The position they chose to assume in combating this “fine old gentlemanly vice” is a singular feature in its history. Their method was to associate 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 assert the wantonness and hardihood of so directly incurring the Divine displeasure, but they raised the most piteous appeal to the compassion 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 illustration, 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 class 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 encyclopædic work of the thirteenth century, the ‘Miroir du Monde.’ This takes us to the year 1279, and instances could be furnished showing its regular passage 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 assembled round the vintner’s door and partaking of the ale-house hospitalities. Here feats of rude strength were performed, wrestlers practised their throws, and sturdy 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 constituting 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 passively submit to the loss of a single cast, the “carder will tear God 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 repetition. 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 titles 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 classification, would therefore seem to be: “ydelnesse,” “yelpinge,” “bloudynge,” “todiazinge,” “stryfinge,” “grochynge,” “wyþstondinge,” 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 surpassed by the next competitor for moralistic fame. Robert of Brunné, 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, Brunné enters into a narrative describing the Mother of God 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 associates. 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 entitled a “Supplycacion to Kynge Henry the Eyght.”
Such, then, was the ponderous metal that passed 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 peacock 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 Godde’s soule I am thy man.”