Holy Sh*t: A Brief History of Swearing (15 page)

Obsolete “Obscenities”

Many of the words we have been discussing are in frequent use today, but medieval English had words for similar subjects with which we are less familiar. If these words were still in use today, they would probably be obscene—they are vernacular words for taboo parts of the body and bodily functions. In the Middle Ages, though, they were simply direct words for things that medieval people had less trouble talking about.

We’ve already encountered
sard
and
swive
. (
Swive
is not, strictly speaking, obsolete—it is undergoing something of an ironic revival today, especially in printed media, where it is employed as a jocular
alternative to the
f
-word).

Kekir
and
bobrelle
are forgotten words for the clitoris, probably. The word
bobrelle
is recorded only once, in the
Pictorial Vocabulary
of the fifteenth century, where it is given as the English for
hec caturda
. In fifteenth-century Latin,
caturda
was used to indicate the labia majora or labia minora (the outer or inner lips, respectively, of the vagina), as well as the clitoris, so it is difficult to know exactly to which part of the female genitalia
bobrelle
refers.

Kekir
is more clearly identifiable as the clitoris. The
Pictorial Vocabulary
(which despite its vocabulary doesn’t have any good pictures) defines it as “hic tentigo.” A 1425 treatise on uroscopy also gives
kykyre
as the vernacular word for
tentigo
: “lewd folk [call it] the kykyre in the cont” (the kekir in the cunt). Note that
lewd
doesn’t mean “unprincipled” but rather “uneducated”—learned people would have used the Latin word itself, presumably. In Latin,
tentigo
connotes stiffness and was used for both the clitoris and an erect penis. There is some evidence that
kekir
could also be used for “erect penis” in the period—there is a Latin-English vocabulary list from 1450 that defines
kekyr
as “extensio vel arrectio virilis membri”—“an extension or erection of the membrum virile.” The word embodies those Aristotelian fears about women who use their monstrous clitorises for penetration, while also gesturing toward a real biological homology—a
kekir
is what gets erect in both men and women.

Pintel, tarse
, and
ʒerde
are all medieval English words for the penis.
Tarse
or
ters
is the oldest word, appearing first in Anglo-Saxon.
ʒerde
(or
yard
) was originally a euphemism—it also meant “staff” or “rod”—that became a direct word for the thing it had been employed to avoid, like
penis
in Latin. An early fifteenth-century anatomy text informs its readers that “the yard is an official member (one that performs a service for the rest of the body, such as a finger or foot) … which men call a ters but for courtesy women call it a yard … a ters was principally ordained to enable the piss and spermatic matter to be cast out.”
Pintel
appears to have come into general use, for the most part replacing
ters
, in the mid-fourteenth century, although it appears in names—Robertus Pintel, Johannes Swetpintel—two hundred years earlier.

One mid-fifteenth-century poem,
A Talk of Ten Wives on Their Husbands Ware
, manages to fit in both
pintel
and
tarse
, as well as several metaphors for the penis. None of the ten women in the poem has found a satisfactory penis, and each complains bitterly. One says her husband’s “meat” is the size of a snail, another that his “ware” is the size of three beans, while the third complains: “I have one of those, that is worthless when it’s needed. When ‘our sire’s’ pants are torn, his penis peeps out of the hole like a maggot.” The fifth wife thinks she has it even worse: “‘Our sire’ breeds like a deer. He pisses his tarse [ejaculates]—once a year, just like a buck.” These lines are certainly insulting—“Your penis is like a maggot”?—but again the vocabulary would not have been considered obscene.
Pintel
and
tarse
are direct—these tavern-going women do not mince words—but the poem gives no sense that they carry more charge than
meat
or
ware
, which other women use as metaphors for their husbands’ penises.
Pintel
, as we have seen, was employed in medical texts as well as tirades—you could cast aspersions at the thing it represented, but the word itself was beyond reproach.

Medieval Fighting Words

Given that so much of what we would define as obscenity was in this period simply bracing and direct,
how did people insult each other
in medieval England? To learn what people said to abuse and offend each other seven hundred years ago, one can look at court records for charges of defamation or slander, assault with contumelious words (words that are “reproachful and tending to convey disgrace and humiliation,” according to the
Oxford English Dictionary
), scolding, and barratry (bringing false lawsuits; more generally, obstreperous public behavior). These are crimes of the spoken word, consisting of insults to authority or to someone’s personal reputation; libel is the written equivalent. Often court records were kept in French or Latin, and often they state simply that Alicia Garlek
scolded William Wipetail, or that Rogerus Prikeproud is a “common barrator.” (These are all actual medieval names: Alicia Garlic, William Wipe-Dick—though
tail
could refer to both the penis and the vagina—and Roger Proud-of-His-Prick.) Occasionally, however, scribes wrote down the precise English words at issue, so we know that when medieval English people traded insults, they were usually accusations of sexual immorality, such as
whore
, when directed at women, and accusations of dishonesty, such as
false, thief, robber
, or
knave
, when directed at men.
The Victorian legal scholar
Frederic William Maitland published a number of thirteenth-century cases from manorial courts (run by feudal lords) and translated them from the Latin in which they were recorded. Of the slander cases included, which were brought from 1249 to 1294, six involved accusations against men of stealing or other dishonesty, one involved a woman being called a meretrix (a prostitute), and in one the slanderous accusation was not recorded.

