Holy Sh*t: A Brief History of Swearing (14 page)

The worst, most dangerous kind of language in the Middle Ages, however, was swearing.
Swearing
at the time had a very particular meaning, the biblical meaning—it referred only to oaths by God. Sincerely done, swearing was one of the bases of stable government
and social order. Badly or frivolously—that is, vainly—done, it threatened to wreak havoc with the smooth running of society and even to injure God himself. The Holy provided the strongest taboos and most highly charged language.

Before we go on, we need to clarify what we mean by the Middle Ages, and
what the linguistic situation in England was
during this period. For hundreds of years, English was only one of three languages spoken in England, and not the most important one. England was triglossic—its three languages were used by different social classes and imbued with varying amounts of prestige. Latin was the language of learning, the international lingua franca, used by monks, clerks, doctors, philosophers, and many literary authors in England and across the rest of Europe. Anglo-Saxon—the Old English of Aldred’s Bible translation—was the primary language of everybody else from the sixth century to 1066, when the Normans conquered England. After the Conquest, Norman French became the language of power,
parlée par
the nobility, employed in the courts of law, and prized as an expressive literary language. English became in turn the language of the downtrodden, the dispossessed.
King Richard the Lionheart
, portrayed in tales and movies as the savior of the brave and oppressed Saxons in Sherwood Forest, actually wouldn’t have been able to talk to them—he never bothered to learn English.

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.