A Cursory History of Swearing Part 3

"Yes, by Jupiter!" rejoins Strepsiades, "and would pay down, too, a three-obol piece besides to swear by them."

It must have been a sorry spectacle to have beheld Socrates in the midst of an Athenian audience solemnly witnessing this masterpiece of buffoonery, and a still sadder one to those whose feeling was still enlisted upon the side of the moribund system of oath-taking.

One singular instance of whimsicality in the ancient practice of swearing must not be allowed to pa.s.s unnoticed. The Levantine merchants trading with the port of Rhodes had familiarized Athenian households with a most excellent description of cabbage. The herb was only to be found in its highest perfection upon the southern coasts of the Mediterranean. This Rhodian cabbage had a mellower flavour than that indigenous to the Troad, and was, moreover, prized by all Athenian topers as the surest antidote to the effects of drink. No supper-table would have been perfect without some preparation of this delicacy, and the gay revellers knew, or in any case imagined, that with this nostrum close at hand the choicest Chian or Lesbian vintages might safely be defied. Hence it was that the very name of so precious a vegetable came to be held in estimation, until it was customary to say that if it were permitted to blaspheme without offending the G.o.ds, it would be by mention of the Rhodian cabbage.[19] The lover in a fragment of the lost poet Ananius invokes it solemnly in evidence of his attachment, and there is found a suggestion in the iambics of Hipponax of the vegetable having even entered into the mythology--

"He, falling down, worshipped the seven-leaved cabbage, To which, before she drank the poisoned draught, Pandora brought a cake at Thargelia."

This oath by the cabbage became in time the favourite expletive of Ionia, and having winged its way westwards, still lingers in the shape of the exclamation _Cavolo!_ as a popular phrase of modern Italy.

Specific forms of swearing were in a great measure localised in the ancient world. As the Thebans swore by Osiris, the Ionians by the cabbage and the colewort, so also in Athens Minerva formed the staple of the national oaths. No Roman citizen was heard to swear by Castor. Why there should have been this denial upon the part of those who swore freely by Pollux is not easily explained. But while the Roman women were loud in the use of "Mecastor"--the affix _me_ being supplied to adapt the name to swearing purposes, the men abjured that oath as scrupulously as the women in their turn ignored the expression "Mehercule."[20]

Hercules himself, so the story went, was known to swear but one oath in the whole course of his life. In recognition of such singular forbearance, the Roman children were instructed never to make light use of his sacred name. The prohibition, however, extended no farther than the four walls and curtilage of the dwelling, and they were free to make what use they liked of it out of doors.

An instance of oaths being subjected to the like whimsical conditions is noticeable in the domestic manners of Old Germany. We gather from the popular mediaeval satire, the 'Ship of Fools,' that a code of rules had been formulated regulating the propriety of swearing. Society in this case would seem to have formed its precedents of oath-taking, and to have withheld its sanction from any others than its own. There was a time in Germany it appears when a man adopted an oath as deliberately as he might take to a trade, it being only necessary, to bring it within the licensed pale, that it should be derived from the symbols of his own or his father's occupation. The particular merit of this system was that while it partook of all the abandonment and conferred all the enjoyment of swearing, it was practically no swearing at all. When, in an outburst of pa.s.sion, the grazier called out upon his beeves, or the smith invoked his anvil or his sledge, all the advantages of swearing, whatever they may be held to be, had been accomplished, and that without prudery being ruffled or innocence shocked. In fact the needs of society had invented a kind of stalking-horse for blasphemy, and the Bob Acreses and Captain Absolutes of that day must have found themselves cruelly hoodwinked by the inanimate effigy of swearing.

But while northern nations were conspicuous for the substantial and ponderous nature of their oaths, the Roman yielded to none in the multiform versatility of his adjurations. Caligula owned a horse that he not only treated as a fellow-being and brought to meals at his table, but whose name served him wherewith to p.r.o.nounce his accustomed oaths.

