Holy Sh*t: A Brief History of Swearing
Page 10
By the late thirteenth century, the situation was changing. French remained the language of government, but it was no longer always the first language acquired by the nobility. Some nobles were growing up speaking English and learning French, which they still needed to walk the corridors of power, from tutors later. At this point too, English started to look much more like modern English. An influx of French words transformed it from the Old English we saw earlier, “Bóc cneurise haelendes cristes dauides sunu abrahames sunu” (950), to this: “The book of the generacioun of Jhesu Crist, the sone of Dauid, the sone of Abraham” (1370s–1380s). This is Middle English, still somewhat of a challenge to read but certainly recognizable as the ancestor of the language we speak today.
This startling transformation brings to the fore that what I have been calling “the Middle Ages” comprises a thousand years, give or take, and large cultural and linguistic variations. Aldred belongs to the end of the Early Middle Ages, the period traditionally dated from the fall of the Roman Empire in 476 to the year 1000. The High Middle Ages ran from 1000 to approximately 1300, followed by the Late Middle Ages, the time of Chaucer, from 1300 to around 1500.
In this chapter, we are talking about broad cultural trends. A thousand years is obviously a long time, and sources are scarce, especially at the beginning of the period. Most of the texts discussed in this chapter come from the Late Middle Ages, and sometimes I argue backward from Renaissance (approximately 1500–1660) sources. There simply is more material that has come down to us from these later periods. What we learn from the texts that we do have is that words we consider to be obscene today were not obscene to medieval English people. Within the thousand years of the Middle Ages, however, there were already signs that this attitude was changing and becoming more like contemporary ones. What historian Norbert Elias called the “civilizing process”—an increased concern with etiquette and decorum, coupled with tighter control over and stronger taboos around the body and its functions—began, very roughly, in the fourteenth century. Combined with the rise of Protestantism, and with it a strain of Puritanism, this civilizing process slowly transformed formerly innocuous words into what modern observers would recognize as obscenities. But I’ll leave these changes for the following chapter.
A Pride of Lions, a Murder of Crows, and a Heap of Shitrows: Obscenity in the Middle Ages
Words that to modern eyes would be obscene appeared everywhere in medieval English, from the names of common plants and animals to grammar-school textbooks, medical manuals, and literature.
Now let us pause, to reflect on nature’s rich store. What a wondrous bounty of plants and animals exists to gratify our eye and sense. In the single, humble ecosystem of a pond, to narrow our attention to a single example, there are stilt-legged herons that stalk the waters for finny prey; kestrels that soar above, seeming to hover in the air; smartweed and fumitory, with their delicate pink flowers beautifying the boundaries of the sylvan pool, and the lowly dandelion, that delights Youth with its bright flowers and plumaceous seeds.*
All these are literary expressions of a later sort, however. A medieval pond would have looked the same but sounded different. There would’ve been a shiterow in there fishing, a windfucker flying above, arse-smart and cuntehoare hugging the edges of the pond, and pissabed amongst the grass. If you’d have brought a picnic, perhaps to eat under an open-arse (medlar) tree, pisse-mires—ants—probably would have started to crawl on your food. These are not obscene or otherwise bad words—shiterow was the common, ordinary name for heron, pissabed that for dandelion, and so on. (Heron comes from the French. The Nominale sive Verbale, a poem from the early 1300s that translates words and phrases from Anglo-Norman into English, renders “un beuee de herouns” [a bevy of herons] as “a hep of schiterowys” [a heap of shitrows]. The translation goes some way toward explaining the centuries-long British sense of cultural inferiority.)
Medieval street and personal names also featured words that we would consider to be obscene today. In the thirteenth century, London and Oxford both boasted a Gropecuntelane, in Warwickshire there was a Schetewellwey (Shitwell Way), and several towns had Pissing Alleys. These were descriptive, not derogatory—Gropecuntelane in Oxford was the haunt of prostitutes, and the others need even less explanation. They were also formal, official names, appearing on maps, in parish lists, and in legal documents such as wills. In Lincolnshire in 1202, a Randulfus Bla de Scitebroc (roughly, Randall Shitboast) was recorded in the court rolls, while Thomas Turd lived in Canterbury in 1357. There were Bastards all over the place as well, right up through to the Reverend Thomas Bastard, a somewhat famous Elizabethan poet. (His friend John Davies addressed a poem to him in 1611: “Bastard, thine Epigrams to sport inclines.”) And we shouldn’t forget those Cunts we met in Chapter 1—Gunoka Cuntles, Bele Wydecunthe, Godwin Clawcuncte, and Robert Clevecunt.
