Holy Sh*t: A Brief History of Swearing (19 page)

The “Warning to Swearers” in St. Lawrence’s Church, Broughton.

With their promotion of the physical senses as the most reliable means of verifying truth (for us fallen humans), these complaints also suggest why medieval swearing is portrayed as having the power to touch God’s physical body. Since oaths guarantee the truth of our statements by securing God as witness, and since we prefer physical proof that things are true, oaths work best by anchoring themselves in God’s body. Every oath in effect re-creates the Doubting Thomas
scenario—our voice goes out from our bodies to touch God’s body and the truth is secured. What better way to understand and to shore up swearing’s power to make God act as witness to our words than by depicting those words as basing themselves in his body—almost as if, when we swear, we tap him on the shoulder and say, “Hey, look!”

The Eucharist was the center of complex spiritual and worldly hierarchies, constructed around God’s body as present in the Host and through people’s various relations to it—who got to make it, who could partake of it, and who had to admire it from afar. Historian Eamon Duffy succinctly lays out these connections between sacrament and medieval society: “
The body of Christ
… was the focus of all the hopes and aspirations of late medieval religion.” As Duffy points out, it was also the means by which those in power stayed in power, “a device in the process of the establishment of community [and] the validation of power structures.”

In this society, priests occupied the top of the hierarchy, they alone having the power to transform bread and wine into Christ’s body and blood. Lay men and women had no part in and were not supposed to understand these mysteries to the same degree as could priests—they were forbidden “
even [to] touch
the sacred vessels with their bare hands.” Members of the aristocracy and gentry had quite ready access to the Host, since they were able to hear Mass several times a day and to take Communion every month or more. Most of the population, however, took Communion only at Easter, and for the rest of the year were reduced to worshipping the Host at a distance during the Elevation. Even this long-distance admiration was carefully scripted, the congregation’s smallest movements dictated. Before the consecration of the Host, for example, “
a bell was rung
to warn worshippers absorbed in their own prayers to look up.” Next, “
holding up of the hands
and the more or less audible recitation of elevation prayers at the sacring was a gesture expected of everyone: refusal or omission was a frequent cause of the detection of Lollards.” The ceremony was so tightly regulated that the smallest
deviation could bring accusations of heresy—Christ’s body was thought to be powerful, and it had to be handled with extreme care.

Like the Eucharist, lawful swearing was a pillar of medieval English society. It secured people’s honesty by making God a witness to people’s promises, without which allegiances would waver, criminal and Church trials would grind to a halt, marriages would remain unsolemnized, and baptism would be impossible—and without which, as one clergyman put it, “
no state can stand
.” Vain swearing, however, carried with it a terrifying potential for chaos. Unlike administering or receiving Communion, swearing was not a class prerogative. It threatened to disrupt the carefully maintained Eucharistic hierarchy of power by allowing anyone and everyone access to God’s body—anyone, that is, who could put together the talismanic words.
Catholic pastoral literature expresses great anxiety
about this democratizing potential, typically echoing the sentiments of this fifteenth-century sermon, which worries how the second commandment “is broken entirely among learned and uneducated, among young and old, among rich and poor, from a little child who can barely speak, to an old bearded man from whom age has almost taken his proper speech.” Pastoral tracts such as
Jacob’s Well
and
Handlyng Synne
react to swearing’s disruptive potential, as we have seen, with a slew of rules to regulate proper and improper use of oaths, rules as complex and rigid as those that govern the ceremony of the Eucharist. These restrictive regulations demonstrate a strong desire for control over the language, but also a fear that control is ultimately impossible. Given this ever-present suspicion that precepts, however iron-clad, might not be able to stem the flood of oaths, complaints against swearers and some pastoral texts rely on another means of protecting God, and the society organized around his body, from damage: pity. As we saw in the
Gesta Romanorum
, these tales depict not a wrathful God, angry that people are trying to pull off his feet, but Christ as a child, bloody and helpless. His mother often begs swearers to stop, and sometimes Christ himself asks them to have mercy. These depictions stress what pastoral literature’s strict prohibitions are intended
to limit and tend to disguise—the extent to which swearing places God in our care, to be cherished or torn apart.

In the Middle Ages, swearing followed the biblical model, concerned with the Holy and not with the Shit. Many of the obscene words we use today were already in use by the medieval period, but they did not have the same offensive and emotive power. The period was not without Roman influences—we saw the religious sense of obscenity make an appearance in the apotropaic vulvas and penises of medieval Catholicism. But for the most part, obscenity as we understand it was in abeyance. It was in the Renaissance that the Shit started to make a comeback.

Chapter 4
The Rise of Obscenity
The Renaissance

Robert Southwell knew that he was sailing to his death when he left Calais for England on the morning of July 17. He landed on the southeast coast between Folkestone and Dover, dressed soberly but richly, like the gentleman he once had been. The secret service was informed of his impending arrival and hoped to eliminate what it saw as a dangerous threat as soon as he touched English soil. But here Southwell had a bit of luck. In England, it was still July 7—the English continued to refuse to adopt the “Popish”
Gregorian calendar
—and one of the feast days of St. Thomas Becket. Despite the Protestant government’s abolition of the holiday, hundreds of people were on the roads, traveling to and from local fairs. Southwell was able to disappear into the crowds of revelers and elude the government informers who watched the coastline.

Southwell was not a spy, not an assassin. He came to England to say Mass, to administer the sacraments, and to offer spiritual comfort to Catholics. He was, in other words, a Catholic priest, and in 1586 this was illegal.

