by Melissa Mohr
Occasionally men were insulted with sexual terms too, including cuckold, whoreson, or whoremonger, as when Thomas Wybard attacked William Richardson as “whoreson and whoremonger priest.” Wybard probably did not mean that Richardson was literally the child of a loose woman or that he kept a stable of prostitutes. Wybard is simply searching for the most effective way to abase the man, and in a society that valued lineage, female chastity, and (at least in theory) male sexual continence, the concept of whoredom proved a promiscuous source of abusive terms. Today we could scarcely conceive of an assault with contumelious words that doesn’t contain at least a few obscenities. But the court records from 1200 to 1500 indicate that for medieval people, a simple “you false whoremaster son of a whore” sufficed.
Privacy and the Privy Members
The image on the next page shows a pilgrimage badge from the end of the fourteenth century. Badges like this were purchased by pilgrims at the shrines they visited and worn on hats or clothing as souvenirs of their travels. Some of the badges feature motifs we would consider to be more appropriate for a holy journey: images of saints, religious mottos, crucifixes. But many resemble the one above: winged phalluses; vulvas hunting on horseback or climbing ladders; a crowned vulva and a phallus, both with legs, over the inscription “pintel in.” Despite all appearances to the contrary, these are Christian religious objects. Such badges were thought to have apotropaic power to protect against envy and the evil eye, like the fascini worn by young Roman boys. And like fescennine songs, some of the badges used mockery to protect pilgrims and the sacred relics that inspired their travels. The badge pictured above, for example, parodies processions in which icons of the Virgin Mary were carried. Similar figures can be found in churches beginning around the twelfth century: the sheela-na-gigs, “stone carvings of naked women exposing their genitals,” and ithyphallic men, with large erect penises. This is obscenity in its second Roman sense, the Shit married to the Holy, obscenity with religious functions.
Three phalluses carrying a crowned vulva on a litter.
Unlike Roman religious obscenity, such pilgrimage badges were not officially sanctioned. The chancellor of the University of Paris, for example, decried the “shameless and naked images displayed for sale in churches and during church festivals” in the late fourteenth century. They were expressions of popular as opposed to “orthodox” religion, like the Israelite worship of Asherah. And they were far from the only place in medieval English society where “private” parts of the body were on display.
In previous chapters we’ve talked about the connection between what is “shameful to perform in public” and what is “shameful to name,” as the great Renaissance humanist Erasmus put it. So what actually was shameful to perform or to show in public in the Middle Ages?
The short answer is, not much. There was almost no such thing as privacy as we know it, even for the very rich. The earliest houses consisted of a large, central great hall and a few outbuildings. Most of the business of life was conducted in the hall—visitors were entertained, meals were cooked (over a large open fire in the middle of the room), meals were eaten, justice was dispensed for the manor court, and so on. The hall was also, apparently, where one might openly perform some bodily functions we would most definitely conceal today. In his De civilitate morum puerilium (On Civility in Boys), Erasmus announces that “it is impolite to greet someone who is urinating or defecating,” implying that even as late as 1530—when Henry VIII was king—it was normal to run into people thus occupied and engage them in conversation. Two sets of court regulations from the sixteenth century specify where these voluble voiders might be encountered: “One should not, like rustics who have not been to court or lived among refined and honourable people, relieve oneself without shame or reserve in front of ladies, or before the doors or windows of court chambers or other rooms.” Also, “Let no one, whoever he may be, before, at, or after meals, early or late, foul the staircases, corridors or closets with urine or other filth, but go to suitable, prescribed, places for such relief.” These rules are from the 1500s, when, evidently, people were still making use of the floor and corners, and it was beginning to be seen as a problem. Before then, it was unremarkable.
We can reconstruct what a dinner party in the Great Hall during the High Middle Ages—1100 to 1300—might have been like by reading between the lines of medieval conduct books. First of all, most food would have been eaten with the fingers and a knife. Forks were either unknown or thought to be an eastern affectation. Dishes were passed, and each person helped himself with his fingers, placing his food on his trencher, a thick piece of stale bread. Soups and drinks were passed down the table with each person taking a sip, or occasionally eaten with soup spoons. People apparently felt the urge to spit much more than we do today and did it wherever the urge took them—in the washbasin, on the table, over the table. Conduct books assert, however, that really the only polite place to spit is on the floor. The 1430 Boke of Curtasye warns that “if you spit over the table or upon it, you shall be held an uncourteous man,” and “When you wash after you eat, don’t spit in the basin or splash water around.” It was thought to be unhealthy to retain “wind,” so there was probably quite a lot of farting and belching—it takes until 1577 for instructions to arrive in Hugh Rhodes’s Book of Nurture, perhaps one of the “books for good manners” Shakespeare mentions in As You Like It, that one should “belch near no man’s face with a corrupt fumosity; / Turn from such occasion, it is a stinking ventosity.” Rushes were strewn on the floors of most halls and were supposed to be changed weekly or even daily to keep them clean and fresh-smelling, but this was an ideal and not always a reality. When he traveled to England from Holland in the early 1500s, Erasmus noted that “the floors too are generally spread with clay and then with rushes from some marsh, which are renewed from time to time but so as to leave a basic layer, sometimes for twenty years, under which fester spittle, vomit, dogs’ urine and men’s too, dregs of beer and cast-off bits of fish, and other unspeakable kinds of filth.”
