The state of feeling disclosed by this offensive farce shows plainly, even at that time, that the public which tolerated it had passed out of a state of mere supineness and had assumed an attitude of disrespect and defiance towards the authority of oaths. The system had been allowed to overreach itself, and thenceforward its set forms and all the paraphernalia that pertained to them were made over to the service of criminality and to the uses of violent speech. The modern practice of swearing, in either its flippant or vituperative shape, is derived from the break-up of the process once devised as a protection of truthfulness and fair dealing. So nearly allied have been the oaths of piety and statecraft with those of violence and malice, that the severer thinkers, whether Lollards, Puritans, or Quakers, have waged a war of extermination against both alike. They have contended, and with some amount of probability, that these jarring expletives of passion and irreligion have only been perpetuated by reason of the familiarity that has ensued from the undue exaction of legal tests. The same stubbornness with which they combated the evil in endless tracts and broadsides they maintained before courts and inquisitions. At the Lancaster Assizes of 1664, George Fox and Mrs. Margaret Fell stood upon their trial for refusing to conform. “I have never laid my hand on the book to swear in all my life,” urged the woman. “I do not care if I never hear an oath read, for the land mourns because of oaths.” And then appealing to the jury she exclaims: “I was bred and born in this county and never have been at this assize before. I am a widow, and my estate is a dowry, and I have five children unpreferred.”
There was one device of oath-taking, half pagan and half barbaric, which but very slowly relaxed its hold on Christian Europe. We have spoken of the oath upon the sword—the oath of ancient Scythia, the oath of the Antigone of Euripedes. In the terrors of an isolated death, remote from all the outward appliances of his faith, the stricken warrior found consolation in raising before his vision the hilt of his scabbardless sword. The tapering metal-hafted blade threw the shadow of a cross upon the dying soldier, and to this rude emblem the poor fevered lips would stammer out their last words of petition. The sword had become a revered symbol conveying to the departing the hope of divine favour and intercession. This thought so powerfully arrested the imagination that it did not relinquish its grasp when a period of security had succeeded a reign of bloodshed and danger. In the traditions of Denmark, the oath upon the sword-hilt was preserved in a spirit of deep solemnity. Later, in English history, the King-Maker took his vows upon the cross of his bared steel, and the custom lingered in effigy to the days of Elizabeth, when the fencing-masters, practising their calling at the Bear Garden, were required to take an oath upon their rapier’s hilt to carry themselves honourably in their profession.[6] The gravity with which this form of conjuration is approached by Hamlet’s followers is evident from the passage:—
| “Hor. Mar. | } | My lord, we will not. |
| Hamlet. Nay, but swear it. | ||
| Hor. In faith, my lord, not I. | ||
| Ghost. (beneath). Swear! | ||
| Hamlet. Ha, ha, boy! say’st thou so? art there, true-penny? Come on—you hear this fellow in the cellarage, Consent to swear. | ||
| Hor. Propose the oath, my lord. | ||
| Hamlet. Never to speak of this that you have seen, Swear by my sword.” | ||
The ground that we have thus far traversed is really one of a remarkable struggle, that has not abated even in our time. It is not the intention of this essay to follow the history of judicial oath-taking, or of the attestations that would seem to be demanded by conscience or religion. But it must be remembered that the subject of vituperative swearing is so interwoven with that of these legal and religious ordinances, that the consideration of them must be frequently forced upon us. But whilst doing so it should be no less borne in mind that we are never really losing sight of the object we have in view. We aim simply at disinterring a neglected, possibly a justly neglected, chapter in the world’s social history, and are called upon to judge both of the tree and its fruit, of the seed and the grain.
CHAPTER III.
THE BRITISH SHIBBOLETH.
“Pantagruel then asked what sorts of people dwelled in that damn’d island.”—Rabelais iv., chap. lxiv.
“If ever I should betake myself to swearing,” says Sir John Hazlewood in the play, “I shall give very little concern to the fashion of the oath. Odd’s bodikins will do well enough for me, and lack-a-daisy for my wife.” Many other persons have been much of the same mind as this Sir John, and, possessing a certain esteem for the pomp and circumstance of swearing, have been impelled to cherish some curious substitute so that they might still get a little harmless amusement out of the vice. In this way they have contrived so to compound with their consciences as to become swearers in practice without being blasphemers in intention.