The same emperor is reported to have put to death a Roman citizen who refused to swear by his "imperial genius." Another of the oaths prescribed by command of Caligula was "per numen Drusillae." This wretched woman he constrained his subjects to worship as a divinity. To explain this partiality for the use of these absurd if not impious oaths, it would seem that a tradition had been circulated, ascribing the duration of his own lifetime to the period during which the oath should pa.s.s current. Any attack of illness that happened to the emperor was directly attributed to the waning popularity of the oath. Nor was the doctrine strange to many of the nationalities over which the Roman sway extended. We have it distinctly occurring among the Scythians,[21] and it has more recently been noticed by travellers as existing among half-barbarous tribes. The oath itself was probably a development of the affirmation that has been used more than any other in the history of the world. The _life_ or the _head_ of the ruler of the chief tribesman, or of the spiritual prophet, has invariably furnished the true standard of affirmation. But even as a mere domestic oath, the _head_ of the goodman of the house seems to have been permitted a degree of solemnity--

"Per caput hoc juro, per quod pater ante solebat."

_Virgil_, aen. ix. 300.

CHAPTER V.

"He swore by the wound in Jesu's side."--_Coleridge, 'Christabel.'_

We may now turn our backs upon the luxuriant and fanciful swearing of the ancient world and pursue our researches into one other division of the subject that gives rise to more serious reflections. The diversions of the Roman and the Greek in the way of imprecation seem to have been mostly intended in good part, and to have been productive of little theological odium. But there is a body of swearing that has diffused itself through Christian countries which is the very reverse of sportive, and has undeniably provoked the strongest feelings of aversion. The abuse to which we allude consisted mainly in the indiscriminate use of popular oaths that selected the limbs and members of Christ as the paraphernalia of swearing. There does not appear at the present day any great irreverence in the exclamation, "S'light," or "S'lid," or "Bodikins," as, happily, the wave of impiety that brought them has long since broken and pa.s.sed away. Indeed, as they now occur in the pages of sixteenth century writings, they only strike the modern reader in the light of so many interruptions from the text. But we shall find as we pursue the inquiry further, that there was a great deal of meaning wrapped up in these expletives, and that they played a by no means unimportant part in the workings of the mediaeval understanding.

Whatever may have been the malignities laid to the charge of the later middle ages, it is certain that the Englishman was on the whole of a reverential type. The pious moralist who laboured in those times was so far a.s.sisted by an utter absence of captious criticism to honeycomb his teaching, and by the solid sense of appreciation that was wont to fill the minds of his listeners. He was practised, moreover, in the exercise of two potent influences that he was ever ready to exert. The one may be said to have had its root in his hearers' fund of ready sympathy, the other in their ghostly apprehension of horror and dread. It is not at all surprising that in later times we should find an opaqueness to have obscured the clear crystal of these subtle perceptions, for fear and pity have no longer the same ascendancy in a busy world. But at a period more piously illiterate, things of this shadowy nature were linked very closely to objects of a material kind. A long process of reasoning could then be saved by reference to some obscure picture of monkish fancy. And so, in the glooms and twilights of mediaeval life, the moralist might insure speedy victory by overwhelming men's intellects by an appeal to the formidable images of terror and compa.s.sion.

The pre-Reformation Englishman, stricken and toil-worn, having no hope save in forbearance from the skies, and no consolation but in the repose of the ale-house, could yet be awed and subdued by the apprehension of some priest-directed shape of ghostly terrorism. Above all, he had been made to grasp a sentiment, which, slightly as it can be treated in a secular work, may be said to have left no adequate imprint upon the Protestant world. By dint of the monastic teaching, he had been brought to entertain a keen personal realisation of the actual sufferings of Christ. The fact is self-evident from every fragment of contemporaneous literature intended to react upon the fears and sympathies of uncultivated men. It was the constant presentment of the notion of the divine agony, the daily calling to remembrance of the thorns, the nails, and the hyssop, that was relied upon to keep alive in those poor agued souls some struggling flame of spiritual vitality. And so surely was the spark wont to kindle, and so reverently was the similitude of these priestly images treasured up, that they formed the mainstay of the ploughman's faith, the sum total of the poor man's theology.