Late medieval accounts
provide a more vivid record of invective, as cases began to be transcribed in English instead of Latin or law French. In London in 1497, as just one example, Joan Rokker was charged with defamation of Joan Sebar for saying publicly, “Thou strong whore and strong harlot … Go home thou strong whore and bid thy dame ordain the clouts [cloths to use as diapers or swaddling]; an ever I had child in my belly thou hast one. Here wert thou dight [screwed], and here lay thy legs and here thy feet.” Likewise in 1496, Elizabeth Whyns was fighting over some property with her neighbor Edward Harrison and verbally assaulted him: “Thou art a false man and false harlot to me.” (
Harlot
originally meant “beggar or vagabond,” as in these lines from a circa 1360 version of the
Morte Arthure
: “
For harlots and servants
shall help but little— / They will hie them hence.” Around 1400, it acquired the additional meaning of “a professional male entertainer; buffoon, jester; story-teller”—in both cases it was a term that indicated low social status and applied to men only. Through a process that literary critic and author C. S. Lewis called “
the moralisation of status words
,” “words which originally
referred to a person’s rank—to legal, social, or economic status and the qualifications which have often been attached to these—have a tendency to become words which assign a type of character and behavior. Those implying superior status can become terms of praise; those implying inferior status, terms of disapproval.” As Lewis points out, words that in the past denoted high social status, such as
noble
and
gentle
, now indicate good moral character. Others, such as
villein
[an unfree tenant],
churl
[any person not nobility or clergy],
knave
[a boy child],
caitiff
[a captive or slave], and
wretch
[an exile], went in the other direction. These pejorated, as philologists say, becoming terms of abuse or opprobrium. Likewise,
harlot
acquired a negative meaning. In the mid-fourteenth century it began to be used for a man “of licentious habits,” as the
Middle English Dictionary
puts it—and to add insult to injury, it came to be applied to women as well.)

Occasionally men were insulted with sexual terms too, including
cuckold, whoreson
, or
whoremonger
, as when Thomas Wybard attacked William Richardson as “whoreson and whoremonger priest.” Wybard probably did not mean that Richardson was literally the child of a loose woman or that he kept a stable of prostitutes. Wybard is simply searching for the most effective way to abase the man, and in a society that valued lineage, female chastity, and (at least in theory) male sexual continence, the concept of whoredom proved a promiscuous source of abusive terms. Today we could scarcely conceive of an assault with contumelious words that doesn’t contain at least a few obscenities.
But the court records
from 1200 to 1500 indicate that for medieval people, a simple “you false whoremaster son of a whore” sufficed.

Privacy and the Privy Members

The image on the next page shows a pilgrimage badge from the end of the fourteenth century.
Badges like this
were purchased by pilgrims at the shrines they visited and worn on hats or clothing as souvenirs of their travels. Some of the badges feature motifs we would consider to be more appropriate for a holy journey: images of saints, religious mottos, crucifixes. But many resemble the one above: winged phalluses; vulvas hunting on horseback or climbing ladders; a crowned vulva and a phallus, both with legs, over the inscription “pintel in.” Despite all appearances to the contrary, these are Christian religious objects. Such badges were thought to have apotropaic power to protect against envy and the evil eye, like the
fascini
worn by young Roman boys. And like fescennine songs, some of the badges used mockery to protect pilgrims and the sacred relics that inspired their travels. The badge pictured above, for example, parodies processions in which icons of the Virgin Mary were carried. Similar figures can be found in churches beginning around the twelfth century: the sheela-na-gigs, “stone carvings of naked women exposing their genitals,” and ithyphallic men, with large erect penises. This is obscenity in its second Roman sense, the Shit married to the Holy, obscenity with religious functions.

Three phalluses carrying a crowned vulva on a litter.

Unlike Roman religious obscenity, such pilgrimage badges were not officially sanctioned. The chancellor of the University of Paris, for example, decried the “
shameless and naked images
displayed for sale in churches and during church festivals” in the late fourteenth century. They were expressions of popular as opposed to “orthodox” religion, like the Israelite worship of Asherah. And they were far from the only place in medieval English society where “private” parts of the body were on display.

In previous chapters we’ve talked about the connection between what is “shameful to perform in public” and what is “shameful to name,” as the great Renaissance humanist Erasmus put it. So what actually was shameful to perform or to show in public in the Middle Ages?

The short answer is, not much.
There was almost no such thing as privacy
as we know it, even for the very rich. The earliest houses consisted of a large, central great hall and a few outbuildings. Most of the business of life was conducted in the hall—visitors were entertained, meals were cooked (over a large open fire in the middle of the room), meals were eaten, justice was dispensed for the manor court, and so on. The hall was also, apparently, where one might openly perform some bodily functions we would most definitely conceal today. In his
De civilitate morum puerilium
(
On Civility in Boys
), Erasmus announces that “
it is impolite
to greet someone who is urinating or defecating,” implying that even as late as 1530—when
Henry VIII was king—it was normal to run into people thus occupied and engage them in conversation. Two sets of court regulations from the sixteenth century specify where these voluble voiders might be encountered: “
One should not, like rustics
who have not been to court or lived among refined and honourable people, relieve oneself without shame or reserve in front of ladies, or before the doors or windows of court chambers or other rooms.” Also, “Let no one, whoever he may be, before, at, or after meals, early or late, foul the staircases, corridors or closets with urine or other filth, but go to suitable, prescribed, places for such relief.” These rules are from the 1500s, when, evidently, people were
still
making use of the floor and corners, and it was beginning to be seen as a problem. Before then, it was unremarkable.