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Abusive Words

Out of earshot, and far removed in time from their first hearers and reporters, we have only limited retrieval of the dark discourse of dangerous words. Most of what we know comes from depositions of witnesses and examinations by magistrates concerning private and controversial exchanges. We can never be sure of the truth of the matter, any more than early modern justices and councillors could tell if a story was fabricated or misheard, or shaped by malicious purposes. Too often the reports refer to words that were ‘scandalous, seditious or treasonable’ without actually citing them.

Words were but wind, and most were soon forgotten, but fragments of speech entered the historical record. This chapter examines some of the ways in which private exchanges became part of the public transcript. It uses the records of local and national courts, councils, governors, magistrates, and diarists to recover the words that early modern authorities deemed transgressive. It attempts to reconstruct the circumstances of these exchanges in order to eavesdrop on past conversations. And it offers a sample of the disorderly speech that came before the courts. The records yield echoes of antisocial language, insult, and scolding; scandal, slander, defamation, and libel; and the spreading of rumour and false news. These were products of social interactions that commonly gave voice to the sins of the tongue. The politically sensitive matter of undutiful speech, unsubjectlike utterance, seditious talk, and treasonable words against the crown is reserved for the following chapters.

Words are but Wind

Preachers and moralists often claimed that, though ‘what is spoken is transient and passeth away’, God was always listening to offending conversations.¹ The state too was interested in ‘tongue transgressions’, and had means to identify and punish offenders. A chain of reaction and reportage brought representations of offensive speech to the attention of the authorities and into the purview of historians.

First, someone had to say something that someone else thought inappropriate, dangerous, or actionable: a lie, an oath, a curse, or a grumble. But no words were recorded until a listener complained. A drinker in social company might first appeal to the landlord; another auditor might call for a constable; sometimes the words were recollected later in the course of some other dispute. Eventually the tale might reach a magistrate, who would dutifully examine the alleged speaker and witnesses. Only then would the allegation and answers be transcribed into text. Before sending the matter to the assizes, or some other legal venue, the magistrate might write to a superior for advice or to demonstrate his assiduity. Hundreds of letters reached the Privy Council with reports of ‘scandalous’, ‘scornful’, ‘vile’, or ‘uncomely’ utterances. Files of documents expose ‘railing and reviling speeches’ and ‘unseemly and opprobrious words’. If the alleged expressions were thought traitorous or seditious, or in any way threatened authority, the Council might well press for further examinations, or take over the investigation itself.

In other circumstances involving dangerous or damaging language the victims might retaliate against personal vilification. If their reputation was attacked, their honour sullied, or their name besmirched, they might seek redress through the law. Depending on the status of the parties involved and the nature of their verbal injuries, the matter might go before the local ecclesiastical courts, King’s Bench or Common Pleas, Star Chamber, High Commission, or the High Court of Chivalry. These were all record-keeping agencies, generating allegations, presentments, indictments, orders, or depositions. All offered opportunities to prosecute ‘crimes of the tongue’.² A standard interrogatory asked, ‘at what time and in what company and in whose presence were any such words spoken?’³ Witnesses, defendants, and officials all contributed to the written record, creating partial transcripts of past conversations. Though the processes of law and the mediation of scribal recording rob these words of immediacy and inflexion, they nonetheless capture the flavour and patterns of heated and intemperate speech. Since most heated conversations were indeed lost to the wind, the recorded fragments represent a minimum of dangerous discourse.

