Holy Sh*t: A Brief History of Swearing

by Melissa Mohr

  the oldest surviving English version: Walter W. Skeat, ed., The Gospel According to Saint Matthew (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1887).

  “don’t sard another man’s wife”: “Sard,” Middle English Dictionary, 2001 ed. (online), accessed May 25, 2010. Thanks also to George Brown and Dorothy Bray for their help on sard.

  In a 1530 English-French dictionary: John Palsgrave, Lesclarissement de la langue francoyse, ed. R. C. Alston, English Linguistics 1500–1800 190 (Menston, England: Scolar Press, 1969).

  And what these ordinary people learned: Quotes from the Wycliffite Bible come from Studylight.org, The Wycliffite Bible (online), accessed May 25, 2010; see also Mary Dove, The First English Bible: The Text and Context of the Wycliffite Versions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).

  In a 2000 ranking: Advertising Standards Authority, BBC, Broadcasting Standards Commission, and the Independent Television Commission, “Delete Expletives?” Ofcom.org, December 2000, accessed May 25, 2010.

  as we’ve seen Steven Pinker define a swearword: Pinker, Stuff of Thought, 339.

  what the linguistic situation in England was: Geoffrey Hughes, A History of English Words (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2000), 109–45; Seth Lerer, Inventing English: A Portable History of the Language (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 25–70; Richard M. Hogg, ed., The Cambridge History of the English Language, vol. 1: The Beginnings to 1066 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); Norman Blake, ed., The Cambridge History of the English Language, vol. 2: 1066–1476 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); Hans Sauer, “Glosses, Glossaries, and Dictionaries in the Medieval Period,” in The Oxford History of English Lexicography, ed. Anthony Paul Cowie (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2009), 1:17–40.

  King Richard the Lionheart: Jean Flori, Richard the Lionheart: King and Knight, trans. Jean Birrell (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006), 7.

  Aldred belongs to the end: This classification of the Middle Ages is fairly standard among historians. Mine comes most directly from Sauer, “Glosses, Glossaries and Dictionaries,” 17.

  the “civilizing process”: Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process: Sociogenetic and Psychogenetic Investigations, ed. Eric Dunning et al., trans. Edmund Jephcott, rev. ed. (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000).

  The Nominale sive Verbale: “Nominale sive Verbale,” ed. Walter Skeat, in Transactions of the Philological Society, 1903–1906 (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1906), 1–50.

  Schetewellwey… Randulfus: These names can be found in the Middle English Dictionary.

  Blame Alexander Pope: Alexander Pope, trans. The Odyssey of Homer, ed. George Musgrave, 2 vols. (London: Bell and Daldy, 1865).

  “Bastard, thine Epigrams to sport”: John Davies, “The Scourge of Folly,” in The Complete Works of John Davies of Hereford, ed. Alexander Grosart, 2 vols (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1878).

  Dictionaries and vulgaria: Ortus Vocabulorum, ed. R. C. Alston, English Linguistics 1500–1800 123 (Menston, England: Scolar Press, 1968). The Pictorial Vocabulary (747–814), the Nominale (675–744), Abbot Ælfric’s vocabulary (104–67), and “a ners” (678) are found in Thomas Wright, Anglo-Saxon and English Vocabularies, ed. Richard Paul Wülcker, 2nd ed., vol. 1 (London: Trübner, 1884); Catholicon Anglicum, ed. Sidney J. H. Herrtage, EETS 75 (Millwood, NY: Kraus Reprint, 1973); Promptorium Parvulorum, ed. A. L. Mayhew, EETS Extra Series 52 (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1908).

  “dum paro menpirium”: Wright, Anglo-Saxon and English Vocabularies, 627.

  Led, by a creative but false: Jack Anderson, review of Watch this Space and Anitergium II Hohodowndownho, by Phoebe Neville, New York Times, March 17, 1988.

  Despite their name, vulgaria: The Vulgaria of John Stanbridge and the Vulgaria of Robert Whittington, ed. Beatrice White, EETS 187 (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1932).