In the evenings, most people in the household bedded down in the hall as well. They slept on the floor amid those sweet-smelling rushes, or on benches, as described in these lines from the Anglo-Saxon epic Beowulf (c. 800):
Soon then Beowulf
Yearning for bedrest bent to his hall-bench
Sank gratefully to slumber in Heorot (the Hall)
Once more a night-guest in that mighty hallroom.
The Danes’ thane-servant thoughtful of their needs
Spread bench-covers bore final cupfuls
Readied the meadhall for rest in the night.
The great-hearted slept in that steep-gabled hall.
The lord and lady of the manor probably would have had a chamber to themselves at the head of the hall, at first behind a curtain, then by the thirteenth century as a solar, a separate bed-sitting room. Even then, these rooms were not private in our sense of the word. Servants, male and female, would have slept in the same room as their masters, and since most people slept naked, this meant that “the sight of total nakedness was the everyday rule up to the 16th century,” as one historian puts it. Female servants would bathe their male masters, and vice versa, and they would bring drinks to their naked lords and ladies in bed. All this naked togetherness makes it sound like medieval English people witnessed other people having sex more often than we do today, and that was probably the case. Historian Ruth Mazzo Karras writes, “Medieval people would be much less likely to see representations of sex acts, but they would be much more likely than modern ones to witness the actual performance of those acts.” Charges of adultery were supported by eyewitnesses; clandestine marriages were determined to be valid because someone saw the parties involved having sex; defamation suits about “whoredom” were affirmed or denied on the basis of whether witnesses had seen the defendant in flagrante delicto. In a 1366 case about a clandestine marriage between an older man and an heiress who may or may not have been of age, it
was determined that the two had consummated their marriage because the girl’s companion, Joan, had been lying next to them in bed when she “heard a noise from them like they were making love together, and how two or three times Alice silently complained at the force on account of John’s labour as if she had been hurt then as a result of his labour.” This was not some sort of kinky setup—it reflects the limited privacy available to medieval couples. The two women shared a bed, and there was probably no other place for the couple to go.
These behaviors—profuse spitting, defecating, and fornicating in public—go hand in hand with what historian Norbert Elias identifies as a low threshold of shame and repugnance. “What was lacking” in the Middle Ages, Elias writes, “was the invisible wall of affects which seems now to rise between one human body and another, repelling and separating.” Medieval people lacked what we feel as “embarrassment at the mere sight of many bodily functions of others, and often at their mere mention, or as a feeling of shame when one’s own functions are exposed to the gaze of others.” People could freely do and say things that we tend to conceal in our actions and in our language (if we want to be considered polite). This is a major reason that words that are obscene to us today were not in the Middle Ages. The things represented by cunt and sard and shit were much less charged: they carried no onus of taboo. Thus the words themselves had less power.
This doesn’t mean that such words were never used as insults or in jokes. Excrement, for example, was just as unpleasant seven hundred years ago as it is today, and so it offered a useful way to convey disapproval. When Chaucer wants to criticize corrupt priests, he writes that it is a shame to see “a shitten shepherd and a clean sheep.” We’ve seen that characters in the mystery plays use excrement to insult each other, with Noah calling his wife “ram’s diarrhea.” A well-known comic set piece in Chaucer’s “Miller’s Tale” involves Nicholas and Alison tricking the clerk Absolon into kissing Alison’s “naked arse.” He is clued into what he is kissing by the fact that he feels a “beard.” The humor runs on humiliation and comeuppance rather than on obscenity. The word arse itself is not the punch line of the joke, and Chaucer could have used buttocks or tail to make the same point, though he would have lost the directness of arse. Likewise, Chaucer’s “shitten shepherd” could have just as easily been “befouled shepherd” or “filthy shepherd,” and Noah’s wife is lucky that he didn’t call her something really offensive, like false or whore.
This is not to say that all words had the same register in the Middle Ages, or that medieval authors couldn’t choose among a variety of synonyms with different valences depending on what they were trying to express. Part of the richness of Chaucer’s work is that he could and did. There is in fact a famous crux involving a choice of register in “The Wife of Bath’s Tale,” where at one point the Wife refers to her womanly parts as a “queynte” (quaint). Noted Chaucer scholar Larry Benson observes that many scholars have identified queynte as “the forerunner of the modern cunt, and the normal, if vulgar, name for the vagina” back then. They suggest that the Wife of Bath’s uses of queynte are blatantly obscene, referring to the vagina by its most offensive name. As we have seen, though, if she had wanted to say cunt, she easily could have—the word was in plentiful use when the Canterbury Tales was written. (One manuscript of the poem actually does have her saying conte instead of queynte.) But above all the Wife wants to sound refined, so she employs French-derived euphemisms—queynte, meaning “quaint,” as well as bele chose, meaning “elegant, pleasing thing.” Benson argues that despite what so many believe, queynte was not “the forerunner of the modern obscenity.” Indeed, it was not even the normal word for vagina. The Wife, Benson contends, wasn’t “talking dirty.” She was “talking cute.” Rather than uttering the c-word, she was coyly avoiding it.
