Diary of a Hangman

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A Hangmans Diary is not only a collection of detailed writings by Schmidt about his work, but also an account of criminal procedure in Germany during the Middle Ages. W. Gruner have put together a masterful tome that sets the scene of execution day and puts you in Master Franz Schmidts shoes as he does his duty for his country.

During that span, he personally executed more than 350 people while keeping a journal throughout his career. This amount includes seller specified domestic postage charges as well as applicable international postage, dispatch, and other fees. John Ellis was Britain's executioner for 23 years, and in his time he hanged some of the most infamous murderers of all time. Eight years later, in September 1932, after another bout of heavy drinking, Ellis died by suicide, cutting his throat with a razor.Lots of people have their heads cut off "as a favour" to avoid the worse fates of hanging out the wheel, which are reserved for the worst offenders. John Ellis (4 October 1874 – 20 September 1932) was a British executioner for 23 years, from 1901 to 1924. An incredible classic, A Hangman’s Diary is more than a history lesson; it shows the true anarchy that inhabited our world only a few hundred years ago. The first half is a historical background on execution and torture in medieval Nuremberg and it dispels myths and legends about the era. A job that was not glamourous, but nevertheless very necessary, and came with benefits and risk as well.

Whether this was due to his experiences at the Thompson hanging is open to dispute, especially since he performed 11 more executions (among which was one of another woman) before he withdrew. The harrowing part of the book is not the diary, it's too factual, but the essay which proceeds it, Calvert's "A brief account of criminal proceedure in Germany in the Middle Ages' is enough to put any potential time traveler off.

Now an esoteric of legal and criminal history, A Hangman’s Diary gives a year-by-year breakdown on all of Master Franz Schmidt’s executions, which included hangings, beheadings, and other methods, as well as details of each capital crime and the reason for the punishment. They shot the miller dead, did violence to the miller’s wife and the maid, obliged them to fry some eggs in fat and laid these on the dead miller’s body, then forced the miller’s wife to join in eating them. The language used is occasionally archaic, for example the translator uses ‘incendiary’ where we would be more familiar with the term ‘arsonist’. I borrowed it from Hoopla, looking forward to hearing the experiences of Franz Schmidt in his own words.

Steffan Hötzelein, alias der Lauffenhöltzer, a wire-drawer at Lauff, who accused Georg Schwindel, a councillor there, saying he had seen him commit lewdness with four women; his father, Hans Hötzelein, whose fingers were struck off, bore witness in the matter, the father saying it happened under an oak-tree, the son, on the contrary, under a fir-tree. A bit disappointed as I had expected a diary where Master Franz Schmidt detailed not only the morbid deeds of his job as an executioner, but - more interesting - any moral conflict he felt at doing what he had to do (after all, some of the crimes for which an execution were handed out were beyond paltry by today's standards - small-time theft, infidelity). Some of these remarks are about the criminal's conduct before execution - "Behaved very wantonly at the end" (175), "He was a godless man" (187) and "He sang all the way when he went to his death" (210). The woman Dörfflerin, when she brought forth her child in the garden behind the Fort, left it lying alive in the snow so that it froze to death.An interesting read, albeit less in-depth then I would have liked compared to the Faithful Executioner. In Keller's words, Schmidt only records "cases where life and limb actually suffered" making this "Diary a veritable book of blood" (93). There are also some notes referring the reader to other passages (when someone is let off and is later executed or if two people are accused and executed on different days). If you’re interested in medieval justice, the essay is invaluable, explaining the various people who worked at the prison, what a cell looked like, the various punishments meted out and for what crimes. If, however, you are after a rare piece of source material from the sixteenth century, then this is excellent.

It's just him counting how much people he kills by year, the crime they've commited and the punishment.

Originally published more than eighty years ago, A Hangmans Diary gives a year-by-year breakdown on all of Master Schmidts executions, which include hangings, beheadings, and other methods of murder, as well as explanations of each crime and the reason for the punishment. It is nothing you have ever witnessed before, with all the gore and the craziness people did back in the midddle ages.