Holy Sh*t: A Brief History of Swearing (17 page)

Instead, the pastoral texts worry about
any
words that lead to sin.
The Ayenbite of Inwit
describes a chain reaction like that implied in Ephesians, in which foul words lead to foul deeds:

The devil tempts of this sin
in five manners, as Saint Gregory says. First in foul sight, then in foul words, then in foul touching, then in foul kissing, and afterward I come to the deed. For of foul sight, I come to speech. And from speech to handling, from handling to kissing, from kissing to the deed. And this subtly does the devil make [people] go from one to the other.

Foul words bring people into sin, particularly into the sin of lechery (though sometimes into gluttony—excessive indulgence in the pleasures of the body—as well).
The danger of this sort of speech
, “as medieval writers repeat, is that indecent words lead to indecent actions,” as literary critic R. Howard Bloch puts it. Speech leads to touching, touching to kissing, and kissing to the deed. Obscene words such as
cunt
might lead people into sin, but so could an innocuous—to modern ears—poem, perhaps Andrew Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress”: “
Had we but world enough
, and time / This coyness, Lady, were no crime.” In the schema set out by the pastoral texts, these are equally bad kinds of language. In fact, “Had we but world enough” could be considered
worse
. It is the beginning of a beautiful poem that might actually be quite an effective means of seduction, whereas if you called a woman a “filthy cunt,” she would not be super likely to sleep with you.

This moral judgment of bad language accounts for a difference in the way medieval writers tended to use words for sex and words for excrement. The vocabulary lists in John Stanbridge’s
Vulgaria
exemplify this difference. After translating Latin names for parts of the body with their most direct English equivalents, as we’ve seen—
podex
for “arse hole,”
urina
for “piss,” and so on—Stanbridge comes to
hec vulva
. He does not translate this as “cunt”—in fact, he fails to translate it at all, chickening out with a Latin explanation: “locus ubi puer concipitur,” “the place where a boy is conceived.” A few decades earlier, the
Ortus Vocabulorum
and many other dictionaries had given
vulva
simply and directly as “cunt,” but Stanbridge evidently thought that the vernacular version would be too much for his
young charges to handle, inappropriate for a textbook or for the schoolroom.

Words for sex and for the parts of the body involved in it are inherently more dangerous in the medieval scheme of bad language. Talking about excrement will very likely entice no one into sin. But if you employ a word such as
cunt
or
pintel
or
sard
—or if you simply describe an especially fetching dress or a well-formed leg—you risk conjuring up foul thoughts, and foul thoughts lead to foul deeds.

Chaucer was aware of this possibility. He himself composed a pastoral text, “The Parson’s Tale,” the final tale told on the pilgrimage to Canterbury. It is entirely typical of these manuals, dealing with the importance of true penitence and the dangers of the seven deadly sins, including the sins of the tongue. It is followed by “Chaucer’s Retraction,” in which he begs Christ’s pardon for his “worldly vanities” including the
Canterbury Tales
, because they “sownen into sin”—they tend toward, are conducive to, sin. Whether or not Chaucer was really apologizing for his secular poetry, and critics debate that, he is acknowledging that his poems about lecherous wives, angry friars, and butt-kissing students might at least be interpreted as “foul words.”

By God’s Bones

In the Middle Ages, the equivalent of modern obscenity was not “foul words” but oaths. Swearing, as we saw in the previous chapter, historically meant only one thing—oath swearing. Today, of course, it refers to both oaths and obscene words. But from the earliest Old English texts right to the end of the nineteenth century, the word
swearing
referred to oaths alone.

There were and are two kinds of oath swearing, as we saw with the Bible. There is
sincere
swearing, making an oath before God that what you say is true, or that you really will do what you say you intend to do. And there is
vain
swearing, which is any kind of bad
swearing—swearing habitually, which trivializes God’s name and power; swearing falsely, which makes God witness to a lie; or swearing wrongly in forms such as “by God’s bones,” which had catastrophic effects on God’s body. Vain swearing
was
medieval obscenity, carrying all the power of the public utterance of taboo topics that defines obscene words. Vain swearing shocked and offended people when they heard it. It was used in order
to
shock and offend, to insult or injure someone. It was used as an intensifier, to supply extra strength to some aspect of an utterance. And it provided an inexhaustible topic for controversialists, who, then as now, looked at its efflorescence and saw the end of civil society and perhaps the world.

