Medieval Swear Words

Focusing on medieval England, people back then did not have much of an issue with describing bodily functions in ways that we might find less appropriate. Going into a city you might find a street called ‘Shitwell Way’ or ‘Pissing Alley’. Open a school textbook for teaching children how to read and you might find the words arse, shit or fart. If you saw ants crawling around you would most likely call them ‘pisse-mires’.

Even some names, like Rogerus Prikeproud or Thomas Turd, seem to have acceptable to medieval men and women. Mohr explains, “generally, people of medieval England did not share our modern concept of obscenity, in which words for taboo functions possess a power in excess of their literal meaning and must be fenced off from polite conversation…Medieval people were, to us, strikingly unconcerned with the Shit.”

While medieval people may have seen these words as somewhat impolite, they rarely found them obscene. Instead, they took it much more important when people swore oaths. Mohr explains, “these words were offensive for two reasons. Partly because from how sincere oaths were supposed to work, so when you swear sincerely what people in the Middle Ages believed they were doing was asking God to look down from heaven and guarantee that your were true and according to covenants he made with the people of the Bible he actually is almost required to do that.”


[link to www.medievalists.net]