Britain Etc.

railed one priest.

The English historian Julian Sharman presented a vivid picture of medieval profanity in his book of 1884, A Cursory History of Swearing. Britain in the Middle Ages, he suggested, was a country ‘inundated with a torrent of the most acrid and rasping blasphemy’. Swearing was the language of religious rebellion, a reaction against the political and juridical power of the church:

Thus it was that, labouring under the ban of priestly exaction, and confronted on all sides by the ghostly emblems of wrath and condemnation, there descended upon England in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, a torrent of the hardest and direst of verbal abuse. Not mere words of intemperate anger came bubbling to the surface, but sullen and defiant blasphemies, execrations that proclaimed open warfare with authority and a lasting separation from everything that was tender in men’s faith.

Swearing spanned the social spectrum, with the nobility appearing to take particular pride in a well-chosen expletive. Henry VIII swore regularly and, according to the anthropologist Ashley Montagu, his 10-year-old son Edward VI ‘delivered himself of a volley of the most sonorous oaths’ when ascending the throne in 1547. His half- sister Elizabeth I apparently swore ‘like a man’, with the essayist Nathan Drake suggesting that she made the ‘shocking practice’ fashionable, ‘for it is said that she never spared an oath in public speech or private conversation when she thought it added energy to either.’

As with Chaucer, so there has been much schoolboy mirth in discovering rude words in Shakespeare texts. In Twelfth Night, for example, Malvolio analyses the handwriting in a letter he believes may have been penned by his mistress Olivia: ‘By my life this is my lady’s hand. These be her very C’s, her U’s and her T’s and thus makes she her great P’s.’ Elizabethan audiences were expected to respond the same way as pupils in a modern English class, giggling at the c-word secreted in the text, and the reference to Olivia’s ‘great pees’.

Hamlet presents the paradox of sixteenth-century swearing. In Act III, the Prince asks Ophelia: ‘Lady, shall I lie in your lap?’ When rejected, he responds, ‘Do you think I meant country matters?’ (Cue much schoolboy tittering.) ‘That’s a fair thought, to lie between maids’ legs,’ Hamlet adds, Shakespeare determined no dozy student should miss the crude meaning of the Prince’s question. But in Act II, Hamlet despairs at the obscenities dropping from his lips, horrified that he ‘Must, like a whore, unpack my heart with words, And fall a-cursing like a very drab, A scullion!’ Swearing was simultaneously the vice of princes and of prostitutes, kings and kitchen maids.

The lexicographer Eric Partridge once reflected on how the Bard’s use of crudity compared with the profanity of class-ridden post-war Britain:

Sexual dialogue between men is, no less in Shakespeare than in the smoking-room or — compartment, frank and often coarse: between members of the lower classes, both coarse and, often, brutal; between members of the middle class — well, we hear very little of that!; between aristocrats and other members of the upper and leisured class, it is still frank — it is frequently very frank indeed — but it is also witty.

In Shakespeare’s day, taboo words were verbal weaponry engaged to display both the sharp wit of noblemen and the rough earthiness of peasants. Status was revealed, not by whether one swore, but how one swore. That was to change, however, with the arrival of the Puritans.

The dawn of the seventeenth century saw strict Protestant values become increasingly influential, a movement that resulted in the 1606 Act to Restrain Abuses of Players. The law made it an offence for any person in an interlude, pageant or stage play to use ‘jestingly or profanely’ the name of God, Jesus, the Holy Ghost or the Trinity. With a fine of ?10 a time (?1,000 in today’s money), plays written in the years after this date had little or no obvious profanity, although the legislation is credited with the spread of ‘minced oaths’ — shortened or altered swear words that could slip past the censor.

The linguistic strictures of the Puritans meant that, when the civil war sliced England in two, swearing became associated with the Royalist cause. The landed gentry would use taboo words, not as a rebellion against the authority of the church, but to put two fingers up to Cromwell and his Puritan Commonwealth. From 1660, with the restoration of the monarchy, England revelled in its freedom to curse once more. ‘Odd’s fish, I am an ugly fellow,’ Charles II pointedly remarked on seeing a portrait of himself. A minced oath for God’s face, ‘odd’s fish’ was apparently the king’s favourite expletive of many.

