Chaucer, Geoffrey

The works of Geoffrey Chaucer (ca. 1340–1400) contain unexpected volumes of blasphemy, profanity, foul language, and xenophobic insult. Furthermore, Chaucer gives us many insights into swearing, namely class differences, gender factors, and different levels of awareness of the seriousness of oaths. Although he lived in a totally different society six centuries ago, Chaucer makes the modern reader aware of the vitality, creativity, continuity, and dangers of swearing. We would not expect these qualities from the preeminent English poet of the medieval era, “the first finder of our fair language,” as Thomas Hoccleve called him, the first commoner to be buried in Westminster Abbey and praised by all his peers, both English and European. The Canterbury Tales (1386–1400) draws on diverse literary influences, notably the spirituality of Dante, the idealism of Petrarch, and the realism of Boccaccio, as well as his extensive human experience, as an envoy, ambassador, and senior civil servant.

Chaucer’s great frame narrative encapsulates the diversity of the Middle Ages and forms a wonderful tour de force of medieval literary genres. It explores the polarities of the sacred and the profane: from the most spiritual genres, the saint’s life, homily and sermon, obviously befitting a pilgrimage, through the elevated epic and chivalric romance, the dream vision, tales of faery and magic, the love debate, the beast fable and complex allegory down to the frankest amorous memoirs and the crudest imaginable bedroom farces. This diversity reflects variously the idealism, spirituality, worldliness, crudity, and corruption of the tellers: they range from the Knight, whose whole life has been devoted to campaigns against the heathen all over the known world; the Parson, the one “good man of religion”; the frankly physical Miller; the sexually omnivorous and much married Wife of Bath; down to the most corrupt spiritual confidence tricksters. The bawdy tales, unexpected entertainments on a pilgrimage, belong to the genre of the medieval French fabliaux: cleverly plotted narratives treating sexual infidelity and even profanity in a comic, often cynical, fashion. Their conclusions embody a rough justice that seldom squares with Christian morality. The prime examples are the tales of the Miller, Merchant, Shipman, and Reve.

Less predictably, the tales are seldom purely generic in the mixture of style and content. The Nun’s Priest’s beast fable is very philosophical and learned; the coarse Miller’s adulterous farce is surprisingly literary; the saint’s life of the Prioress is full of anti-Semitism; the Pardoner’s grim hellfire sermon has unintentional sexual revelations in its hysterical denunciations. The opposing criteria of ernest and game (seriousness and fun) are teasingly intertwined, as are high and low language. The realistic link-pieces between the tales contain a similar range of register, from formal compliment, bawdy double-entendre , down to furious verbal brawls and wounding insults. From all of them echo an amazing range of oaths, exclamations, ejaculations, lamentations, and curses.

Chaucer is the only major author prior to the modern era who used the whole gamut of the lexis, from the most technical and philosophical to the most vulgar and obscene. In his work can be found the whole range of “four-letter” words: ferte, erse, pisse, shiten, queynte, collions (testicles), and swyve , which predates the arrival of fuck around 1500 and thrived from the medieval period before suffering a curious demise around the end of the Victorian era. The authors who came after Chaucer were all restrained by censorship of one form or another. Although there was no actual censorship, many tracts and major texts were extremely censorious about swearing. These included Robert of Brunne’s Handlyng Synne (ca. 1300) and Dan Michel’s Ayenbite of Inwit , or “The Remorse of Conscience” (ca. 1340).

These admonitory texts make the profusion of oaths in the Canterbury Tales particularly astonishing. Herbert Starr, in what is probably a conservative estimate, calculated that there are two hundred different oaths in Chaucer (Elliott 1974, 263). Ralph Elliott noted that “It is the vulgar characters who swear most and most profanely, with Harry Bailly [the Host of the Tabard Inn] well out in front, the Wife of Bath some way behind, followed by the Pardoner and the Miller” (Elliott 1974, 253). Chaucer’s early poem The Parlement of Foulys (ca. 1382), a comic debate with vigorous exchanges between the different orders of birds, makes a similar discrimination between the “polite language” of the aristocracy and “cherles termes” of the lower-class birds. In the scheme of the Canterbury Tales , the hierarchical correlation between class and language is equally apparent, as the entries for the medieval period and cherles termes make clear.

