So after finishing the whole season, here are some of my thoughts. It may not matter, since I heard it was cancelled and thus not getting a second season, but I haven't verified that.
WARNING: SPOILERS.
My feeling is that it's reasonably well executed, but the story meanders and didn't really grip me. From a historical perspective, it's clear that the script writers only had a "Hollywood" understanding of the period, and didn't do any actual homework on the subject. I liked the characters, mostly.
The one thing that kept gnawing at me though, was I felt like it was designed right from the start to show torture, blood, and brutality, just because they could. It's not gratuitous, in the sense that there is always a story reason for those things. However, the story feels like it was contrived to do so. I mean, a former knight who turned into a farmer to escape his past (and having been betrayed and left for dead), is now posing as an executioner. They could have written him to pose as any role they wanted, but they chose that specifically.
I get the fact that they wanted him to be trapped by circumstances, doing something that caused him a lot of grief and soul-searching, and got him involved in the castle's justice system. But still.
The main story was dominated by he and his friends taking on this role to quietly seek vengeance against those who destroyed their village, and slaughtered their loved ones. That was the thread that bound the entire season together.
And then in the finale, when they have the opportunity to kill the remaining two people they wanted vengeance against, they discover that those men were in fact honorable. The finale is driven by concepts of honor and camaraderie, for the first time all season. The camaraderie was a weak thread prior to that, but we finally see it shine when everyone who was at odds with one another came together for a common cause.
And while the finale wraps everything up in a nice little bow (perhaps too nice), with the main character finally having a romantic night with the Baroness, the crazy fake-wife situation dealt with, peace being made with the revenge-targets, the priest saved, and so on... It was actually the finale that made me want to see more.
So if it really has been canceled, I'm OK with that. But I would have watched the next season just to see how they deal with the threads that were left dangling at the end, such as the story of the Seraphim, the Baroness's fake pregnancy and the fate of her Barony, and the visions of a future child with the main character, etc.
Oh well.