Like much of Europe in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century, Britain was trying to work out how to maintain national stability in the face of bitterly divided religious communities. The general response was a more influential civil domain that introduced a code of secular values around notions of tolerance and restraint.

The shift of power from church to state also saw a shift in swearing habits. Expletives must offend almost by definition, so as blasphemy prosecutions dwindled, so did the use of blasphemous oaths. Instead, swearing became a reaction against the emergence of middle-class gentility. Sexual and excremental obscenities, previously regarded as rather mild profanities, became the most offensive.

The new elite middle class still hit its thumb with a hammer and lost its temper, but exasperation was increasingly met by euphemism, not obscenity. By Jingo! To swear publicly was to reveal oneself as uncivilised as the lower orders. Verbal gentility and self-control were the identification marks of high status, modesty central to the new manners.

Writing in The Connoisseur magazine in 1754, the dramatist George Colman revealed the class divide that had emerged.

The shocking practice of Cursing and Swearing: a practice, which (to say nothing at present of its impiety and profaneness) is low and indelicate, and places the man of quality on the same level with the chairman at his door. A gentleman would forfeit all pretensions to that title, who should choose to embellish his discourse with the oratory of Billingsgate, and converse in the style of an oyster-woman.

The fish market at Billingsgate was regarded as the stinking core of British vulgarity. Samuel Johnson’s dictionary explained it as ‘a place where there is always a crowd of low people, frequent brawls and foul language’. The word ‘Billingsgate’ had its own definition: ‘Ribaldry; foul language’, reinforcing the link between swearing and the lower orders.

As the middle-class fashion for modesty spread (see ‘T is for Toilet’), so it seems there was an equal and opposite increase in lavatorial crudity among the working classes. The simple word ‘shit’, which would have raised few eyebrows a century earlier, was scratched into walls of important public buildings by those who resented the power of the bourgeoisie. The word ‘piss’, which appeared in the authorised King James Bible (‘eat their own dung, and drink their own piss’: 2 Kings 18:27), gradually became loaded with vulgar association. The c-word, so casually planted in Elizabethan texts, was effectively exorcised from English literature for two hundred years.

With the Victorian era, concern that potentially offensive words might upset sensitive souls led to ludicrous examples of censorship. In Wuthering Heights, Emily Bronte makes the point when her character Mr Lockwood relates an encounter with Heathcliff: ‘“And you, you worthless—” he broke out as I entered, turning to his daughter-in-law, and employing an epithet as harmless as duck, or sheep, but generally represented by a dash.’ The c-word on this occasion would appear to be cow.

In fact, Wuthering Heights was regarded as quite shocking: the word ‘damn’ appears twelve times, ‘devil’ twenty-seven times and on four occasions do characters beseech ‘God’s sake’. In the Editor’s Preface, Emily’s sister Charlotte recognises the gamble the novel takes with Victorian sensibilities: ‘A large class of readers, likewise, will suffer greatly at the introduction into the pages of this work of words printed with all their letters, which it has become the custom to represent by the initial and final letter only — a blank line filling the interval. I may as well say at once that, for this circumstance, it is out of my power to apologise; deeming it, myself, a rational plan to write words at full length.’

George Bernard Shaw prompted inevitable outrage in 1914 when he highlighted the linguistic social divide in his lampoon on the British class system, Pygmalion. The character of flower-girl Eliza Doolittle, whose Cockney accent is transformed to that of a duchess, shocked middle-class theatre audiences by announcing in cut-glass tones: ‘Walk! Not bloody likely. I am going in a taxi.’ It was reported how, on the first night, the utterance of ‘the word’ was greeted by ‘a few seconds of stunned disbelieving silence, and then hysterical laughter for at least a minute and a quarter’. Headlines suggested ‘Threats by Decency League’ and ‘Theatre to be Boycotted’. The Bishop of Woolwich was apparently horrified.

Shaw’s provocative tweaking of bourgeois verbal propriety heralded a period in which the coarse vocabulary of the working man became an international political issue. In 1923 Leon Trotsky wrote in Pravda of ‘The Struggle for Cultured Speech’: ‘Swearing in our lower classes was the result of despair, embitterment, and above all, of slavery without hope and escape. The swearing of our upper