Chaucer the author, who has created the whole ingenious scheme of storytelling, presents a narrative persona , another Chaucer, the pilgrim-narrator, who refers to the problems of obscenity and profanity in the Prologue (ll. 725-42). In a slightly embarrassed fashion he hopes that the reader will not ascribe the bad language to his vileynye (“ill-breeding”), since he is obliged to repeat the tales truthfully, even though people will speak rudeliche and large (“rudely and freely”). From these modest protestations, he moves to a quite different level of argument, reminding us firstly that “Crist spak himself ful brode in hooly writ” (“Christ himself spoke very plainly in Holy Writ”) and that Plato prescribed that “The wordes moot be cosyn for the dede” (“The language must be appropriate to the action”).

Although oaths seem to cascade indiscriminately from the lips of the pilgrims as they make their pilgrimage to Canterbury, Chaucer is clearly making a judgment on the characters on the basis of their swearing and “brode” language. Even Madame Eglentine, the prim, class-conscious Prioress, swears mildly by St. Loy, appropriately the patron saint of jewelers. At one end of the scale is the pious modesty of the Knight, “who never in his life said anything ill-bred” ( vileynye ), telling a romance of chivalry virtually free of oaths. At the other are a variety of foul-mouthed and profane exhibitionists who seem to have no business on the pilgrimage. These include the Miller, Reeve, Pardoner, Summoner, Wife of Bath, and the Host of the Tabard Inn in London, the self-appointed master of ceremonies. The principal theme of the corrupt Friar’s tale is swearing, more especially whether grievous curses like “The feend yow fecche!” (“The Devil take you!”) used by a furious carter as he flays his horses should be taken literally as invocations, or regarded with more toleration as expressions of frustration in which “The carl spak oo thing, but he thoght another” (“The chap said one thing but he meant another,” l. 1568).

The Parson, an idealized figure, is aggressively judgmental against swearing. When the Host invites him to tell his tale, using provocative language:

“Sir Parrishe Prest,” quod he, “for Goddes bones
Telle us a tale … by Goddes dignitee!”

the Parson immediately retorts:

“Benedicitee!
What eyleth the man so synfully to swere?”
(“What is wrong with the man that he swears so grievously?”)

The Host stands his ground, but warns the pilgrimage to expect a predicacioun (sermon). Into the confrontation quite unexpectedly comes the Shipman (skipper), a ruthless and unChristian man, who also has strong views, insisting that the Parson shall not preach.

“Nay, by my fader soule, that schal he nat!”
Seyde the Shipman, “heer schal he nat preche;
He schal no gospel glosen [interpret] here ne teche.”
(ll. 1166-80)

These three characters express different attitudes then current toward profane and religious language. The Parson is severely against all swearing, the Host regards it more broad-mindedly as a venal (minor) sin, but the Shipman is hostile to preaching and represents a growing fundamentalist suspicion of priests and “glosing” (ingenious interpretation) of the Gospel. This attitude was to harden into Protestantism and Nonconformity in the following centuries.

The originality of the swearing in the Canterbury Tales is difficult to appreciate now. Disparaging secular uses of foul, lousy, old, shrew, swine , and idiot were then new, but have lost their impact in the intervening centuries through the semantic trend of loss of intensity. Several of them emerge from the lips of the formidable Wife of Bath, who in her amorous and violent memoir, her remarkably extensive Prologue , castigated her elderly spouses in wickedly insulting phrases like olde barelful of lies and sire oulde lecchour , dismissing Metellius as the foule swyn . In the Friar’s Tale the devil-figure speaks of a lowsy jogelour (“a lousy juggler”), using lousy for the first recorded time. The Pardoner extends the currency of the ancient term bitch in condemning dice as the bicched bones two . Even the Man of Law, a conservative practitioner of the language, launches the fascinating word virago as a new misogynist term, while the disillusioned Merchant refers to his wife as a shrew , a term newly applied to a woman. Both terms have their own entries.

