Forswearing

This term, now obsolescent, means variously swearing falsely, breaking one’s oath, or going back on one’s word, meanings essentially taken over by perjury . In earlier times when personal relations often took the form of an oath, to be forsworn was a great social stigma. The Laws of the Anglo-Saxon king Ecgbert (ca. 1000) specified that a layman who forswore should be imprisoned for four years (II § 24). A number of proverbs reinforced the ethic: “Forsworn man shal neuer spede!” (“A person who is forsworn will never prosper”) from about 1330 and the similar sentiment: “Once forsworne ever forlorne,” from 1619.

However, from the eighteenth century onward the term was used in an increasingly trivial fashion, meaning generally to abandon, renounce, or simply give up something. Thus a character in Sheridan’s classic play The Rivals (1775) announces: “I will forswear your company” (II i), while another in Benjamin Disraeli’s novel Vivian Grey (1826) is almost ironic: “I forswore, with the most solemn oath, the gaming [gambling] table” (V xiii). The decline in the strength of the meaning is a direct reflection of the diminishing importance attached to oaths.