From this cause it arose, as there is now every reason to suspect, that the country was at one time inundated with a torrent of the most acrid and rasping blasphemy. It would not be difficult to trace the relative connection between the luxuriance of oath-taking and the various forms of religion under which oath-taking has successively flourished. It could be shown that the swearing of most Catholic states is of greater fertility, and displays a readier fund of invention than that of countries brought under the reformed faith. The more religion appeals to the senses, the more fecund has been the vocabulary of oaths. The more it has been made the subject of ill.u.s.tration and imagery, the more finished and ornate have been the comminations in use. A priest-ridden nation, such as the Spanish or Italian, has always been eminent for its proficiency in blasphemy; and as part of the argument it may not be out of place to mention the instance of the hedge-parson in the 'Fortunes of Nigel,' who, by reason of his superior knowledge of divinity, could swear with greater volubility than any of his a.s.sociates.

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. Imprecations were contrived from every incident in the narrative of the Crucifixion. The limbs and members of the slain Christ were made the vehicle of revolting profanation. The didactic writers of the time, no less than epic poets and sprightly versifiers, give full testimony to the prevalency of the offence. The laureate, Stephen Hawes, Lydgate, Chaucer and the "moral Gower," all are alike loud in their expression of horror and renunciation. Among the later writers replete with instances of the scandal is the epigrammatist, Robert Crowley, who enumerates a lengthy catalogue of expletives current in his day. Although by the time Crowley appeared upon the scene the language of blasphemy had become a little softened by the admixture of rather more innocent particles, as "by c.o.c.k and pye," or "by the cross of the mousefoot," the author still finds it necessary to record a set of hard, grating oaths p.r.o.nounced by the "hands," the "feet," and the "flesh" of Christ.

To refer, for instance, to the use of the one word "zounds!" This strikes us now-a-days as anything but a very solemn or a very momentous form of adjuration. But in unreformed England--the England that still adored the _Genetrix incorrupta_, and had earned among the devout the t.i.tle of Our Lady's Dower, it was absolutely impossible to surpa.s.s in blasphemy the hideous import that had been imparted to the user of the word. It was in fact nothing else than a rebellious and mutinous rendering of the once sacred oath taken by the wounds of the Redeemer.

There are few who can probably now realise the conspicuous place then occupied in the Catholic worship by the legends relating to the five several incisions in the body of Christ. The monkish representations of the wounds were depicted in countless rosaries and Books of Hours.

Confraternities were formed in the Church for their greater veneration.

There were occasions when papal absolution was specially extended to those worshippers who paid their devotions to the wound in the side of Christ. The so-called measurement of them was even preserved in families, and was reputed to be a charm.[22] In the great northern insurrection of 1536, known as the Pilgrimage of Grace, the Five Wounds was the badge under which York and Lincoln farmers marched to avenge the spoliation of the monasteries. Such was the oath in the days of the last King Henry. Its more modern application scarcely requires ill.u.s.tration, but if any such were needed, we might find it in the villainous lines which Lord Byron wrote in connection with a certain trip on board the _Lisbon_ packet.

To the present hour, in Italy, the popular oaths are in close alliance with the Romanist faith. The ordinary exclamation "_Per l'ostia_" is the equivalent of "G.o.d's bread!" that so long did duty in England of the pre-Reformation era. A modern traveller has noticed how distinct an impress has been set upon Italian swearing by the particular notions of heavenly beings that are inculcated by the national creed. A workman in an art-studio was heard vociferating in such terms as "_Per Christo_,"

"_Per sangue di Christo_," "_Per maladetto sangue di Christo_,"

whereupon the following conversation occurred:--

"Do you forget who Christ is, that you thus blaspheme Him?"

"Bah!" replied the man, "I am not afraid of Him."

"Who, then, do you fear?"

"I'm afraid of the Madonna, and not of Him."