  “Courtesie” was another important part: For more on medieval education, see Nicholas Orme, Medieval Schools: From Roman Britain to Renaissance England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), and Nicholas Orme, Education and Society in Medieval and Renaissance England (London: Hambledon Press, 1989). Also The Babees Book (a collection of poetical and prose instructions for young children, showing the kinds of things that were thought to be important to learn), ed. Frederick J. Furnivall, EETS 32 (New York: Greenwood Press, 1969). And you might look as well at Chapter 3 of my dissertation, about the similar aims of early sixteenth-century education: “Strong Language: Oaths, Obscenities, and Performative Literature in Early Modern England,” Ph.D. diss., Stanford University, 2003.

  expulsion for “lying, swearing, and filthy speaking”: The Vulgaria of John Stanbridge and the Vulgaria of Robert Whittington, xv.

  “In women the neck of the bladder”: Lanfrank’s “Science of Cirurgie,” ed. Robert v. Fleischhacker (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1894), 173. For other examples of medical texts using unmarked obscene words, see “balocke codde,” “pyntell,” and “ars” in The Middle English Version of William of Saliceto’s Anatomia, ed. Christian Heimerl (Heidelberg: Winter, 2008), 45, 47, 53; “the ersse” in John Arderne’s Treatises of Fistula in Ano, ed. D’Arcy Power, EETS 139 (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1910), 2; and Juhani Norri, Names of Body Parts in English, 1400–1550 (Helsinki: Finnish Academy of Science and Letters, 1998).

  you should anoint him: Lanfrank’s “Science,” 176.

  “For on thy bed”: Chaucer, “The Manciple’s Tale,” The Riverside Chaucer, 256, 311–12.

  “We! hold thy tongue”: quoted in Lynne Forest-Hill, Transgressive Language in Medieval Drama: Signs of Challenge and Change (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2000), 34.

  “Take out that southern”: “Southerne,” Middle English Dictionary, accessed July 25, 2012.

  Kekir and bobrelle: Wright, Anglo-Saxon and English Vocabularies; Thomas Ross, “Taboo-Words in Fifteenth-Century English,” Fifteenth Century Studies: Recent Essays, ed. Robert F. Yeager (Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1984), 137–60; Middle English Dictionary.

  Pintel, tarse, and yerde: Middle English Dictionary; Ross, “Taboo-Words,” 153; Eve Salisbury, ed., “A Talk of Ten Wives on Their Husbands’ Ware,” Teams Middle English Texts Series (online), accessed September 27, 2010.

  how did people insult each other: For more on linguistic crimes such as defamation and scolding, see Sandy Bardsley, Venomous Tongues: Speech and Gender in Late Medieval England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006); Edwin Craun, The Hands of the Tongue: Essays on Deviant Speech, Studies in Medieval Culture XLVII (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute, 2007), particularly the essay by Derek Neal, “Husbands and Priests: Masculinity, Sexuality, and Defamation in Late Medieval England”; Ruth Mazo Karras, “The Latin Vocabulary of Illicit Sex in English Ecclesiastical Court Records,” Journal of Medieval Latin 2 (1992): 1–17; L. R. Poos, “Sex, Lies, and the Church Courts of Pre-Reformation England,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History XXV, no. 4 (Spring 1995): 585–607; and J. H. Baker, An Introduction to English Legal History, 3rd. ed. (London: Butterworths, 1990).

  The Victorian legal scholar: Frederic William Maitland, Select Pleas in Manorial and Other Seignorial Courts, vol. 1 (London: Bernard Quaritch, 1889).

  Late medieval accounts: The Rokker case is described in Kim Phillips, Medieval Maidens: Young Women and Gender in England, 1270–1540 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003). Elizabeth Whyns’s words are from Poos, “Sex, Lies, and the Church Courts,” 593. Wybard’s attack is found in Derek G. Neal, The Masculine Self in Late Medieval England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008).

  “For harlots and servants”: Morte Arthure, ed. Edmond Brock, EETS 8 (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1871).

  “the moralisation of status words”: C. S. Lewis, Studies in Words (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967), 21–23.

  But the court records: Court rolls provide a valuable record of real-life insults, but they have their limitations. It is likely that whore was the most common abuse
recorded for women and false for men because defamation suits were most often brought about words that had the potential to cause real damage. Being tarred as unchaste could cost an unmarried woman a husband, or could cause a married woman to be hauled up before another court on charges of adultery; having a reputation as a dishonest man could cost a farmer or tradesman business. It is possible that other kinds of insults were rife but that they do not appear in the court rolls because they would have been an unsuccessful basis for a defamation suit. The fact that other linguistic crimes such as scolding and assault with contumelious words also employ the whore/false vocabulary would indicate otherwise, however.