Insult and scolding

Many a parish suffered an exceptionally noisy trouble-maker, a woman like Sara Prine in Herefordshire, ‘a common scold’ who inflicted ‘many curses … with great oaths and protestations’ upon her long-suffering neighbours,⁴ or Joan Allen of Essex, who berated the churchwarden and constables with ‘most bitter railing and taunting speeches’ and ‘opprobrious and scandalous’ words.⁵ Equally common were men like Abel Wanseworth of Rayleigh, Essex, described as ‘a horrible swearer, a common barrater, a sower of false and slanderous reports, and disturber of the peace and quiet of the whole town’,⁶ or John Wall of Hereford, who ‘did scold and rail’ at a female neighbour, ‘calling her whore, common whore, and rotten whore’, and abusing a man as ‘false forsworn knave’.⁷

There was hardly a community immune from such talk. Even if they caused no other damage, abusive speakers violated the rules of civil discourse and threatened to impair the peace. Often enough their words led to blows. Local authorities made occasional attempts to curtail loud and foul language, to restrain ‘railing and reviling speeches’, and to guard respectable parishioners against ‘unseemly and opprobrious words’. But only when they overreached or said something particularly offensive did scolding speakers become subject to judicial process, and thereby enter the records.

‘Scolding’ was notionally gendered, described by one scholar as ‘the feminization of deviant speech’.⁸ It was the unruly tongue gone wild. According to the eighteenth-century legal authority William Blackstone, ‘a common scold, communis rixatrix, (for our law-Latin confines it to the feminine gender) is a public nuisance to her neighbourhood’.⁹ Most foul speakers described as scolds were women, but men could be guilty of the like offence; the label ‘scold’ might not attach to them, but men could still be charged with ‘scolding’.

Margaret Price of Kingston, Herefordshire, pursued a neighbour to the grave with a stream of scolding invective, ‘cursing and using most uncharitable words against the corpse of one deceased’. At King’s Sutton, Oxfordshire, in 1617 the scold Anne Chapman was heard ‘contemptuously raging, blasphemously swearing by the lord’s wounds and blood’ against the incumbent minister.¹⁰ Jane Nightingale of Norley, Cheshire, was described in 1630 as ‘a woman of a turbulent and vexatious spirit… in continual opposition with her neighbours, either causelessly vexing them or wrongfully slandering and defaming them’ with ‘slanderous and reproachful speeches’, but the records do not refer to her as a ‘scold’.¹¹

In Norfolk in 1626 parishioners complained about Richard Sheepheard of Westwinch, ‘an incorrigible and desperate tinker’, whose ‘ordinary talk’ consisted of ‘swearing, lying, slandering, and common barrating against others’. When the minister Robert Bale offered a mild reproof, ‘the tinker broke forth into many violent speeches against him… vomiting out such fearful blasphemies, oaths, reproaches and threatenings… as it is not meet to be written’. One outburst triggered by attempts to collect rent for Sheepheard’s parish lodgings led to proceedings at the Quarter Sessions.¹² Three years later Norfolk magistrates heard of the ‘many filthy, lewd, barbarous and threatening speeches’ of Mr Thomas Violet, many of them directed at his unfortunate wife. Violet was a gentleman, who should have known how to control his temper and his tongue, but neighbours judged his utterance to be ‘foul’, ‘tyrannical’, and ‘inhuman’.¹³

In more examples, Thomas Sommerfield of Ibstock, Leicestershire, was cited in 1634 ‘for brabbling and scolding in the church’ and speaking with malice ‘in somewhat a high manner’.¹⁴ William Ireland of Langton-iuxta-Horncastle, Lincolnshire, was presented at an episcopal visitation in 1636 as ‘a common swearer and blasphemer of God’s name, for a common slanderer of his neighbours, for a filthy and lascivious talker and sower of much discord, and a common drunkard’.¹⁵

Described in 1641 as ‘a common quarreller, a disturber of the king’s peace… a constant jangler and wrangler both in word and action’, the glover John Holt of Hereford, ‘reviled and mewed’ at another glover’s wife, ‘calling her filthy sot and a spawn of a bastard’. When the woman’s husband called on the speaker ‘to bridle his tongue’, Holt called him ‘knave’ and said ‘he did not care a fart or a turd for him, nor did not care for no man or no man in England’.¹⁶ Also in 1641, parishioners at Erpingham, Sussex, described Thomas Andrews as ‘a common sower of discord and debate amongst his neighbours, a very troublesome and contentious person, full of evil and foul words’.¹⁷ Ralph Sparke of Chester the same year was similarly known as a ‘quarreler amongst his neighbours… breeding strife, quarrels and debate… apt to give foul words’.¹⁸

People like these were incapable of tongue discipline. Their words raised the temperature of verbal scandal and invective, and also became subjects of other people’s conversations. Neighbours had to decide how much to tolerate and when to resort to the courts. A particularly virulent outburst, or an exchange that created disorder, could lead to intervention by constables, clergy, or magistrates.

