Women in Nuremberg, as in France and England, were not exposed on gibbets in chains but were buried alive, till 1515, when at the hangman's request they were drowned instead. In 1580 they took to being decapitated. Women who had murdered their husbands were bound to a cart on the way to execution, bared to the waist and tortured with red-hot tongs. The condemned criminal usually walked from the [Illustration: HENKERSTEG (HANGMAN'S TOWER)] Rathaus over the Barfüsserbrücke to the Frauenthor, where the gallows stood. On the way priests confessed him; pious people prayed for him and supported him with draughts of wine. It is satisfactory to learn that the feeling of the people was usually in favour of the "poor" thing. Fellow-feeling made them wondrous kind, so that if the hangman bungled his business and failed to kill his subject outright the mob might prove dangerous. But the executioners, who lived in the picturesque Henkersteg, were usually masters of their art.[38] They tell us of one great artist who in 1501 killed two robbers almost at a blow. He placed them back to back, two or three yards apart, and took his stand between them. He beheaded the first one, who was kneeling, then with the same sweep, swinging round in a circle, he whipped off the other's head. Clearly he was not devoid of professional pride, and worthy was he to be compared with the executioner in Anne of Geierstein who boasted that "Tristrem of the Hospital and his famous assistants André and Trois Eschelles are novices compared with me in the use of the noble and knightly sword," and who claimed "if one of my profession shall do his grim office on nine men of noble birth with the same weapon and with a single blow to each patient, hath he not a right to his freedom from taxes and his nobility by patent?" The day-book of the Nuremberg executioner, 1573-1617, shows that no less than 361 were executed, and 345 were beaten with rods and had their ears and fingers cut off in that period. Besides these there were doubtless many dungeon executions and much cellar practice as well. There were also the victims of the Secret Tribunal, the Vehme-Gericht. After leaving the torture-chamber we pass the entrance to a passage, inaccessible now by reason of the masses of fallen stone, which leads beyond the town to a distance of nearly two miles, and emerges (it is said) in the forest near Dutzendteich. It was used to despatch envoys, and as a means of access to, and escape for, the Senate in troublous times.