Holy Sh*t: A Brief History of Swearing (43 page)

The place to find obscenity in the Middle Ages is not in English but perhaps in French. The thirteenth-century literary genre called the
fabliau
contains tales with titles such as
Le Chevalier qui fist parler les Cons
(“The Knight Who Made Cunts Talk”) and
Cele qui se fist foutre sur la fosse de son mari
(“The One Who Got Herself Fucked on Her Husband’s Grave”), in which words such as
foutre
and
con
do seem to be “obscene” in the modern sense of the word. Several
fabliaux
, and the c. 1275
The Romance of the Rose
, deal explicitly with the question of whether it is immodest of women to use words such as
coillons
(“balls”), indicating that a taboo was developing against it. For men, though, no such taboo seems to have existed—the injunctions are directed at women. Chaucer scholar Charles Muscatine argues that the concept of obscenity was just starting to develop at this time: “Much of the fabliau diction we might now consider obscene might not have been so obscene in its own time. The fabliau language of sexuality … is much of the time surprisingly free of impudence or self-consciousness. It often sounds like normal usage, the unreflective language of a culture that was relatively free of linguistic taboos, but took pleasure of various kinds in the direct verbal evocation of sexuality. It must have been the contemporaneous emergence of courtly norms of diction … that created, invented, or perhaps reinvented, in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries a new sense of obscene or vulgar language.” (281) The
fabliaux
date from the time of the separation between England and Normandy; the development of obscenity, which begins in the thirteenth century in Norman French, starts later in English. See Charles Muscatine, “The Fabliaux, Courtly Culture, and the (Re)Invention of Vulgarity,” in
Obscenity: Social Control and Artistic Creation in the European Middle Ages
, ed. Jan M. Ziolkowski (Leiden: Brill, 1998), 281–92.

England was a feudal society:
On the feudal system, see Jeffrey L. Forgeng and Will McLean,
Daily Life in Chaucer’s England
, 2nd ed. (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2009); W. L. Warren,
Henry II
(London: Methuen, 1991); “Oath,” in
Encyclopedia of the Middle Ages
, ed. André Vauchez, Barrie Dobson, and Michael Lapidge, trans. Adrian Walford (Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn, 2000).

Just such a broken oath was the cause:
On the Conquest, see Simon Schama,
A History of Britain: At the Edge of the World?
(New York: Hyperion, 2000), 86; Kari Ellen Gade, “Northern Light on the Battle of Hastings,”
Viator
28 (1997); De Re Militari: The Society for Medieval Military History (online), accessed June 28, 2010.

through a process called compurgation:
On compurgation and trial by ordeal, see Richard Firth Green,
A Crisis of Truth: Literature and Law in Ricardian England
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999); Frederic William Maitland,
The Constitutional History of England
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1961); Baker,
An Introduction to English Legal History
.

Christiana de Dunelmia
: The Calendar of the Early Mayor’s Court Rolls, ed. H. A. Thomas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1924), xxx–xxxi.

“
worse is he than an homicide
”: Miles Coverdale,
A Christen Exhortation unto Customable Swearers
(London: W. Hill, 1548), 20.

Lollardy began in England:
There was a contemporaneous Lollard-like movement in Bohemia, led by the preacher Jan Hus. Hus was a follower of John Wyclif, the theologian who inspired the Lollards. Hus was burned at the stake in 1415. Wyclif died before he could be executed, but his bones were dug up and burned in 1428. For more on the Lollards, see Anne Hudson,
The Premature Reformation: Wycliffite Texts and Lollard History
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988) and her
Selections from English Wycliffite Writings
, rev. ed. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997).

De Haeretico Comburendo: English Historical Reprints
, ed. W. Dawson Johnston and Jean Browne Johnston (Ann Arbor: Sheehan, 1896), 27.

At her trial in 1429:
John Foxe,
Actes and Monuments
, ed. George Townsend (New York: AMS Press, 1965); Norman P. Tanner, ed.,
Heresy Trials in the Diocese of Norwich, 1428–31
, Camden Fourth Series 20 (London: Royal Historical Society, 1977).

“
the sacrament on the altar
”: Hudson,
Selections
, I.

“
I abjure and forswear
”: Foxe,
Actes and Monuments
, 540, 593.

you shouldn’t swear by creatures:
Henry G. Russell, “Lollard Opposition to Oaths by Creatures,”
American Historical Review
51, no. 4 (1946): 668–84.

William Thorpe, for example, was all ready:
Foxe,
Actes and Monuments
, 249–85.

“
false swearing become one of the most commonly
”: Hughes,
Swearing
, 60.

In one example from 1303:
Robert of Brunne,
Handlyng Synne
, ed. Frederick James Furnivall, EETS 119 and 123, 2 vol. (London: Kegan, Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co., 1901–3), 2700–734.

Or, as Steven Pinker writes:
Pinker,
Stuff of Thought
, 341.

The Pardoner addresses this kind of language:
Chaucer, “The Pardoner’s Tale,”
The Riverside Chaucer
, 629–50.

“
it is not lawful to swear by creatures
”: “On the Twenty-Five Articles” in John Wyclif,
Selected Works
, ed. Thomas Arnold (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1871), III:483.

Jacob’s Well
discusses these oaths
: Jacob’s Well, 153.