The records are also rich with examples of disorderly speech among people of higher social status. Gentlemen, clerics, and members of the professions were expected to watch their language, but sometimes their passion got the better of them. Like villagers and townsfolk, the educated elite occasionally succumbed to offences of the tongues. It was always shocking to hear abusive language from people whose speech was supposed to be civil and polite.

Two Cambridge academics, fellows of Pembroke Hall, fell into a shouting match in 1611, when one of them spoke unwisely, ‘in a great heat and rage’. Meeting together in the college garden, Dr Theophilus Field began to berate his junior colleague Alexander Read, claiming that Read had spoken ill of him behind his back. Field called Read a ‘stiff clown’, to which Read replied ‘that for stiffness he had honesty in him, and further said that a man had need to have a stomach in that college to carry matters out’. Field told Read ‘that he had a stomach to a piece of beef to his victuals, but otherwise that he was a base fawning fellow, a back-biter and a base rascal’. When Read in turn accused Field of being ‘base and contemptible’, the doctor took Read ‘by the beard, saying again that he was a base rascal, or words to the like effect’. Theophilus Field was a doctor of divinity, a royal chaplain, and a future bishop of Hereford, but on this occasion he could not restrain his temper. Although the words ‘were spoken in private… no man else being present’, they soon became public when Field repeated them to other fellows and threatened to prosecute Read before High Commission. The altercation is reported in records of the Vice Chancellor’s court.¹⁹

Collegiate life at Oxford was also disrupted by the speaking of ‘verba brigosa’, or contentious, divisive and wrangling words. The ‘chiding’ of two fellows of St Edmund’s Hall, for example, came to the attention of the Chancellor in 1631 when one called the other ‘thief’ and ‘dishonest’ for ‘stealing part of other men’s sermons’, and was labelled ‘rascal’ in return.²⁰

Clergymen positioned themselves as models of verbal propriety, but reports of their excesses are common. The Kentish minister John Reading appealed in 1626 against ‘the liberty of an ill governed and conscienceless tongue’, but apparently gave as good as he got, calling one parishioner a ‘dog among men’, and justifying this language by Scripture, ‘for so David called railers and persecutors’.²¹ Another cleric, John Hodgeson, vicar of Stradsett, Norfolk, seemed unable to practise the verbal restraint that was required of a man of the cloth. Instead, petitioners complained in 1629, he was ‘a common railer and evil speaker to his neighbours and parishioners’, and reviled them ‘in base and uncomely terms’. He told one parish widow that she was ‘a quean and the filthiest and wickedest woman that ever lived’, berated another churchgoer as ‘rogue, rascal and knave’, and abused Francis Piggott, esquire, the most prominent landowner in town, saying ‘sirra, sirra, sirra… thou lyest’. ‘Sirra’ was a demeaning word to apply to a gentleman, but it was among the mildest of Hodgeson’s verbal transgressions. Parishioners complained to the Quarter Sessions about their minister’s ‘beastly words’ when, before thirty witnesses, he charged Edmund Chapman with encouraging Thomas Parlett to ‘lay his maid down in a haycock and fuck her, fuck her, fuck her, fuck her, by God… with such beastly gesture and motion of his body that all the people there present except himself were ashamed of his beastliness’.²²