The reason scholars would like to believe that queynte was obscene is that it fits nicely with the images we have of the Middle Ages, images that, we have seen, contain a large degree of truth. Writers did indeed use many words that we would consider to be obscene, in contexts we might find alternately shocking and hilarious. But they weren’t always “talking dirty”—they could choose words from higher or lower registers, from queynte to cunt.
Wurdys Waste—Wasted Words
So what was “bad language” in medieval England? There were campaigns against it, conducted mainly by religious writers who railed against “foule wordes,” “words of villainy,” or “words of ribaldry.” These “foule wordes” were not necessarily obscene; they were any and all words that might lead people to sin. Medieval English people had a New Testament attitude toward “talking dirty.” As in the Letter to the Ephesians, the problem with “foul language” was not that it was shocking or offensive but that it could start people down the yellow brick road to hell.
Unsurprisingly, most explanations of what “foule wordes” were and why they were dangerous occurred in what are now called pastoral texts. These were manuals written by learned churchmen, designed to classify the multitude of ways it was possible to sin, and to pinpoint the one and only way to be redeemed. Some of these works contained high-flown philosophical arguments about, say, the nature of the Antichrist, but most were meant to be used by less learned priests as they cared for the souls of their parishioners. They discussed what was involved in making a full confession, described the joys of heaven and the terrors of hell, and mostly listed sins mortal and venial, from Adultery, Theft, and Murder to Delight in Soft Beds and Excessive Fondness for Cushiony Places to Kneel. They devote large sections to the “sins of the tongue”—the ways words themselves can be sinful, and the ways they can precipitate even worse sins when spoken.
If the authors of these texts had thought that obscenity was a particular problem, they would have found a way to make that clear. They knew and revered St. Augustine, the Roman theologian (from the tail end of the Roman Empire, AD 354–430), who in his City of God argued that obscenity developed as a result of the Fall. When God punished him for eating the fruit, Adam lost the ability to control his penis with his will, as he could his hands and feet. (Some people, Augustine notes, have so much control over various body parts that they can “sing” by emitting stinkless farts at will.) Instead, Adam had to submit to Lust, which sometimes gave him erections when he didn’t want them, and refused to cooperate when he did. This is the origin of Shame, according to Augustine, and it is Shame that renders certain words obscene. In the Garden of Eden, he speculates, “there would not even be words that could be called obscene [obscena], but all our talk on this subject would be as decent as what we say in speaking about the other members of the body.”
The pastoral texts ignore Augustine’s wishful thinking about his disobedient member and do not discuss obscenity, though it could easily be seen as a “sin of the tongue.” The early fifteenth-century Speculum Christiani (The Christian’s Mirror) contains a pretty exhaustive list of the ways your tongue can get you into trouble, none of which is by speaking obscene words:
These are the sins of the mouth: Intemperance or unlawful tasting, eating, or drinking; idle jangling [chattering]; words of harlotry speaking; God’s holy name in vain taking; lies; false [promises]; vain swearing; forswearing; slandering, scorning; banning [cursing]: backbiting; discord sowing; false deeming [judging]; wrong upbraiding; secrets or advice foolishly discovering; chiding; threatening, boasting; false witness bearing, evil counsel giving; flattering; evil deeds praising; good deeds perverting; Christ or his word or any of his servants scorning, slandering, or despising; unskillful pleading [in a court case]; vain arguing; foolishly laughing, scornful mocking; proud and presumptuous speaking; nice and jolly chanting [wanton and merry singing]; or to sing more for the praising of men than of God.
These texts are quite obsessively concerned with classifying sin and laying it out for scrutiny—Jacob’s Well (early fifteenth century) breaks down the “wose of synne” (the ooze of sin) into several sub-oozes, including, first, the ooze of pride, wh
ich itself has eight corners, the first of which is presumption, which itself has six feet in breadth, including self-will, extravagance, litigiousness, et cetera. The fourteenth-century Ayenbite of Inwyt (The Again-Biting of the Inner Wit, or The Remorse of Conscience) divides sin according to the “the seven heads of the beast of hell.” Pride is the first head, as it was the initial ooze, and it has seven boughs growing on it (so much for the beast metaphor)—untruth, despite, presumption, and the like. The first bough, untruth, has three twigs: foulhood, foolishness, and apostasy. Some of the sins are further divided into leaves on the twig on the bough (on the head of the beast)—a this-is-the-house-that-Jack-built of everything that people can do to alienate themselves from God or bring down his wrath. If there was a category of “obscenity,” or any particular words that were commonly thought to be worse than others, there would be room for it somewhere in the ooze or on the head of the beast. If anything like the today’s “Big Six” existed in the Middle Ages, they would find a perfect home in these flow charts of sin.