The fact was that the Mother of G.o.d was the sole being the mind was brought to esteem with feelings of veneration. Christ was only the _bambino_, or infant in arms, and nothing more.[23]

The state of feeling that still prevails in Italy should go far to explain the presence in pre-Reformation England of this widely-spread body of irreverent swearing. With the Reformation, however, the contagion was shortly to abate. The severer authors at the close of the sixteenth century do not have to complain so bitterly of these jarring elements of vituperation. In the literature of the stage there is a marked improvement: in none but the earlier of the Elizabethan comedies do the characters accentuate their meaning by reference to the grossest description of blasphemy. When expletives occur they are generally in the spirit of derision and lampoon. As the writings of the stage grew more robust, the custom altogether wore away. It may, indeed, be held that the subversion of the Catholic religion was mainly, if not entirely, accountable for the change. There is certainly a marked distinction between the oaths of the outgoing and incoming creeds. But if we have been finally spared from the ravages of the infection, we may attribute our deliverance to that reserve of reverence of which we have spoken as possessed by English laymen, and to the pious devices that were practised upon it by the inferior orders of preachers.

The position they chose to a.s.sume in combating this "fine old gentlemanly vice" is a singular feature in its history. Their method was to a.s.sociate the practice of swearing with the notion of actual bodily pain being occasioned to the Saviour. They made it appear that Christ in person was put to extreme physical agony on every occasion of its committal. Not alone did they a.s.sert the wantonness and hardihood of so directly incurring the Divine displeasure, but they raised the most piteous appeal to the compa.s.sion of these benighted swearers. It was daily proclaimed from their pulpits that the profanity in this one respect of professedly Christian men had worked a sharper and more agonising martyrdom than that formerly designed by the Jews themselves.

In countless broadsheets, no less than by pictorial ill.u.s.tration, the wounds of Christ were portrayed as hourly re-opened, and the sufferings of Golgotha renewed from day to day. The doctrine gained additional credit when transferred from the hands of monkish authors and embraced by popular and captivating pens. Stephen Hawes, own poet to carpet-knights and buckram soldiery, brought home conviction to a cla.s.s of offenders that a whole consistory would not have succeeded in convincing. In a rhyming pamphlet, prefaced by a figure of the bleeding Christ, Hawes depicts with awful realism those sufferings which, as he believed, were being actually and bodily inflicted.[24] The author of 'Bel Amour' describes the feet and hands of Christ as literally pierced anew, and every member torn and lacerated by reason of the imprecations of unheeding Christians.

At this time of day it might be difficult to ascertain with any certainty the origin of this forced view of the iniquity of swearing. So far as concerns printed literature, we discover it for the first time in the doggerel of the poet Hawes, but it is none the less traceable to that encyclopaedic work of the thirteenth century, the 'Miroir du Monde.'

This takes us to the year 1279, and instances could be furnished showing its regular pa.s.sage through the next three centuries, until the monkish notion is at last surrendered and delivered over to the cleansing fires of the Reformation. The last of the English authors who seems to have seriously advanced the theory is to be found in the rigid disciple of asceticism, Thomas Becon.

Becon was a man who, throughout a devout and severe life, had set himself sternly to the task of rebuking the immoderate lawlessness of the orders among which he lived. The rustic usage of collecting round the village tavern to celebrate the Sabbath in sport and holiday was one particularly repellant to the mind of Becon, and held by him to be the mainspring of all the evils that ravaged the country-side. The fore part of the day having been devoted to the services of the Church, it was usual for a time of high festival to succeed the morning's austerities.

Noon discovered all the grown men of the village a.s.sembled round the vintner's door and partaking of the ale-house hospitalities. Here feats of rude strength were performed, wrestlers practised their throws, and st.u.r.dy fellows played bouts at quarter-staff. Foot-races were run upon the greensward for wholesome wagers of barley-cake, and games of hazard were conducted under the shelter of the ivy-bush at the publican's threshold. Bets were staked, dice were rattled, and yokels learned to place the dues of the harvest-field upon the fortunes of the winning or losing colour. When, therefore, after earnest and fruitless entreaty, the good Becon rushed into print and produced his learned 'Invective,'

he did not omit to visit with uncompromising censure the chartered licence of this Sunday festival.