Other clergymen overflowed with rage and called their parishioners ‘base’, ‘greasy’, or ‘saucy fellows’, ‘scurvy companions… reprobates… coxcombs… giddy headed fellows’, or likened them to lowly beasts. Thomas Geary, the vicar of Bedingfield, Suffolk, railed at his parishioners as ‘sowded pigs, bursten rams and speckled frogs’. Another Suffolk minister, Robert Shepherd of Hepworth, insulted his congregation as ‘black mouthed hell hounds, limbs of the devil, fire brands of hell, plow joggers, bawling dogs, weaverly jacks, and church robbers, affirming that if he could term them worse he would’. Edward Layfield of All Saints, Barking, allegedly lashed out at his enemies as ‘black toads, spotted toads, and venemous toads, like Jack Straw and Wat Tyler’, when parishioners protested his ceremonial innovations.²³ Handbooks for ministers warned them to avoid ‘foolish, ridiculous and… undecent’ or ‘unbefitting’ terms,²⁴ but in times of stress they found it hard to contain the anger in the breast.

Even lawyers were capable of abusive language. In 1634 William Fanshaw, an auditor of the Duchy of Lancaster, spoke contemptuously of Chief Justice Thomas Richardson, ‘calling him a foul blabber-lipped blockhead, fitter to be a bearward than a judge’. Richardson brought legal action against Fanshaw ‘for speaking of scandalous words’, and ‘his too lavish speeches of his betters’, but the suit redounded to the Chief Justice’s discredit. The Norfolk gentleman Thomas Knyvett wrote home from Westminster that ‘this business was mightily canvassed at the Common Pleas bar, to the great scorn and derision of all the hall… His great lordship [Richardson] is so jeered all the town over for bringing this business in question … The king, they say, is mightily angry at him for disgracing himself and his place so much.’²⁵

Defamation and Slander

Everyday victims of defamatory language could seek redress in both the ecclesiastical and secular courts. The church courts handled defamation suits when one party spoke ill of another. The common law provided remedies for ‘injuries affecting a man’s reputation or good name… by malicious, scandalous, and slanderous words, tending to his damage and derogation’.²⁶ These were not criminal prosecutions by the crown or the church for violations of the law, but rather litigation between members of the community. In principle, an aggrieved party might sue for damages in a secular court, seeking money by way of compensation. An ecclesiastical court, by contrast, might vindicate a person’s honour but could impose only spiritual sanction, such as excommunication or public penance, on a layman or suspend a clergyman from his ministry.²⁷

Historians have made extensive use of the records of ecclesiastical courts—in episcopal, archidiaconal, and peculiar jurisdictions—to investigate charges of defamation. Surviving in bulk from the late Middle Ages to the eighteenth century, the allegations and depositions in these cases yield detailed accounts of verbal exchanges and altercations. The number of such suits expanded in the later sixteenth century, in what some people called ‘the bum court’ or the bawdy courts. Most concerned assaults on a person’s probity, honesty, or honour, through abusive or vituperative language.²⁸

A high proportion of defamation cases before the ecclesiastical courts involved sexual insults. Both men and women could suffer sexual defamation, but the most common cases involved someone—either male or female—calling a woman ‘whore’, ‘harlot’, ‘jade’, ‘quean’, or, in the Latinized records of the late fifteenth century, ‘meretricem communem’.²⁹ In the early Tudor diocese of Norwich, for example, Margaret Malyett of Norwich defamed Elizabeth Banyard in 1511, ‘thou art an harlot’. And a few years later Emma Wilby of south Norfolk charged Katherine Googe, ‘thou art a false forsworn quean’.³⁰ Elizabethan cases typically involved someone saying, ‘you are a damned bitch, whore, a pocky whore’, or calling a married woman ‘whore … a cart is too good for thee’.³¹ In 1586 the taunts of a Wiltshire woman against her neighbour—’Mistress stinks, mistress fart… mistress jakes, mistress tosspot and mistress drunkensoul’—brought her before the ecclesiastical court. Others defamed their enemies as ‘brazenfaced quean, hacking jade, filthy bawd, and hot tailed whore’.³²

