Note 7 — THE PUPPETS OF ALL NATIONS.[1]

Another strange office of the headsman, at least in some parts of Germany, was to collect the periodical fine or impost levied from houses of an infamous class. Some striking particulars of his various opprobrious functions in the Middle Ages, which the peculiar genius of the German people and their literature has environed with a ghastly mystery that at times borders on the supernatural, is to be found in a curious work, entitled Das Malefiz Buch, reviewed in Blackwood’s Magazine for February 1848.