Historical sources on that kind of thing are extremely sketchy and yield wildly varying estimates – 41 executions a year in Toulouse in the 14th century according to one source; 11-13 a year in Florence in the 14th century but 7-8 per year in the 15th versus 1-5 in Nuremberg, Lyon, or Frankfurt according to another; yet another source says that Avingon’s 15-30 executions per year was low by comparison to other medieval cities. That kind of variation isn’t unusual in premodern studies, btw; accurate statistics being very much a key element of modernity, both the child of and the result of the rise of the nation-state.
Continued after the cut, because this is going to get gruesome.
One thing that pretty much every scholar both before and after Foucault’s Discipline and Punish (1975) agrees on is that frequency isn’t the real story here: for unlike executions after the Enlightenment, medieval executions were meant to be exemplary. As Foucault puts it:
“The public execution is understood not only as a judicial, but also as a political ritual. It belongs, even in minor cases, to the cermonies by which power is manifested…in punishment, there must always be a portion that belongs to the prince…it requires that the king take revenge for an affront to his very person…”
“The public execution…is a ceremonial by which a momentarily injured sovereignty is reconstituted. it restores that sovereignty by manifesting it at its most spectacular…it deploys before all eyes an invincible force….the punishment is carried out in such a way as to give a spectacle not of measur,e but of imbalance and excess; in this liturgy of punihsment, there must be an emphatic affirmation of power and of its instrinsic superiority. And this superiority is not simply that of right, but of the physical strength of the sovereign beating down upon the body of his adversary and mastering it…it is the prince…who seizes upon the body of the condemned man and displays it marked, beaten, broken.”
For those reasons, medieval executions were public by design – the masses had to bear witness to the power of the monarch, hence why places of execution were public, prisoners were transported in the open air, and crowds were encouraged (although attempts were made to control them).
Moreover, deaths were also designed to be as humiliating and violent as possible: the condemned being stripped of clothes or hair or other badges of rank or being made to wear symbolic garments was often a part of the process; blurring the lines between torture and execution, the process was made as drawn-out and lingering as possible, and efforts were made to combine many different forms of “almost-deaths” as possible (medieval hangings or drownings for example, were often cut short of death); the human body would be opened up, divided, and mutilated, and as with the “almost-deaths,” great care was taken to try to keep the condemned alive and conscious for as much of the process as possible, so that they would see and be aware of their own obliteration. Some particularly skilled executioner/torturers took pride, for example, in being able to keep a man alive long enough to see his own heart burned in front of him.
In other words, terror was meant to do the work of frequency – if the medieval state with its extremely limited law enforcement capacity couldn’t demonstrate that there was a good chance that you would be caught and punished, it was going to do its level best to ensure that the fear of what would happen to you if you lost the lottery of crime was as intense as possible.
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