Most of the swearing is, expectedly, religious and traditional. The Parson, the one “good man of religion” on the pilgrimage, tells the final “tale,” but in the form of a lengthy discourse on the Seven Deadly Sins. He condemns swearing in a literal fashion, although he opens with an appeal that sounds to us like an oath:

For Cristes sake, ne swereth nat so synfully in dismembrynge of Crist by soule, herte, bones and body. For certes it semeth that ye thynke that the cursed Jewes ne dismembred nat ynough the preciouse persone of Crist, but ye dismembre hym more. (l. 590)

The Parson’s strict interpretation condemns much of the profanity that has been uttered on the path of pilgrimage. His view is echoed in the pseudo-sermon delivered by the corrupt simoniac bogus evangelist, the Pardoner. His own hellfire diatribe is schizophrenic; one mode is the standard denunciation of swearing, setting out three modes:

Gret sweryng is a thing abhominable,
And fals sweryng is yet more reprevable [reprehensible]….
But ydel sweryng is a cursednesse [wickedness].
(ll. 631-38)

The other mode is the orgy of swearing indulged in by the revelers in his tale in their drunken frenzy, indiscriminately garbling dicers’ oaths and invocations to holy relics:

“By Goddes precious herte,” and “by his nayles,”
and “by the blood of Crist which is in Hayles [a sacred relic],
Sevene is my chaunce, and thyn is cynk [five] and treye [three]!”
“By Goddes armes, if thou falsly pleye,
This daggere shal thurghout thyn herte go!”
Thys fruyt cometh of the bicched bones two
Forsweryng, ire, falseness, homycide.
(ll. 651-57)

The revelers, too, in the words of the Parson, “dismember” Christ:

And many a grisly ooth thanne han they sworn
And Cristes blessed body they to-rente [tore to pieces]
(ll. 708-9)

This idiom, which is to modern readers the most shocking, is reiterated throughout the work. The body of Christ, the wounds and torture of the Crucifixion, become a grim motif. Thus the drunken Miller announces himself almost incoherently: “By armes, by blood and bones” (3125). The Host reacts to the Physician’s Tale in a similar way, giving us an indication of what Chaucer considered outrageous swearing to be:

Our Host gan to swere as he were wood [mad];
“Harrow!” quod he, “by nayles and by blood!”
(ll. 287-88)

(“Harrow!” is an almost untranslatable medieval cry of pain and distress; it is secular, surviving only in the adjective harrowing .)

The most sacred Christian symbols take on different meanings, not all of them expected in an age of faith. The Cross is strangely transfigured into “Cristes sweete tree” ( Miller’s Tale , l. 3767) and the sufferings of the Crucifixion are made into exclamations, such as “for Cristes peyne,” “for Cristes passioun.” ( Tree was used of the Cross from Anglo-Saxon English through to late Middle English; passioun in Chaucer’s time meant “the sufferings of Christ on the Cross.”) However, the Cross is also used in a way we would consider blasphemous in the Wife of Bath’s retaliation for her young husband’s dalliances: “I made him of the same wood a croce [cross].” Protestations range from the Latin corpus dominus (“by God’s body”) to “by Godes herte!,” “God help me so …” and “God it woot,” which later became “God wot,” the ancestors of “God knows.”

Blessings are usually general, as in “God save al the route” (“God save all the company”), sometimes reinforced to “God bless us, and oure lady Seinte Marie!” But some are profane or even blasphemous. The Shipman ends his cynical tale relating ledger-sheets and bedsheets with a naughtily ambiguous blessing: “God us sende / Taillynge ynogh unto our lyves ende” (“May God give us plenty of bonking/accounting until the end of our lives”).

Invocations follow the same pattern, including “by thilke [the same] God that yaf me soule and lyf!,” “by heighe God!,” “by God and by Saint John!,” “by hevene king!,” and “for verray God, that nys but oon” (“By the true God, of which there is only one”). This is, of course, the top of the scale. Lesser known saints such as St. Note and St. Ronyan make their appearances, as do ancestors, some of them surprisingly remote in “by my fader soule!” and even “by my moodres sires soule!” and related artifacts, such as “by seint Poules belle!” The comparatively mild are “Benedicitee!” (“The Lord bless you!”). Some are completely personal and secular, such as “so theech!” (“so may I prosper!”) and “nevere in my lyf, for lief ne looth” (“never in my life, whether I wish to or not”).

