Medieval Period

The medieval period was paradoxical and inconsistent from the point of view of swearing and profanity, but more predictable in its obscenity and xenophobia. An age of faith, its intense spirituality and great religious energies were manifest in the building of cathedrals and monasteries, the founding of idealistic orders, the pursuit of arduous pilgrimages, and the military exploits of the Crusades, whose original intentions were to find the True Cross and liberate the Holy Land from the heathen. But in time these institutions became venal and corrupted. The fixations with death in the form of the memento mori and the horrors of the Last Judgment were profound and ubiquitous.

Yet verbally there was an astounding volume of religious asseveration, ejaculation, profanity, blasphemy, anathema, and cursing, both personal and institutional, both fraudulent and genuine. The word of God, so signally absent from the older Anglo-Saxon oaths and asseverations, was used and abused, elevated, debased, cynically exploited, and distorted as never before. Furthermore, whereas at the beginning of the medieval period the Church was united, by the end it was bitterly divided by reformist impulses and sectarian strife. These divisive forces were to intensify during the Reformation. Consequently the monolithic and unifying ecclesiastical vocabulary turned into labels of vilification.

Most medieval oaths were naturally generated from a religious dynamic. However, many are now hardly recognizable as such because they have been “minced” into innocent forms or lost their original intensity. Thus by my faith! eroded into plain faith; by Mary similarly became commonplace marry; and I pray thee continued as simple prithee . In time all became moribund and then obsolete. Extraordinarily, the central act of sacrifice in the Christian religion, the Crucifixion, became the generator of numerous grisly oaths in which Christ’s wounded and bloody body, even the very nails of the Cross, were callously and often profanely exploited. Oaths like by Goddes armes, for Cristes peyne, by the blood of Crist , and by nayles and by blood , now seem as grotesque and bizarre to modern readers as modern genital, copulatory, and sexual swearing would have seemed to medievals. Indeed, sexual swearing, now de rigueur , is hardly apparent, according to Ralph Elliott “non-existent in Chaucer” (1974, 241). Equally strange were the conventions of courtly love whereby the object of desire, the Lady, was placed on a pedestal, deified, and worshiped in the Petrarchan convention to a degree that strikes modern readers as profane. As the sacred was downgraded, so the amorous and secular were spiritualized. The polar opposite was the convention of the adulterous and opportunistic wife-figure in the genre of the fabliau, a mixture of the farce and the dirty story with liberal use of obscenity.

Most strangely, there were no official restraints imposed on such utterances and activities, authors enjoying almost complete artistic freedom. This was a reflection of the manuscript culture. All the forms of censorship with which the modern world is familiar were instituted after the Middle Ages. (As the entry for censorship shows, the Index was instituted by the Vatican in 1546.) Language now regarded as coarse and obscene thrived in common words, sayings, and even names. Two London streets were called, astonishingly, Gropecuntlane and Shitteborrowlane , and there were numerous Pissing Alleys . The dandelion flower, with its heraldic name rooted in French dent du lion , was commonly known by the grosser name of pissabed , on account of its diuretic properties. As the entry for Geoffrey Chaucer makes clear, the diversity of the Middle Ages, both literary and linguistic, is encapsulated in his magnum opus , his Canterbury Tales (1386–1400). Chaucer and his contemporaries, indeed most medieval writers, could exploit a whole range of vituperation and obscenity in which no word was taboo. He himself used the whole range of “four-letter” words, and introduced a range of new secular terms of personal disparagement like foul, lousy, old, shrew, swine , and idiot . His contemporary William Langland, author of Piers Plowman , uses such daring juxtapositions of register as “He pissed in a potel [bottle] a pater noster while” (Passus B V l. 348). (By Elizabethan times a short interval was called “a pissing while.”) This juxtaposition of the religious and the grossly physical is captured in some religious paintings, notably Pieter Brueghel the Younger’s canvas, The Kermesse [Feast] of St. George (1628), showing drunken villagers drinking, fighting, kissing, urinating, dancing, vomiting, and defecating with compete abandon.

