Holy Sh*t: A Brief History of Swearing (16 page)

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, which 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.