Ernst Klein, Else Angstmann, W. Danckert). 

Theories which explain defilement as a commonplace psychic reaction to the fear of death and revulsion at vileness of the professions are judged more reasonable (Otto Beneke, Frederik Dyrlund, Hugo Matthiessen, Joachim Gernhuber, Brita Egardt). This type of explanation is nevertheless still inadequate, because it fails to explain how the phenomenon arose as well as why it ceased. 

The alternative approach of the present study is to consider defilement in the context of the overall economic, social and psychic developments characteristic of the five centuries during which it occurred. Within a framework inspired by Nobert Elias' theory of civilizing development, the appearance of the executioner in the thirteenth century is attributed to the efforts of rulers to enforce the peace in town and country. The outcome was decrease in societal violence. The striking brutality of the scaffold scene stood in ever sharper contrast to the declining social status of physical violence. Criminals, and especially thieves, were judicially stamped with defilement, and in a parallel development their place of punishment itself was seen as defiled. The executioner and his assistant were, in turn, further contaminated by the defilement of the thieves they punished, and gradually whoever climbed the scaffold or was tied to the pillory was deemed defiled, even though the crime for which they were sentenced was not considered defiling. This kind of defilement, derived independently of the crime, was exploited by the authorities in Denmark in the sixteenth century to enforce the new legislation of morals. 

As the executioner's helper, the nightman was likewise defiled by association with the penal site, but, in addition, he was contaminated with the defilement derived from the removal and use of dead animals. It is argued that an important point in the development of the nightman's profession is reached when he not only carts away dead beasts, but begins to use at first their hides and then their tallow and other parts. The time when this begins to take place was presumably in the last part of the fifteenth century in Germany and two centuries later in Denmark. The commercial exploitation of dead animals provided an economic basis for a far greater diffusion of the profession, while at the same time exacerbating the breaking of tabus by cutting up the carcasses. 

Previous research on defilement has approached the subject in a condemnatory way, portraying the phenomenon as a prejudice of backward segments of the population that should have been combatted. The present study, on the contrary, sees the defilement of the executioner as an active factor in the predominant civilizing force of development and an instrument of moral renewal in the fifteenth century. The diffusion of the nightman's profession is seen as an innovative element in animal production. Seen in this context, backward peasants and superstitious guilds were not the only force that carried defilement through the five centuries during which it affected society in Central and Northern Europe.

Translated by Michael Wolfe