Dictionaries and vulgaria, books designed to teach young children how to speak Latin, were also full of such terms. The Ortus Vocabulorum, printed in 1500, defines the Latin vulva as “anglice a conte” (“in English, a cunt”), hundreds of years before cunt makes it into the Oxford English Dictionary. “Cunt,” in fact, seems to have been the standard way to define vulva in the fifteenth century. A manuscript dictionary known as the Pictorial Vocabulary also defines it this way, as does a fifteenth-century Nominale (a dictionary that includes only nouns) that was owned by a schoolmaster and probably used in his classroom, since it was rolled up to be easily portable.
Likewise, arse (or ers or ears) was the standard way to refer to the buttocks. People sometimes refer to obscenities as “Anglo-Saxon” words, implying that they are earthy relics of a time when people spoke more freely. Actually only arse, shit, fart, and bollock really date from the Anglo-Saxon, or early medieval, era—our other obscenities are all of more recent descent. The abbot Ælfric’s tenth-century collection of Latin-English vocabulary calls nates “ears-lyre” (arse-muscle) and anus “ears-þerl” (arse-hole). (He identifies verpus, which, we saw in Chapter 1, means “erect or circumcised penis,” as the arse-hole too. Perhaps the holy man was outside his area of expertise.) Another early vocabulary defines anus and culus as “a ners.” The Catholicon Anglicum of 1483 even includes entries for both arse and erse, in case a reader encounters a variant spelling. Several dictionaries also include the word erse wyspe (arse-wisp). An arse-wisp is a bunch of straw or grass used to wipe one’s behind. The dictionaries have trouble translating this concept into Latin, since the Romans didn’t for the most part use straw, but wiped themselves with those little sponges on sticks. They are forced to make up Latin words to define it—the Promptorium Parvulorum (1440) gives memperium and anitergium, “a bundle, an anus-cleaner.”* This is the medieval equivalent of deciding on a word for computer in Hebrew. (A late fourteenth-century vocabulary gives an example of how one might use the word in a sentence: Dum paro menpirium, sub gumpho murmurat anus, “While I prepare the wiper, my arse roars beneath the seat of the privy.”)
Despite their name, vulgaria were not supposed to be collections of bad language—they are vulgar in the old sense of the word, meaning “common” or “vernacular.” These lists of English words and phrases with their Latin translations were used in medieval and Renaissance grammar schools by boys seven to twelve years of age. Though not obscene at the time, many of these words have come to be vulgar in the modern sense of the word too. The vulgaria compiled by Oxford don John Stanbridge around 1509 begins by going through the parts of the body, including “Hic podex … for an arse hole; hec urina … for piss; hic penis … for a man’s yard.” These terms are apparently the polite words to refer to these parts—the ones you would use if you were forced to talk about them and didn’t want to give offense.
Stanbridge’s text continues with a variety of phrases a schoolboy needs to know, presented in seemingly random order: “I am weary of study. I am weary of my life… . I am almost beshitten. You stink… . Turd in your teeth… . I will kill you with my own knife. He
is the biggest coward that ever pissed.” Clearly Stanbridge chose topics that would interest young boys, but he is not trying to pique their interest by using bad words. Schooling in this period focused on moral development—one of the primary purposes for learning Latin was to be able to read the ancient authorities and absorb their virtues—so textbooks would have been unlikely to include language that would threaten a student’s growing love of virtue.
“Courtesie” was another important part of schooling—an understanding of what kinds of language and behavior were appropriate to various circumstances. A curriculum devoted partly to instilling a sense of courtesy in students would hardly utilize a textbook that violated its dictates by including offensive language. Schools often expressly opposed themselves to bad language as well, as did the Dronfield Grammar School in Derby, which drafted a statute that mandated beatings or expulsion for “lying, swearing, and filthy speaking.” Medieval schoolmasters were concerned with “bad language,” but Stanbridge’s Vulgaria makes clear that words such as beshitten, turd, piss, yard, and arse hole were not it. The vocabulary that Stanbridge used in his Vulgaria was not obscene. Indeed, it was appropriate to young boys whose moral development was at a delicate stage and who were learning the rudiments of courtesy.*
Medical texts likewise often used terms we might find obscene but which were then considered direct but unremarkable. As a translation of Lanfranc’s Science of Cirurgie (c. 1400) reveals, “In women the neck of the bladder is short and is made fast to the cunt.” It explains many other medical mysteries as well—how a man’s “yard” has two holes, one for urine and one for sperm; how the “bollocks” collect blood to make sperm; and what to do if a man’s penis gets accidentally cut off (in such a case, you should anoint him with oil of roses “about his ass and the region of the yard” and then burn him with a hot iron to stop the bleeding; the rose oil is for pain relief).