The riot and pastime that on every seventh day had been wont to disturb the quietude of rustic life appeared to our reformer as a direct encouragement to the practice of swearing, and in fact as const.i.tuting so many training-schools for the cultivation of this unwelcome accomplishment. In the hope of rendering the habit positively forbidding to the more impressionable among his readers, he reminds them how the body of the Saviour is actually torn and mangled by reason of the imprecations hurled at him in these country sports. Oaths, he deplores, were then used in every matter of chopping and changing, of bargaining and selling, and he groans to think how the "dicer" will swear rather than pa.s.sively submit to the loss of a single cast, the "carder will tear G.o.d in pieces rather than lose the profit of an ace."

It is a feature that must be very palpable to the student of incipient literature, that when once an original and daring notion was fairly launched upon the world, it was not allowed to founder for want of repet.i.tion. The peculiar mode of thought which we have ventured to ascribe to the 'Miroir du Monde' in the thirteenth century, could boast a long line of exponents in the interval that closed with Thomas Becon.

The writer to whose industry, rather than invention, English laymen were indebted for their acquaintance with this painful doctrine was a certain Dan Michael, described as a brother of the Cloister of Saint Austin.

This person has produced a didactic treatise based upon the model of the famous 'Miroir,' an original from which no writer at that time felt himself justified in departing. With the subject of swearing he deals in a way that is highly painstaking. Not to mention the intricate distinctions which he treats under these several heads, we find that he has grouped the offences of the tongue into no less than eight cardinal divisions. It may be curious to record the t.i.tles as our author enumerates them, notwithstanding that it is scarcely to our purpose to follow him through the niceties he has created. The branches of the subject, according to his cla.s.sification, would therefore seem to be: "ydelnesse," "yelpinge," "bloudynge," "todiazinge," "stryfinge,"

"grochynge," "wystondinge," and lastly "blasfemye." So far as we have mastered the system of Dan Michael we are driven to the conclusion that the practice of swearing, as understood in the Cloister of Saint Austin, was, save for the outward distinction of dress, much the same as prevails in the later world. "For there are some," says he of the cloister, "so evil taught that they are able to say nothing without swearing. Some swear as if smitten with sudden pain. Others swear by the sun, the moon, by the head, or by their father's soul."

Minute as is Dan Michael in his treatment of the subject of abuse, his elaborations are possibly surpa.s.sed by the next compet.i.tor for moralistic fame. Robert of Brunne, who produced a similar work in the year 1303, availed himself largely of the other's labours, while he enriched his collections with recitals of wrong-doing from his own exclusive stores. From the "Handlyng Sinne," as the production is called, one may gather considerable insight into the state of prejudice existing at the time. The neighbours tell one another good stories in church time, and inquire during the sermon where they can get the best ale. The monks have become so luxurious that they refuse to shave their heads and have commenced to array themselves in fine clothes. The king's courts are crowded with supplicating suitors, craving for redress from the extortions of trustees and executors, and yielding themselves victims to the falsity of the men of law. Swearing, at that time, would seem to be no longer the prerogative of laymen, but even to have become the privilege of learned clerks.

To depict what, from this author's point of view, were the fruits and consequences of blasphemy, Brunne enters into a narrative describing the Mother of G.o.d presenting the bleeding Jesus to the gaze of the rich man Dives. The latter inquires the reason for the Child being gashed with wounds. In reply the Virgin points out in terms of keen resentment the injuries inflicted upon the Infant by the swearing of Dives and his a.s.sociates. The doctrine of the 'Miroir' is then introduced in full to demonstrate the infamy and inhumanity of the practice, the whole concluding with a promise of repentance on the part of the sinful man.

This fable is only one among many others that were narrated with a view to curbing the propensities of blaspheming swearers. The work that contains it met with general circulation at the commencement of the fourteenth century, but that the spread of the iniquity was not sensibly abated we may infer from other sources of information we have mentioned.[25] In 1544, the evil was set forth in the light of a national grievance, and was paraded in a broadsheet published in that year ent.i.tled a "Supplycacion to Kynge Henry the Eyght."