Though he escaped capture that morning, and indeed for six more years, Southwell was eventually arrested and executed.
The 1585 Act
Against Jesuits, Seminary Priests, and Other Such-Like Disobedient Persons had made it high treason for priests to enter or to stay in England. Southwell, a Jesuit, was clearly in violation of the statute. When he was put on trial, however, the primary charge against him was not that he remained in England illegally but that
he taught Catholics a certain kind of swearing—equivocation. Equivocation is a way to deceive your listener without lying, through the use of double meanings or mental reservation (words thought but not spoken). If you say out loud “I did not have sexual relations with that woman” but add in your mind “So that it’s any of your business,” you are equivocating through mental reservation.
*
It’s equivocation too when you say “Thank you for the book.
I will waste no time reading it.
” The person who has given you the six-hundred-page doorstop thinks that you will dive into it right away; you mean that you will never crack it open. This kind, relying on double meanings, was called amphibology (from the Greek for “both,” as in
amphibian
) during the Renaissance.

It might seem like mere wordplay to us today, but in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries equivocation was a deadly serious matter. It allowed Catholics to escape unjust persecution without committing the terrible sins of lying or perjury. When questioned by the government, Catholics could save their souls
and
their bodies—they could deny that they heard Mass, that they harbored a priest, that they carried a rosary, without lying to God and so damning themselves. To the Protestant government, equivocation was a violation of law, a flouting of its just authority. It is ironic, perhaps, that in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, Catholics had persecuted proto-Protestants for their views on swearing, but by the sixteenth century, it was Protestants persecuting Catholics over what they thought about oaths.

The trial of Robert Southwell was one of the last appearances of the medieval model of swearing, since at its crux was the idea that
oaths are so sacred, so powerful, that circuitous techniques such as equivocation are needed to avoid perjury. His trial also marked the beginning of the end for this model of swearing, however. Later in the Renaissance (usually dated 1500–1660), the strength of oaths began to decline because of the development of Protestantism and its changing definition of man’s relationship with God, and because of the growth of capitalism, with its emphasis on contracts and on man’s word as his bond. At the same time, there was an increase in “civility,” as characterized in the previous chapter—an advancing of the threshold of shame and repugnance. Body parts and actions that in the Middle Ages had been shown in public and not considered particular loci of concern became “private” and invested with the great significance of taboo. Words for these things became taboo as well. This “rise of civility” began in the later Middle Ages and was completed by the end of the seventeenth century, but it happened gradually, with stops and starts, advances and retreats, and at different stages in different geographical areas, social classes, and genres of texts. As a result, obscenities slowly gained the power lost by oaths, and the greatest linguistic taboo became not words that could rip apart God’s body but words that could reveal the human one. The balance began to swing away from the Holy and back to the Shit.

A Jesuitical Doctrine

In the 1580s, England was in religious ferment, and had been for some time.
Henry VIII had halfheartedly
begun the Protestant Reformation when he broke with the Catholic Church in 1534 over its refusal to grant him a divorce from his first wife. His son, Edward VI, was a staunch but very young and sickly Protestant, whose ministers tried hard to Protestantize the country during his six-year reign. When Edward’s half sister Mary acceded to the throne in 1553, she brought Catholicism back with a vengeance.
Queen Elizabeth I returned the country to Protestantism once again when she was crowned in 1558, but she looked to be quite tolerant of Catholics. At this point, toleration was welcomed by a large part of the English population, who had had to adapt to four religious changes in thirty-four years, each time having to figure out whether they would or would not go to purgatory after death, whether the soul of a child who died before baptism was in limbo or with God.

When Elizabeth acceded to the throne, many Catholics were so-called schismatics who attended Protestant church despite their differences with the liturgy and doctrines. In 1564, however, Pope Pius V specifically forbade English Catholics from attending Church of England services. And in 1570 he issued
the bull
Regnans in Excelsis
. This decree excommunicated Elizabeth, declared that she was not the lawful queen of England, absolved her subjects of allegiance to her, and excommunicated anyone who would “dare obey her orders, mandates, and laws.” It was rumored (falsely) throughout the country that the bull also granted full remission of sins to anyone who assassinated her.
After this, English penal laws
against Catholics grew ever more oppressive. Statutes passed in 1571 made it treason to reconcile anyone to the Catholic Church or be oneself reconciled, to procure or publish papal bulls, and to bring into England crucifixes, rosaries, or an Agnus Dei (a small wax cake impressed with the figure of a lamb bearing a cross, blessed by the Pope and thought to possess apotropaic power—a more modest version of the flying phallus pilgrimage badge). In 1581, the government prohibited celebration of the Mass, imposing large fines and year-long imprisonment for the celebrant and hearers. This law also increased the recusancy fine—the penalty Catholics paid if they refused to attend Church of England services—to £20 per month, forty or fifty times the wage of artisans such as carpenters or tailors. The 1585 statute that made it illegal to be a priest in England, under which Southwell was tried, also made it an offense punishable by death to
shelter or aid a priest in any way. And in 1587, recusants were to forfeit two-thirds of their income if they refused to pay the huge fines levied on them.

In short, it was a difficult time to be a Catholic in England. If you helped priests—necessary to your salvation because only they could provide access to the sacraments—you risked death, not just for yourself but also for members of your family. If you followed the Pope’s dictates and refused to attend heretical services, you faced poverty brought on by crippling fines. If you didn’t do these things, though, you were at best, as Catholics of the time believed, preparing for yourself a long, long time in purgatory. Purgatory was not to be taken lightly—it was very much like hell, but with the possibility of release after much suffering. Depending on their sins,
souls in purgatory might
, according to historian Eamon Duffy, be “suspended by meat-hooks driven through jaws, tongue, or sexual organs, frozen into ice, boil[ed] in vats of liquid metal or fire.” At worst, you were damning yourself eternally, going straight to hell, where those souls on meat hooks writhe forever.