And of course medieval literature is famously obscene. Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (1386) is bawdy and scatological—we’ve already seen the Host informing someone that his rhyming is “not worth a turd,” and shitten, arse, and coillons (another word for “balls”), among others, make appearances. Chaucer was also liberal with swive, which, along with sard, was the direct word for copulation until fuck came along in the 1500s. “For on thy bed thy wife I saw him swive,” one character in the Manciple’s Tale informs another. The moral of his tale, the Manciple later explains, is: “Never tell any man in your life / How another man has dight his wife,” dight being a slightly more polite way to say the same thing, akin to today’s screw.
The so-called mystery plays, which were performed on religious holidays and which dramatized events from biblical history, were also fairly earthy by our standards, filled with lines such as this one, spoken by the venerable patriarch Noah to his wife: “We! hold thy tongue, ramskyt, or I shall thee still” (“Shut your mouth, ram’s diarrhea, or I’ll shut it for you”), and this one, spoken by a shepherd: “Take out that southern tooth [stop speaking like a southerner] and put a turd in its place!” All this is evidence that these words were not “obscene” in any traditional sense. They occur in too many places in which we would never find them today, and seem to be used simply as the ordinary words for what they represent, not in deliberate attempts to shock or offend.
Obsolete “Obscenities”
Many of the words we have been discussing are in frequent use today, but medieval English had words for similar subjects with which we are less familiar. If these words were still in use today, they would probably be obscene—they are vernacular words for taboo parts of the body and bodily functions. In the Middle Ages, though, they were simply direct words for things that medieval people had less trouble talking about.
We’ve already encountered sard and swive. (Swive is not, strictly speaking, obsolete—it is undergoing something of an ironic revival today, especially in printed media, where it is employed as a jocular alternative to the f-word).
Kekir and bobrelle are forgotten words for the clitoris, probably. The word bobrelle is recorded only once, in the Pictorial Vocabulary of the fifteenth century, where it is given as the English for hec caturda. In fifteenth-century Latin, caturda was used to indicate the labia majora or labia minora (the outer or inner lips, respectively, of the vagina), as well as the clitoris, so it is difficult to know exactly to which part of the female genitalia bobrelle refers.
Kekir is more clearly identifiable as the clitoris. The Pictorial Vocabulary (which despite its vocabulary doesn’t have any good pictures) defines it as “hic tentigo.” A 1425 treatise on uroscopy also gives kykyre as the vernacular word for tentigo: “lewd folk [call it] the kykyre in the cont” (the kekir in the cunt). Note that lewd doesn’t mean “unprincipled” but rather “uneducated”—learned people would have used the Latin word itself, presumably. In Latin, tentigo connotes stiffness and was used for both the clitoris and an erect penis. There is some evidence that kekir could also be used for “erect penis” in the period—there is a Latin-English vocabulary list from 1450 that defines kekyr as “extensio vel arrectio virilis membri”—“an extension or erection of the membrum virile.” The word embodies those Aristotelian fears about women who use their monstrous clitorises for penetration, while also gesturing toward a real biological homology—a kekir is what gets erect in both men and women.
Pintel, tarse, and ʒerde are all medieval English words for the penis. Tarse or ters is the oldest word, appearing first in Anglo-Saxon. ʒerde (or yard) was originally a euphemism—it also meant “staff” or “rod”—that became a direct word for the thing it had been employed to avoid, like penis in Latin. An early fifteenth-century anatomy text informs its readers that “the yard is an official member (one that performs a service for the rest of the body, such as a finger or foot) … which men call a ters but for courtesy women call it a yard … a ters was principally ordained to enable the piss and spermatic matter to be cast out.” Pintel appears to have come into general use, for the most part replacing ters, in the mid-fourteenth century, although it appears in names—Robertus Pintel, Johannes Swetpintel—two hundred years earlier.
