Lord High Executioner: An Unashamed Look at Hangmen, Headsmen, and Their Kind

Sarah Robertson is an associate editor of the Canadian Book Review
Annual.

Howard Engel observes in his introduction to this entertaining and
profusely illustrated study of executioners and their trade that the
book “is not intended as a sociological, or even psychological, tome;
it is literary and curious.” Our continuing interest in executions is
more than “mere morbid curiosity,” says Engel. “There is something
of the mystery of life and death itself that forms part of the
fasci-nation: the moment when a living creature stops being one.”

Reflecting the rich historical record, the opening chapters of Lord
High Executioner are devoted to English hangmen and the intricacies of
their craft. Before the arrival of William Marwood, inventor of the long
drop, death on the gallows was a “strangling matter.”

Subsequent chapters examine various methods of decapitation, including
the Guillotine, which claimed more than 2500 lives during the Terror of
1793–94; crucifixion in ancient Rome and various forms of capital
punishment in Asia, Europe, Russia, and Australia; hanging in Canada,
where, in the 19th century, “[i]t was a capital offense ... to move a
boundary marker from one place to another without approval”; the
history of execution in the United States; capital punishment and women;
and executioners’ remuneration. Throughout the book are vivid
portraits of famous and not-so-famous “clients,” along with pungent
reminders that all forms of execution, including lethal injection, are
susceptible to human or mechanical error.

Although the author is a strong supporter of abolition, his book is not
a polemic. The executions he depicts are a compelling-enough indictment
in themselves. On the current zeal for state-sanctioned death south of
the border, Engel remarks, “The horror ... doesn’t seem to register
anymore.” For readers of this compassionate and eminently readable
book, the horror should register—loud and clear.