Such, then, was the ponderous metal that pa.s.sed current as the swearing of pre-Reformation England. These verbal projectiles were sometimes moulded, however, of a lighter calibre, and when employed in the talk of priests or women, were so nicely rounded off as to incur little of theological displeasure. Chaucer's people, in particular, are very punctilious in the propriety of their oaths; good Sir Thopas swearing mildly "by ale and bread," and Madame Eglantine naming holy Saint Eligius as the patron of her vows--

"There was also a nonne, a prioresse, That of hire smyling was ful symple and coy, Hire grettest oath was but by St. Eloy."

In much the same way did princes and dignitaries of the land single out some swearing cognizance that might befriend them in the everlasting conflict between lies and honesty. Edward I. sanctified his oaths by the mention of a brace of milk-white swans, and whoever will consult St.

Palaye will find that the peac.o.c.k and the pheasant entered largely into the codes of chivalry as bearing witness to the truth of a statement.

Edward III. followed the lead of his grandsire in the selection of his gage of testimony. At the festival held in 1349 to celebrate the creation of the Order of the Garter, his cognizance was the swan, adorned, moreover, with the swearing motto: "Haye! Haye! the Whyte Swan!

by G.o.dde's soule I am thy man."

The tradition that St. Paul was the saint that Richard III. was wont to conjure with, has found expression in the tragedy of Shakespeare.

Faithful to the popular notions of the usurper's characteristic, this form of oath has been placed upon Gloucester's lips at each impa.s.sioned outburst. Henry V., in his wooing of Katherine, gallantly invokes St.

Denis to aid him in his attempts at love-making. But the chronicler who seems positively to have had an affection for the oaths the memory of which he is recalling, is the historian Brantome. Upon this unimpeachable testimony we learn that the oath of Louis XI. was _par la Paque Dieu_, an affirmation that Scott avails himself of in his portraiture of that monarch in 'Quentin Durward.' This was succeeded by the _jour de Dieu_ of Charles VIII.; by the _diable m'emporte_ of Louis XII., and the _foi de gentilhomme_ of Francis I. Among the Gascon oaths of Henry IV. the most usual was _ventre Saint Gris_. As for Charles IX., adds Brantome, he swore in all fashions, and always like a sergeant who was leading a man to be hanged.[26]

The question has frequently been asked who was intended by the cognomen Saint Gris? The answer accorded by Le Duchat, a savant learned in such matters, is that Saint Francis d'a.s.sise was the person indicated. It is true that Saint Francis was _ceint_ by a hempen girdle, and, moreover, was clad in a habit of _gris_. But there nevertheless seems no reason to suppose that any individual personage was suggested, or, indeed, as has been stated, that the oath was of a Huguenot character. Says M. Charles Rozan,[27] who has had occasion to refer to this subject, Saint Gris is purely a creature of fancy, and was const.i.tuted a patron of drinkers, as St. Lache was a patron of idlers and St. Nitouche of hypocrites.

The oath of William Rufus, _per vultum de Lucca,_ has raised conjectures as to its probable signification. The literal meaning, "by Saint Luke's face," being rejected as not very intelligible, there remain two distinct explanations: one that it referred to the face of Christ as painted by St. Luke, the other that the portrait of Christ as preserved in the cathedral church at Lucca is the object intended. To support the first derivation, credence must be given to the legend which places the apostle among the artist craftsmen of Judaea, and has enshrined him as the patron saint of all workers in the arts. On the other hand, there has reposed for some centuries at Lucca a miraculous crucifix, famous alike for the marvels it has seen and accomplished. The Tuscan people set great store by the possession of this relic, and have engraved a representation of it upon their coins. The inscription upon the Tuscan florin, "Sanctus vultus de Lucca," would seem, therefore, to be identical with the expletive of William Rufus.

We have seen how the occupants of the throne have usually comported themselves in the matter of oaths, but there is one recorded instance of Plantagenet royalty having created a singular precedent. If any man can be said to have ever had cause for swearing, Henry VI. might be described as being that individual. It is stated, however, by contemporaries who had opportunities for conversing with this king, and by whom it is given as a somewhat remarkable fact, that he was never known to swear under the greatest provocation.