Treachery

Disloyalty and betrayal have many dimensions and contexts: personal, marital, martial, religious, political, national, and, in recent decades, racial. Consequently, the word-field is made up of hundreds of diverse terms, from the most condemning to the comparatively trivial. The survival of the value of loyalty, even in the most unlikely places, such as among criminals and underworld gangs, is noteworthy. As the entry for Anglo-Saxon period makes clear, the value of personal loyalty to the death was upheld both within the comitatus or cynn (tribal unit) and between the lord and his men. This was the crucial link in the ancient Germanic warrior culture. Those who broke this bond were punished, not by gruesome execution, but by ostracism and exile, the ultimate disgrace. Both swicere , the Anglo-Saxon word for “traitor,” and swican , the verb meaning “to betray,” died out in the Middle Ages.

In medieval times the monarch was regarded as embodying the nation, so that treason, technically high treason , was a capital offense, being both a personal and a national betrayal. Offenders were typically hanged, drawn (disemboweled), and quartered (cut into four pieces), their decapitated heads being displayed at Traitors’ Gate on London Bridge. Petty treason , by contrast, was that committed against an ordinary subject: thus in 1763, “Mary Head, convicted at Chester Assizes of petit treason, in killing her husband, was burnt.” This is now classified as murder. Traitor and treason , both dating from about 1225, were in the post-medieval period condemning and gravely insulting terms. They could also be used in intimate contexts: “A, false traitour!” shouts the Miller at the farcical moment in Chaucer’s Reve’s Tale when he discovers that one of his student lodgers has seduced his daughter (l. 4269). Similarly, in his tale the Merchant denounces Damyan, the squire and adulterous lover of May, as “O servaunt traytour” (l. 1785). In Shakespeare’s works the word is the third most common noun of opprobrium, with nearly two hundred uses, coming after villain and knave , which are less specific. “Thou art a traitor and a miscreant” is a typical instance ( Richard II I i 39), the word being preceded by a great variety of adjectives, such as monstrous, vile, filthy, viperous , and even toad-spotted (since toads were thought to be poisonous).

The English Civil War created severe problems of authority and terminology, since King Charles I was defeated by the Parliamentary Party under Oliver Cromwell, found guilty of treason, and executed. The famous diarist John Evelyn denounced the judge as “that Arch Traytor Bradshaw” (January 13, 1649) and later acknowledged the “the stupendious [sic] and inscrutable Judgements of God [when] the carkasses of that arch-rebell Cromewell and Bradshaw the Judge were dragged out of their superbe tombs, hanged on the gallows at Tyburn and buried in a deep pit” (November 22, 1658). Henry Hyde, Earl of Clarendon, pointedly called his history of the conflict A History of the Great Rebellion (1702–1704). (Incidentally, the title “the Great Rebellion” was also used of the American Civil War.) Today traitor and treason have been narrowed down to the specific technical sense of betraying one’s country, with correspondingly diminished currency, as has treachery .

From medieval through to Renaissance times, abandoning or changing one’s religion was regarded with detestation. Consequently, powerful terms like apostate (ca. 1340) and recreant became frequent terms of abuse, joining words like miscreant (ca. 1330), originally meaning “infidel,” before it acquired the modern sense of “villain” or “scoundrel.” Interestingly, the original senses of pervert and perversion concerned religious betrayal. Today all these words are either obsolete or used in different senses. Contemptuous terms like turncoat (ca. 1557) and renegade (ca. 1583) came to be used in both religious and political contexts. The same is true of the verb to defect , first used (ca. 1596) of those who had defected from the Christian religion before acquiring the political sense of “to desert to a Communist country,” current from the 1950s. Deserter follows a similar pattern, the first quotation being “the base Desertour of my Mother Church” in Anthony Stafford’s life of the Virgin Mary, called, The Female Glory (1635, 80). This was followed a few decades later by the military sense. In the highly charged context of war, collaborator became a condemning term from 1943, paralleled by the eponym quisling (after the Norwegian Vidkun Quisling, 1887–1945), who collaborated with the Germans in World War II).

Various terms condemn breach of loyalty or solidarity in the workforce, stigmatizing those who refuse to join a strike, break a strike, or take over the work of a striker. The strongest term is scab , from Elizabethan times a general term of abuse for what the Oxford English Dictionary wittily calls “a mean, low ‘scurvy’ fellow,” but later recorded in America in the industrial sense: A notice ending a strike in Bristol, Massachusetts, notes that “The conflict would not have been so sharp had there not been so many dirty scabs” ( Bristol Journal , July 5, 1777). “What is a scab?” asks a contemporary author. “He is to his trade what a traitor is to his country” (in Arthur Aspinall, Early Trade Unions 1949, 84). The other principal term is blackleg , recorded in British contexts from 1865. Both terms are rooted in the notion of disease.

In the criminal underworld with its fierce gang loyalties, a whole range of hostile terms has grown up, rather older than expected, with interesting coded origins. The earliest is snitch for one who turns state evidence, recorded in Francis Grose’s Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue (1785). It is a slang term for nose , which had a similar sense in the same period. So has nark , possibly a Romany word for “nose” recorded first in John Camden Hotten’s Dictionary of Modern Slang (1860) for “a police informer” or copper’s nark. Stool pigeon , originally meaning a decoy, took on a similar sense in the United States from about 1849. All these terms are still current, but in British usage the most prevalent and hostile word is grass , used as a noun and verb from the 1930s. Its origin lies in an ingenious piece of Cockney rhyming slang, namely grass for grasshopper , rhyming with shopper , since “to shop” is criminal slang for to “sell out, betray.”

In the United States perceived racial disloyalty is increasingly stigmatized among blacks. Thus Jim Crow took on the sense of “a turncoat” from as early as 1837, followed much later, about 1921, by Uncle Tom , seventy years after the publication of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s classic novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin . They have since been joined by the humorous but damning insult Oreo from the cookie—that is, dark on the outside but white at the core—thrown up in 1968, during the period when solidarity among American blacks became a major political force.

The essential shift in the dynamic of the word-field is that powerful terms of national significance like traitor have generally lost currency and force, whereas group-words like grass, scab , and Uncle Tom have retained and even increased their vehemence.