Sincere swearing was extremely important in medieval culture. In the early and high Middle Ages,
England was a feudal society
, in which oaths guaranteed key political relationships between lords and vassals. From the king on down, men swore a series of interlocking oaths of fealty to set up networks of land ownership, military support, and agricultural labor. The king granted huge estates to his nobles; they in turn granted bits of land to lesser aristocrats, who granted some to peasants. (At the bottom of the heap were the aforementioned villeins, the unfree peasants, who needed their lord’s permission to marry, leave the estate, join the clergy, etc.) At each stage, the person of higher status swore to protect his vassal and to provide enough land for him to maintain his position in society. The person of lower status swore to provide military service, furnish counsel, and administer the land he had received. There were few written contracts to give these relationships force, and little recourse to be had in the legal system. God did the enforcing. If you broke your oath, God was supposed to punish you, either directly, by visiting a plague upon your children or livestock (or perhaps upon your part by which turds are shat out), or indirectly, through the strong arm of the person with whom you broke faith.

Just such a broken oath was the cause
of—or at least the justification for—the Norman Conquest of England. In 1064, the Saxon
Earl of Wessex, Harold, found himself in Normandy at the court of its duke, William the Bastard (as he was known before he conquered England and made people stop calling him that). Harold had been either blown off course or sent there as a messenger by the ailing and childless King Edward the Confessor to inform William that he had been chosen as heir to the English throne. Whether he arrived by accident or by design, Harold swore an oath of fealty to William, promising to defend and further the duke’s right to the English throne. Some sources have him swearing this oath on a chest full of holy relics, to give it weight. But within two years of his pledge, Harold had returned to England, King Edward had died, and Harold had acceded to the throne. William was outraged at Harold’s violation of his oath of fealty and went into battle carrying the chest of relics upon which his vassal had sworn.

Harold’s broken oath may have been merely an excuse for William to take the throne he so clearly wanted, but we should not underestimate how “oaths were taken with deadly seriousness in medieval Europe,” as historian Simon Schama writes in his recounting of this incident. William probably
was
outraged at the violation—the whole feudal system of government depended on people like Harold being sincere in their oaths. He also probably reckoned that this would be a good time to invade, since God would be on his side. God would punish Harold to avenge his own tarnished honor—he might even make William the instrument of his vengeance. (In the Bayeux Tapestry, you can see Harold trying to pull a spear out of his eye before he is trampled to death by horses. You be the judge.)

Sincere oaths were also a fundamental part of the medieval legal system. As today, witnesses in court were usually required to swear that they were telling the truth. But it was also possible for a person’s guilt or innocence to be proven by an oath alone,
through a process called compurgation
. If someone was accused of a crime, he could swear an oath that he was innocent. If he found a certain number of compurgators or “oath helpers” who would swear that they believed he was telling the truth about his innocence—that his
oath was sincere—he would be released. In 1276 in London, for example,
Christiana de Dunelmia
was accused of killing her husband with poison. She swore that she hadn’t, and managed to find the requisite thirty-six people to swear that she was of good character and that her oaths were credible. She was acquitted. Other, less serious crimes required fewer oath helpers—twelve was a more usual number.

If people couldn’t come up with compurgators, they could sometimes undergo a trial by ordeal instead, which most often involved walking a set distance while carrying a red-hot iron, pulling something from a pot of boiling water, or being thrown into a pond to sink or float. In the first two cases, the person’s injuries would be checked after three days. If they were starting to heal, the person would be judged innocent; if they were festering, he was guilty. In the pond case, an innocent person would float and a guilty one sink (the opposite valuation was assigned during the witchcraft trials of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries—there, the innocent sank and usually drowned). In these ordeals, God was thought to be judging the guilt or innocence of the accused. If the person was innocent, God would intervene directly to make sure that he was not burned by the iron or that her skin wouldn’t slough off from reaching into the boiling water.