One mid-fifteenth-century poem, A Talk of Ten Wives on Their Husbands Ware, manages to fit in both pintel and tarse, as well as several metaphors for the penis. None of the ten women in the poem has found a satisfactory penis, and each complains bitterly. One says her husband’s “meat” is the size of a snail, another that his “ware” is the size of three beans, while the third complains: “I have one of those, that is worthless when it’s needed. When ‘our sire’s’ pants are torn, his penis peeps out of the hole like a maggot.” The fifth wife thinks she has it even worse: “‘Our sire’ breeds like a deer. He pisses his tarse [ejaculates]—once a year, just like a buck.” These lines are certainly insulting—“Your penis is like a maggot”?—but again the vocabulary would not have been considered obscene. Pintel and tarse are direct—these tavern-going women do not mince words—but the poem gives no sense that they carry more charge than meat or ware, which other women use as metaphors for their husbands’ penises. Pintel, as we have seen, was employed in medical texts as well as tirades—you could cast aspersions at the thing it represented, but the word itself was beyond reproach.
Medieval Fighting Words
Given that so much of what we would define as obscenity was in this period simply bracing and direct, how did people insult each other in medieval England? To learn what people said to abuse and offend each other seven hundred years ago, one can look at court records for charges of defamation or slander, assault with contumelious words (words that are “reproachful and tending to convey disgrace and humiliation,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary), scolding, and barratry (bringing false lawsuits; more generally, obstreperous public behavior). These are crimes of the spoken word, consisting of insults to authority or to someone’s personal reputation; libel is the written equivalent. Often court records were kept in French or Latin, and often they state sim
ply that Alicia Garlek scolded William Wipetail, or that Rogerus Prikeproud is a “common barrator.” (These are all actual medieval names: Alicia Garlic, William Wipe-Dick—though tail could refer to both the penis and the vagina—and Roger Proud-of-His-Prick.) Occasionally, however, scribes wrote down the precise English words at issue, so we know that when medieval English people traded insults, they were usually accusations of sexual immorality, such as whore, when directed at women, and accusations of dishonesty, such as false, thief, robber, or knave, when directed at men. The Victorian legal scholar Frederic William Maitland published a number of thirteenth-century cases from manorial courts (run by feudal lords) and translated them from the Latin in which they were recorded. Of the slander cases included, which were brought from 1249 to 1294, six involved accusations against men of stealing or other dishonesty, one involved a woman being called a meretrix (a prostitute), and in one the slanderous accusation was not recorded.
Late medieval accounts provide a more vivid record of invective, as cases began to be transcribed in English instead of Latin or law French. In London in 1497, as just one example, Joan Rokker was charged with defamation of Joan Sebar for saying publicly, “Thou strong whore and strong harlot … Go home thou strong whore and bid thy dame ordain the clouts [cloths to use as diapers or swaddling]; an ever I had child in my belly thou hast one. Here wert thou dight [screwed], and here lay thy legs and here thy feet.” Likewise in 1496, Elizabeth Whyns was fighting over some property with her neighbor Edward Harrison and verbally assaulted him: “Thou art a false man and false harlot to me.” (Harlot originally meant “beggar or vagabond,” as in these lines from a circa 1360 version of the Morte Arthure: “For harlots and servants shall help but little— / They will hie them hence.” Around 1400, it acquired the additional meaning of “a professional male entertainer; buffoon, jester; story-teller”—in both cases it was a term that indicated low social status and applied to men only. Through a process that literary critic and author C. S. Lewis called “the moralisation of status words,” “words which originally referred to a person’s rank—to legal, social, or economic status and the qualifications which have often been attached to these—have a tendency to become words which assign a type of character and behavior. Those implying superior status can become terms of praise; those implying inferior status, terms of disapproval.” As Lewis points out, words that in the past denoted high social status, such as noble and gentle, now indicate good moral character. Others, such as villein [an unfree tenant], churl [any person not nobility or clergy], knave [a boy child], caitiff [a captive or slave], and wretch [an exile], went in the other direction. These pejorated, as philologists say, becoming terms of abuse or opprobrium. Likewise, harlot acquired a negative meaning. In the mid-fourteenth century it began to be used for a man “of licentious habits,” as the Middle English Dictionary puts it—and to add insult to injury, it came to be applied to women as well.)