  Badges like this: Jos Koldeweij, “‘Shameless and Naked Images:’ Obscene Badges as Parodies of Popular Devotion,” in Art and Architecture of Late Medieval Pilgrimage in Northern Europe and the British Isles, ed. Sarah Blick and Rita Tekippe (Leiden: Brill, 2005), 493–510; Susan Signe Morrison, “Waste Space: Pilgrim Badges, Ophelia and Walsingham Remembered,” Walsingham in Literature and Culture from the Middle Ages to Modernity, ed. Dominic Janes and Gary Waller (Burlington VT: Ashgate, 2010), 49–66; Anthony Weir, “Satan in the Groin,” Beyond-the-Pale.org.uk, accessed July 25, 2012.

  “shameless and naked images”: Morrison, “Waste Space,” 57.

  There was almost no such thing as privacy: Mark Girouard, Life in the English Country House (New York: Penguin, 1978); Diana Webb, Privacy and Solitude in the Middle Ages (London: Hambledon Continuum, 2006); Lena Cowen Orlin, Locating Privacy in Tudor London (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007); Ian Mortimer, The Time Traveler’s Guide to Medieval England (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2010); Margaret Wade Labarge, A Baronial Household of the Thirteenth Century (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1965); Maryanne Kowaleski, ed., Medieval Domesticity: Home, Housing, and Household in Medieval England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008); C. M. Woolgar, The Great Household in Late Medieval England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999).

  “it is impolite”: quoted in Elias, The Civilizing Process, 110.

  “One should not, like rustics”: quoted in ibid., 111.

  We can reconstruct what a dinner: Melitta Weiss Adamson, Food in Medieval Times (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2004).

  “If you spit over the table”: The Boke of Curtasye in Frederick James Furnivall, Early English Meals and Manners (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1868), 175–205.

  “belch near no man’s face”: Hugh Rhodes, The Boke of Nurture for Men, Servants, and Children (London, 1545), Early English Books Online, accessed July 25, 2012.

  “the floors too are generally spread”: Erasmus, The Correspondence of Erasmus: Letters 1356 to 153, trans. R. A. B. Mynors and Alexander Dalzell (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992), 10:471.

  “Soon then Beowulf”: Beowulf: An Updated Verse Translation, trans. Frederick Rebsamen (New York: Harper Collins, 2004), 1793–99.

  “the sight of total nakedness”: quoted in Elias, The Civilizing Process, 139.

  “Medieval people would be much less likely”: Ruth Mazo Karras, Sexuality in Medieval Europe: Doing unto Others (New York: Routledge, 2005), 153.

  In a 1366 case: P. J. P. Goldberg, ed., Women in England c. 1275–1525 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995), 62.

  “What was lacking”: Elias, The Civilizing Process, 60.

  “a shitten shepherd”: Chaucer, “General Prologue,” The Riverside Chaucer, 504.

  A well-known comic set piece: Chaucer, “The Miller’s Tale,” The Riverside Chaucer, 687–743.

  There is in fact a famous crux: Larry D. Benson, “The ‘Queynte’ Punnings of Chaucer’s Critics,” in Studies in the Age of Chaucer, Proceedings of the New Chaucer Society, no. 1, 1984: Reconstructing Chaucer, ed. Paul Strohm and Thomas J. Heffernan (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1985), 33, 36, 43.

  One manuscript of the poem actually does: The Canterbury Tales, Cambridge Ii.3.26, Cambridge University Library, Cambridge.

  what are now called pastoral texts: For an introduction to these texts, see Edwin Craun’s Lies, Slander and Obscenity in Medieval English Literature: Pastoral Rhetoric and the Deviant Speaker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).

  When God punished him for eating the fruit: St. Augustine, City of God, trans. P. Levine, vol. 4 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1965), Book 14, Chapters 23–24.

  do not discuss obscenity: “The terms obscene and obscenity—although they were part and parcel of the Latin rhetorical tradition from its formation through its transference to modern spoken languages—do not enter the lexica of the vernaculars until after the Middle Ages.” Ziolkowski, Obscenity, 16.

  “These are the sins of the mouth”: Speculum Christiani, ed. Gustaf Holmstedt, EETS 182 (Oxford: Humphrey Milford, Oxford University Press, 1933), 58.

  the “wose of synne”: Jacob’s Well, ed. Arthur Brandeis, EETS 115 (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1900), 1:53.