Compurgation worked the same way. God would judge the truth or falsity of the oaths of the accused and of his oath helpers. If any of them was swearing falsely, he would inflict horrible punishments. To us, compurgation seems like a more or less ridiculous procedure. What contemporary criminal wouldn’t swear before God that he was innocent, if it meant he could go free? What modern murderer would stick at a little perjury? But to medieval English people, false swearing wasn’t a minor thing—it was a major sin, equivalent or almost equivalent to murder. St. Augustine held that “
worse is he than an homicide
, that compels a man to swear, whom he knows to forswear himself. For the homicide slays but the body, whereas he slays the soul, yea two souls rather.” It was also dangerous—God
would take vengeance on an oath breaker, not just for the term of a prison sentence, but perhaps for all eternity.

In the previous chapter, we mentioned the Lollards, who took a stand on Matthew 5:34–37—“I say to you, Do not swear at all”—and were persecuted for it. I will discuss them in more detail here, because their story vividly reveals just how seriously people took oaths in the Middle Ages.
Lollardy began in England
in the late fourteenth century. Its members are often thought of as proto-Protestants, since many of their beliefs prefigured central tenets of the Reformation. They translated the Bible into English so that everyone could read it (Wyclif’s Bible, with the
turd
s and the
bollock
s, is the Lollard Bible), they refused to acknowledge the Pope’s authority, they spoke out against what they saw as the corruptions of the established Catholic Church, such as selling indulgences—what Martin Luther was attacking when he nailed his
Ninety-Five Theses
to the door of a church in Wittenberg in 1517 and started the Protestant Reformation. The most famous Lollard may be Sir John Oldcastle, who appears as Falstaff in Shakespeare’s
Henry the Fourth, Parts One
and
Two
, and
Henry V
. (In real life, he didn’t die peacefully in his bed, babbling of green fields, as Falstaff is said to have done. He was tried and convicted for heresy, but escaped from prison to lead a series of rebellions and plots against his former friend Prince Hal. He was eventually captured, hanged, and then burned, gallows and all.) Lollards were never particularly numerous or widespread, partly because their attempts to foment a revolution in religious practice occurred before the invention of moveable type. It was hard to advocate individual reading of the Bible in English when all Bibles had to be copied by hand. Without inexpensive and easily available printed books, they couldn’t disseminate their ideas widely enough, and the movement failed to catch on across England or over its borders.

In the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, though, the Catholic authorities didn’t know that Lollardy would simply peter out. They were terrified that Lollard ideas of reform would catch on, stripping them of their gold-embroidered robes and bejeweled chalices,
perhaps even putting them out of a job. In 1401, Parliament enacted a new law,
De Haeretico Comburendo
—“of the burning of heretics”—which stipulated that anyone found to be “usurping the office of preaching,” teaching or writing books about heretical doctrines, instilling doubt about the sacraments, or otherwise acting like a Lollard would be arrested and, if he or she didn’t recant, punished severely, possibly even burned at the stake. Under this law, any person suspected of harboring irregular religious views would be interrogated by high-ranking churchmen, the English version of the Spanish Inquisition. Many of the questions asked in these examinations centered on what was perhaps the Lollards’ most controversial belief, involving the Eucharist. Orthodox Catholic doctrine held that after the Host was consecrated by the priest, it was no longer bread but was entirely the physical body of Christ.
*
The “accidents” of the bread were the same, so it still looked like a wafer, but the “substance” was transformed—it
was
God. Many Lollards, in contrast, believed that there was still some bread in there, coexisting with God’s body. Other Lollards, even more radical, asserted that the Host was merely bread and that the importance of the Eucharist was in spiritual communion with God.
At her trial in 1429
, Margery Baxter described how she knew that God was not physically present in the Host: “If every such sacrament were God, and the very body of Christ, there should be an infinite number of gods, because that a thousand priests, and more, do every day make a thousand such gods, and afterwards eat them, and void them out again in places, where, if you will seek them, you may find many such gods.” The Host can’t be God’s body, because then thousands of Gods would be shat into privies every day.