On this date in 1584, Nuremberg executioner Franz Schmidt beheaded Anna Peihelsteinin (Peyelstainin) for “lewdness and harlotry.” (Despite the image above, Schmidt notes that she was beheaded standing, not sitting.)

The married woman had been intimate with 21 other men, even including a father and a son. But Anna’s own husband was more understanding of her than the cruel law of the time; as the executioner recorded in his diary, the lonely widower Jerome — whipped out of town for countenancing her whoredom — left behind a miserable reproach scrawled on the wall of a church:

Father and son should have been treated as she was, and the panderers also. In the other world I shall summon and appeal to emperor and king because justice has not been done. I, poor man, suffer though innocent. Farewell and good night.

On this day..

• 1986: Kevin Barlow and Brian Chambers, Dadah is Death
• 1591: Ralph Milner, Roger Dickenson, and Laurence Humphrey
• 1907: Xu Xulin, anti-Manchu assassin
• 1835: The unknown lynched of the Murrell Excitement
• 2010: Wen Qiang, prey of Bo Xilai
• 1911: Daniel "Nealy" Duncan, posthumous pardon candidate
• 1962: Talduwe Somarama, Ceylon assassin
• 1730: Olivier Levasseur, "La Buse"
• 1891: Four to save the electric chair
• 1285: Tile Kolup, pretender
• 1896: Charles Thomas Wooldridge, of The Ballad of Reading Gaol
• 1865: Four for Abraham Lincoln's assassination