  “the seven heads”: Ayenbite of Inwit or Remorse of Conscience, vol. 1, ed. Pamela Gradon, EETS 23 (London: Oxford University Press, 1965).

  “The devil tempts of this sin”: Ayenbite, 46.

  The danger of this sort of speech: R. Howard Bloch, “Modest Maids and Modified Nouns: Obscenity in the Fabliaux,” in Obscenity: Social Control and Artistic Creation in the European Middle Ages, ed. Jan M. Ziolkowski (Leiden: Brill, 1998), 305.

  “Had we but world enough”: Andrew Marvell, “To His Coy Mistress,” in The Oxford Book of English Verse: 1250–1900, ed. Arthur Quiller-Couch (n.p., 1919), online at Bartleby.com, accessed September 27, 2010.

  The place to find obscenity in the Middle Ages is not in English but perhaps in French. The thirteenth-century literary genre called the fabliau contains tales with titles such as Le Chevalier qui fist parler les Cons (“The Knight Who Made Cunts Talk”) and Cele qui se fist foutre sur la fosse de son mari (“The One Who Got Herself Fucked on Her Husband’s Grave”), in which words such as foutre and con do seem to be “obscene” in the modern sense of the word. Several fabliaux, and the c. 1275 The Romance of the Rose, deal explicitly with the question of whether it is immodest of women to use words such as coillons (“balls”), indicating that a taboo was developing against it. For men, though, no such taboo seems to have existed—the injunctions are directed at women. Chaucer scholar Charles Muscatine argues that the concept of obscenity was just starting to develop at this time: “Much of the fabliau diction we might now consider obscene might not have been so obscene in its own time. The fabliau language of sexuality … is much of the time surprisingly free of impudence or self-consciousness. It often sounds like normal usage, the unreflective language of a culture that was relatively free of linguistic taboos, but took pleasure of various kinds in the direct verbal evocation of sexuality. It must have been the contemporaneous emergence of courtly norms of diction … that created, invented, or perhaps reinvented, in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries a new sense of obscene or vulgar language.” (281) The fabliaux date from the time of the separation between England and Normandy; the development of obscenity, which begins in the thirteenth century in Norman French, starts later in English. See Charles Muscatine, “The Fabliaux, Courtly Culture, and the (Re)Invention of Vulgarity,” in Obscenity: Social Control and Artistic Creation in the European Middle Ages, ed. Jan M. Ziolkowski (Leiden: Brill, 1998), 281–92.

  England was a feudal society: On the feudal system, see Jeffrey L. Forgeng and Will McLean, Daily Life in Chaucer’s England, 2nd ed. (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2009); W. L. Warren, Henry II (London: Methuen, 1991); “Oath,” in Encyclopedia of the Middle Ages, ed. André Vauchez, Barrie Dobson, and Michael Lapidge, trans. Adrian Walford (Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn, 2000).

  Just such a broken oath was the cause: On the Conquest, see Simon Schama, A History of Britain: At the Edge of the World? (New York: Hyperion, 2000), 86; Kari Ellen Gade, “Northern Light on the Battle of Hastings,” Viator 28 (1997); De Re Militari: The Society for Medieval Military History (online), a
ccessed June 28, 2010.

  through a process called compurgation: On compurgation and trial by ordeal, see Richard Firth Green, A Crisis of Truth: Literature and Law in Ricardian England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999); Frederic William Maitland, The Constitutional History of England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1961); Baker, An Introduction to English Legal History.

  Christiana de Dunelmia: The Calendar of the Early Mayor’s Court Rolls, ed. H. A. Thomas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1924), xxx–xxxi.

  “worse is he than an homicide”: Miles Coverdale, A Christen Exhortation unto Customable Swearers (London: W. Hill, 1548), 20.

  Lollardy began in England: There was a contemporaneous Lollard-like movement in Bohemia, led by the preacher Jan Hus. Hus was a follower of John Wyclif, the theologian who inspired the Lollards. Hus was burned at the stake in 1415. Wyclif died before he could be executed, but his bones were dug up and burned in 1428. For more on the Lollards, see Anne Hudson, The Premature Reformation: Wycliffite Texts and Lollard History (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988) and her Selections from English Wycliffite Writings, rev. ed. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997).