Christ is seven feet tall:
Hudson,
Selections
, I.

The first pattern poem written in English:
Stephen Hawes,
The Conversyon of Swerers
(London, 1509), Early English Books Online, accessed May 15, 2012.

An Easter Sunday sermon:
Woodburn O. Ross, ed.,
Middle English Sermons
, EETS 209 (London: H. Milford, Oxford University Press, 1940), sermon 22.

The mechanism of this miracle:
See
Chapter 1
of Miri Rubin,
Corpus Christi: The Eucharist in Late Medieval Culture
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); Hudson,
Selections
, 142; and Eamon Duffy,
The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England 1400–1580
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), 91–130.

the tale of a monk who doubts
: Handlyng Synne 9981–10072. Other such “miracle of the Host” stories can be found in
Mirk’s Festial
, ed. Theodor Erbe, EETS 96 (extra series) (London: Kegan, Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1905), 170–71; 173, and
The Mirrour of the Blessed Lyf of Jesu Christ
, ed. Lawrence F. Powell (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1908), 308–9. See also Duffy,
The Stripping of the Altars
, 91–109, for a useful contextualization of these stories in terms of medieval lay experience of the Mass.

There was once a man who swore constantly
: Gesta Romanorum, ed. Sidney Herrtage, EETS 33 (extra series) (London: Kegan, Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1879), 409–10. The phrase “complaint against swearers” is Rosemary Woolf’s. See her
English Religious Lyric in the Middle Ages
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968), 395, for more examples of these complaints. See also Elaine Scarry,
The Body in Pain: Making and Unmaking the World
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1985) for an analysis of how societies often have recourse to the human body as the most effective means to legitimate cultural constructs and other “truths” because of its “sheer material factualness” (14).

“
The body of Christ
”: Duffy,
The Stripping of the Altars
, 91–92.

“
even [to] touch
”: Ibid., 110.

“
A bell was rung
”: Ibid., 97.

“
holding up of the hands
”: Ibid., 103.

“
no state can stand
”: John Downame,
Four Treatises, tending to dissuade all Christians from 4 no lesse hainous then common sinnes
(London, 1608).

Catholic pastoral literature expresses great anxiety:
G. R. Owst,
Literature and Pulpit in Medieval England
(New York: Barnes & Noble, 1961), 416.

Chapter 4

Gregorian calendar:
The Gregorian calendar is the one in use throughout most of the world today. It replaced the Julian calendar, in which the dates of the equinoxes were moving earlier and earlier due to a slightly inexact calculation of the length of the year. Britain and its possessions finally adopted the Gregorian calendar in 1752.

The 1585 Act:
27 Eliz.c.2 in Charles Dodd and M. A. Tierney,
Dodd’s Church History of England, from the Commencement of the Sixteenth Century to the Revolution in 1688
, vol. 4 (London: C. Dolman, 1839–43).

“
I will waste no time reading it
”: The quip is variously attributed to Benjamin Disraeli or Moses Hadas.

Henry VIII had halfheartedly:
For more about how the English populace was affected by these changes, see Eamon Duffy,
The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England 1400–1580
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992).

the bull
Regnans in Excelsis
: Pius V, “Regnans in Excelsis,” Papal Encyclicals Online, accessed February 14, 2011.

After this, English penal laws:
“Penal Laws,”
Catholic Encyclopedia
, ed. Charles G. Herbermann et al. (1907–1912), online at New Advent, accessed February 14, 2011. The statutes are: 1571—13 Eliz. c. 1 and 13 Eliz. c. 2; 1581—23 Eliz. c. 1; 1587—35 Eliz. c. 2.

souls in Purgatory might:
Duffy,
The Stripping of the Altars
, 338.

There are several accounts of Southwell’s life, capture, and trial, including Christopher Devlin,
The Life of Robert Southwell: Poet and Martyr
(London: Longmans, Green, 1956); Pierre Janelle,
Robert Southwell: A Study in Religious Inspiration
(London: Sheed and Ward, 1935); and F. W. Brownlow,
Robert Southwell
, Twayne’s English Authors Series 516 (New York: Twayne, 1996).

the crown’s chief and most insidious weapon:
For the oath ex officio, see Janelle,
Robert Southwell
; Devlin,
Life of Robert Southwell
; and Christopher Hill,
Society and Puritanism in Pre-Revolutionary England
(New York: Schoken Books, 1964), 348.

“
to a conscience that feareth God
”: Hill,
Society and Puritanism
, 330.

The “Bloody Question
”: Scott R. Pilarz,
Robert Southwell and the Mission of Literature 1561–1595: Writing Reconciliation
(Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2004), 236, and Alice Hogge,
God’s Secret Agents: Queen Elizabeth’s Forbidden Priests and the Hatching of the Gunpowder Plot
(New York: HarperCollins, 2005), 232.

Southwell was accused of telling:
Southwell’s teachings on equivocation are found in Janelle,
Robert Southwell
, 81; for more on Jesuit views of equivocation, see Perez Zagorin,
Ways of Lying: Dissimulation, Persecution, and Conformity in Early Modern Europe
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), 169–70; Robert Parsons,
A Treatise Tending to Mitigation
, English Recusant Literature 1558–1640 (Ilkley, England: Scolar Press, 1977), 340.