Many of the personal exchanges in Chaucer, both between pilgrims and between characters in the tales, are still astonishing in their robustness, cruelty, and profanity. To take a single example, the sense of outrage felt by the Host of the Tabard Inn at the cynical charlatanism of the Pardoner’s hawking of bogus relics leads to this damning response, the first line intensely spiritual, the second grossly physical:

“By the cros which that Seint Eleyne fond,
I wolde that I hadd thy coillons [testicles] in my hond.”
( Pardoner’s Tale , l. 952)

Obviously these authors were socially aware and spiritually sensitive people. Chaucer apologizes in advance for the “cherle’s tale” (ill-bred story) of the Miller, and in the very last words of his great narrative compendium, the Retractions to the Canterbury Tales , he disavows the racy tales of sin and smut and devoutly prays that at the Day of Judgment he will be one of those who will be saved.

Equally surprising was the development in the medieval period of the strange convention known as flyting, namely exchanges of ritual insults and swearing matches. As the relevant entry shows, the genre has its origins in Norse literature, with both the anonymous work The Owl and the Nightingale (ca. 1250) and Chaucer’s poem The Parlement of Foulys (ca. 1382) being significant early English contributions. Both show a range of swearing, from the religious mode to the scatological, thus making sociolinguistic observations on the hierarchical distribution of oaths.

The dramatic impulse in these debate poems was more fully developed in the dramatic pieces known as the Mystery plays, celebrating the Christian story from the Fall of Lucifer to the Day of Judgment and dramatizing the life and miracles of Christ. Coarse language is surprisingly abundant, especially in the speech of the lower-class and bad characters, such as Cain and an invented figure, Mak the sheep-stealer, in the Second Shepherds’ Play . (According to one of the quaint traditions of the Middle Ages, the churls of the world were descended from Cain.) In the Towneley plays attributed to the Wakefield Master (ca. 1554–1576), the Mactatio Abel (“The Killing of Abel”), the servant boy of Cain called Pickharness, opens the play summarily telling the audience to be quiet, threatening those who do not with the punishment of “blowing my black hollow arse” (l. 7). When Abel wishes Cain “God speed,” he gets the rude response “Com kys mine ars!,” alternatively “kys the dwillis toute” (“kiss the devil’s arse,” ll. 59, 63). Whereas Abel invokes God, Cain consistently refers to the Devil, and when God from on high chides him for quarreling with his brother, Cain answers impudently in mock surprise: “Who is that hob [hobgoblin] over the wall?” After his terrible crime, he shouts out contemptuously: “ly ther old shrewe, ly ther, ly,” obviously using old and shrew (“rogue”) in an emotive and contemptuous sense. Being a thoroughly medieval rather than strictly biblical character, Cain uses contemporary idioms such as “for Godys pain!” and “by him that me deere boght!” anachronistically referring to the future Crucifixion. One of his last antisocial comments is “Bi all men set I not a fart.”

The spectacular ranting of Herod the Great in the Towneley Play similarly exploits blasphemous utterance, oscillating between Christian and pagan referents. In the course of a mere twenty lines Herod swears “by Gottys dere naylys,” “the dewill [devil] me hang and drawe!,” “by God that syttys in trone,” and bizarrely “by Mahounde [Mahomet] in heuen” (ll. 116-38). The character of Mak the sheep-stealer, used to introduce low-life and light relief in the context of the Nativity, shows similar comic religious confusion: pretending to go to sleep, he utters the odd prayer: " Manus tuas commendo, / Poncio Pilato " (“Into your hands I commend myself, Pontius Pilate”), following it up with the more conventional “Cryst crosse me spede!” (“May Christ’s cross protect me!” ll. 266-68).

On a wider front, there were xenophobic semantic growths deriving from martial competition with other religions, especially Islam. As the Church militant mobilized against the expansionism of Islam, so terms like heathen, pagan , and infidel took on narrower senses. The xenophobic animus against Muslims has its memorial in various corruptions of the name of the prophet Mahomet used throughout the Middle Ages. First among these is the form Mahounde , used in an abusive fashion to mean variously, “a devil,” “a false prophet,” or “a monster.” An earlier form is mawmet , meaning “a false god” or “idol,” and its related variant mawmetrie , “the worship of false gods,” “idolatry.” In due time these originally xenophobic senses relating to heathen practices came to be exploited by rival Christian sects in the bitter exchanges of the Reformation.