This miscellany suggests that oaths spring indiscriminately from the pilgrims’ lips—the light, the heavy, and the absurd. Yet in some cases Chaucer clearly seeks to individuate swearing to make oaths, curses, and blessings an indicator of character and values. A notable example is the Wife of Bath’s outrageous mixture of sentiments expressed toward her old husband: “O leeve sire shrew, Jhesu shorte thy life!” (“Oh dear master villain, may Jesus shorten your life!”). Likewise, the outraged husband in the Merchant’s Tale , catching his wife and her lover in flagrante dilecto: “God yeve yow bothe on shames deth to dyen” (“May God give you both a shameful death!”). Similar is the Host’s furious response to the charlatanism of the eunuch Pardoner hawking bogus relics:

“By the cros which that Seint Eleyne fond
I wolde I hadde thy collions [testicles] in my hond.
They shal be shryned [enshrined] in an hogges toord!”

(ll. 951-52)

Two final examples show the individuated use of oaths. The Man of Law’s Tale shows a conservative, dignified formality appropriate to the teller’s character and station: “But oon avow to grete God I heete” (“But one oath I promise to great God”). Heete was an archaic term, even in Chaucer’s time. Other formal archaisms are parfay (by my faith), thanked be Cristes grace!, God and all his halwes brighte! (halwes being an archaic word for “saint” and the root of Halloween ). However, from this highly respectable legal pillar of the establishment emanate two strains of opprobrious language, namely xenophobia and misogyny. In his denunciation of the devious sultaness in his tale (ll. 358-61) he launches a new term of misogynist abuse, virago .

Xenophobic swearing is an important and troubling aspect of the Canterbury Tales . The anti-Semitic phrase the cursed Jewes occurs in the dour sermon of the Parson, being repeated in the Pardoner’s Tale and also in the motif of the dismembering of Christ. However, the most surprising context is the gruesome anti-Semitic tale told by the Prioress, discussed more fully in the entry for Jews.

The Nun’s Priest’s Tale , a brilliant compendium of narrative techniques and a comic tour de force, makes an artfully humorous comment on swearing by its absurd placing of standard oaths in an animal fable. The vain cock Chantecleer protests: “By God! I hadde rather than my sherte” (“I’d give my shirt”). His favorite wife, Pertelote, implores him to take some homeopathic medicine: “For Goddes love, taak some laxatyf!” Even the wily fox, who has already consumed Chantecleer’s father, speaks in an aristocratic fashion; “My lord, your father—God his soule bless!” At the crisis when Chantecleer is abducted by the fox, Chaucer’s “swete prest” makes splendid fun of the extravagant exclamations typical at such points of a narrative: he appeals to “Destinee,” to “Venus,” and to “Gaufred” (Geoffrey de Vinsauf, the master of medieval rhetoric), all in vain. He himself utters only the mildest of oaths “Benedicitee!” at a moment of frantic excitement and rural panic. But suddenly the farmyard chase is compared to a grimmer reality of xenophobic hostility (ll. 3394-97), the massacre of Flemish immigrants during the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381. Chroniclers reported that many lost their lives because they said brood and kaas instead of bread and cheese . At the conclusion of his tale the Host compliments him on his manly physique and virile manner, naughtily adding “I-blessed be thy breche and every stoon” which translates incongruously in Modern English as “Blessed be your buttocks and both testicles” (ll. 3448).

The epithet “Chaucerian” has come to mean “risqué,” “naughty,” or “crude,” unfairly and simplistically on the basis of the coarse tales told by the few vulgar tellers. For the structure of the Canterbury Tales shows a complete range of human types and characters, as well as a medieval encyclopedia of narrative. Chaucer’s genius consisted not only in creating a microcosm of medieval society, but also in matching the tellers and the tales. Centuries before Freud, Chaucer had intuitively grasped the truth that when people speak, especially in an extended narrative, their values, ideals, fantasies, insecurities, and aggressions are subconsciously revealed, and that their expletives are crucial revealers.

Chaucer’s great scheme, although apparently unfinished, is actually complete, since it ends with Chaucer taking leave of his readers as a pious and God-fearing Christian facing the Last Judgment. This conclusion, called the Retractions, is crucial to the understanding of the work, since Chaucer the author finally unmasks himself and separates his own literary output into the wheat and the chaff, the works of ultimate spiritual value and those that “soonen into sinne,” those that derive from baser materials and instincts. Among these are the fabliaux, the crude and profane tales. Chaucer’s final words show him to be profoundly earnest in his hope “that I may be oon of hem at the day of doom that shulle be saved.”