The author analyzes the institution of a town executioner in Przemyśl in the second half of the sixteenth and in the seventeenth century. The executioner’s duties involved subjecting the accused to torture and executing death sentences as well as performing sanitary and cleansing activities, treating injured and sick prisoners and running a legal house of prostitution. The basic source of information on town executioners are municipal accounts preserved in the files on Przemyśl in the local archives. The text includes an appendix, “The earnings of a town executioner in Przemyśl in the years 1600, 1602, 1608-1609, 1645, 1684”.
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