Fuckin Abbot

30 NOTES AND QUERIES March 1993
delicacy about certain words that pertain to
lechery and fornication. 2
However, in that the manuscripts cited are
pedagogic, and thus could have come into a
schoolboy's hands (MS Add. 37075 has a
schoolboy's personal notes added: see Thomson,
op. cit., n. 2 232), an additional, protective
inhibition may have been at work. OED 1 first
records the verb in English (as distinct from
Scots) in John Florio's Italian-English dictionary,
A Worlde of Wordes (London, 1598),
where along with 'to iape, to sard, to swiue, to
occupy' it glosses 'Fottere, fotto, fottei, fottuto';
the Brasenose manuscript's example thus antedates
Florio by seventy years. Under sense 3 of
the verb OED 1 first records the ppl. a. and adv.
used as 'a mere intensive' in J. S. Farmer and
W. E. Henley, Slang and Us Analogues Past and
Present ([London], 1893), iii.81 who note, with
no examples:
Adj. (common). A qualification of extreme
contumely.
Adv. (common). I. Intensitive and expletive; a
more violent form of BLOODY.
If the example in the Brasenose manuscript is
used as a mere intensive it thus antedates
Farmer and Henley by 365 years (for a Scots,
literal example of the ppl. a., c. 1570, see below).
The use of taboo words and swear words
varies, apart from a person's own disposition,
according to a complex of factors such as class,
sex, age, occupation, and whether the occasion
is solitary (alone or under the breath) or in some
sense social; under 'social' we can distinguish
the communicative occasion as written (and
after the invention of printing we can further
categorize print and manuscript) or spoken. We
should also consider what may be termed the
genre of the communication: if written, whether,
say, satire or philosophical argument, and if
spoken, consider both the company (e.g.
whether women or children are present) and the
nature of the occasion (as e.g. between a speech
at a memorial service and at a sports club
1 T. W. Ross, 'Taboo-Words in Fifteenth-Century
English', in R. F. Yeager (ed.), Fifteenth-Century Studies:
Recent Essays (Hamden, Conn., 1984), 137-60,at 140.Fora
detailed account of Ross's principal manuscript source,
British Library MS Add. 37075, see D.Thomson, A
Descriptive Catalogue of Middle English Grammatical Texts
(New York and London, 1979), 219-32.
dinner). In all these matters there is a diachronic
dimension whereby we note that these distinctions
may vary in significance between different
periods. Only if the fullest context is established
can the import of the occurrence of a particular
taboo or swear word be appreciated. 3
Fortunately, we can establish much of the
context which led to the marginalium on fo. 62*
of the Brasenose manuscript in 1528. The
Abbot of the Augustinian house at Osney,
Oxford, at that time was John Burton, first a
Bachelor and then a Doctor of Canon Law. 4 He
had previously been Prior of St Frideswide,
Oxford, from 1513-24. 5 At the Visitation of the
Priory by William Atwater, bishop of Lincoln,
on 5 May 1520 a number of charges were
preferred against him; A. Hamilton Thompson
summarizes them thus:
The prior himself was no worse than other
priors, and the charges preferred against him
were of the usual kind, engrossment of the
revenues of all offices, failure to render
accounts in public, with the suspicion of
collusion with the auditor, sale of wood and
leases of churches and manors on his own
responsibility, and the general accusation that
3 The best study of the topic is G. Hughes, Swearing: A
Social History of Foul Language, Oaths and Profanity in
English (Oxford, and Cambridge, Mass., 1991), which covers
Old English to the present day. Unmentioned by Hughes but
worth consulting is M. Ljung, 'Two American Blasphemes
[the swear word and the pres. ppt. of the verb fuck\\ in J. Allwood
and M. Ljung (eds), Alvar: A Linguistically Varied
Assortment of Readings: Studies Presented to Alvar Ellegdrd
on the Occasion of his 60th Birthday, Stockholm Papers in
English Language and Literature, Publication 1 (September
1980), 116-29; Ljung's suggestion that the final syllable in the
swearword was originally adenominal suffix -en of much the
same kind' (118) as is found in earthen, wooden, golden, etc.,
and that it has been re-spelled -ing on a mistaken analogy with
the pres. ppt. does not persuade; see also Ljung's 'Ouch!' in
S. Backman and G. Kjellmer (eds), Papers on Language and
Literature Presented to Alvar Ellegdrd and Erik Frykman,
Gothenburg Studies in English 60(1985), 274-9. There is an
excellent discussion of the comparative linguistic material in
OF fabliaux in C. Muscatine, The Old French Fabliaux (New
Haven and London, 1986), 105-51. See also the further
references s.v. n. 14 below.
4 See A. B. Emden, A Biographical Register of the University
of Oxford A.D. 1501 to 1540 (Oxford, 1974), s.v.
Burton, John.
5 H. E. Salter, 'The Religious Houses of Oxfordshire',
Victoria County History of Oxfordshire (London, 1907),
ii.97-101, gives a history of the Priory of St Frideswide; for
the history of Osney Abbey see pp. 90-3, and for that of the
nunnery at Godstow see pp. 71-5.
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