Popular usage gave many of these words a heightened derogatory effect. ‘Quean’ originally meant no more than ‘a young woman’, but it took on the meaning of ‘prostitute’. A ‘jade’ was originally ‘a worn-out horse’, but it too came to apply to a woman of easy morals. The word ‘harlot’ once meant a young man or knave, then a vagabond or beggar, before becoming a synonym for ‘whore’. A Yorkshire court heard in 1634 that ‘by the word bawd hath been and is understood such a woman who hath herself formerly been a whore and prostituted her body to the lust and use of several men, and doth keep or procure other women to offend in the like kind of incontinency’. To call a woman ‘whore’, ‘quean’, or ‘bawd’ was as defamatory as calling a man ‘a cuckoldy witwally fool’ or ‘a whoremaster bankrupt rogue’.³³ But disparaging a woman’s housekeeping could be as damaging as deriding her sexual honour.³⁴

Gendered defamatory language fell as commonly from women’s tongues as men’s, with men and women abusing each other. Defending himself in one such case in Tudor Norfolk, one man acknowledged that he called a woman ‘whore’, but meant only that she was a ‘whore of her tongue’, not a ‘whore of her body’.³⁵ In a case from Stepney, Middlesex, in 1608, George Bryan ‘did call Mrs Bowers, the vicar’s wife, quean and drab in contempt of the ministry’, after she ‘called him a knave’ and spat in his face.³⁶

Whereas a woman might be defamed for her sexual incontinency, as a ‘harlot’, ‘whore’, or ‘quean’, a man was more likely to be attacked for his character, as ‘rogue’, ‘rascal’, ‘varlet’, ‘churl’, or ‘knave’, often preceded by the adjective ‘false’. A man’s principal asset was his honesty, and once that was questioned his credit began to suffer. A ‘churl’ was base born, of the lowest rank or credit. So too was a ‘varlet’, a man or boy of menial condition. A ‘rascal’ belonged to the rabble, of the lowest and least trustworthy sort. The word ‘knave’ originally meant ‘male’, but came to connote someone unreliable and worthless. A ‘rogue’ was an idle vagabond, with the character of an unprincipled beggar. Nobody could allow such words to be used of them, even if they were true.

But insults of a sexual nature also applied to men, with ‘whoremaster’ and ‘cuckold’ among common terms of abuse. According to the late Stuart Justice Sir John Holt, ‘to say whoremaster of a man is the same with whore of a woman, which is an ecclesiastical slander’, that lay within the jurisdiction of the ecclesiastical courts.³⁷ A ‘cuckold’, of course, was a man who could not keep his wife from straying to other men. A ‘whoremaster’, by contrast, was a sexually promiscuous man or someone who kept a woman for sexual purposes.

In the early Tudor diocese of Norwich Peter Baldwin of Dunwich, Suffolk, called William Saxmundham ‘a busybody’, Peter Melton called him a ‘knave’, and Saxmundham retaliated by calling Melton a ‘whoremonger’. In 1510 John Humme of Southwold called Hugh Williamson ‘a false stinking cuckold’. The antique usage applied in 1521 when one man called another ‘a false harlot’, though later the word more commonly referred to a woman. Other cases hinged on such words as ‘false knave’, ‘false churl’, or ‘false rogue or varlet’. All ended up before the bishop’s consistory court.³⁸ The common defamatory language that rained on male Elizabethans ranged from ‘whoreson’, ‘whoremonger’, ‘harlot monger’, and ‘cuckoldy knave’, to ‘villain’, ‘forsworn rogue’, ‘varlet’, ‘rascal’, ‘fool’, and ‘dog’. ‘You are an old whoring rogue and a bastard-getting old rogue,’ said one Norfolk man to another.³⁹ The words could not be unsaid, but the courts provided a venue where damaged honour might be mended.

Defamatory words from the alehouse or the street were only marginally less inventive than the insults of Shakespeare’s characters. In The First Part of King Henry IV the prince calls Falstaff ‘thou whoreson, obscene, grease tallow catch’, and ‘thou whoreson impudent embossed rascal’.⁴⁰ Petruchio in The Taming of the Shrew addresses Grumio, ‘you whoreson malt-horse drudge’.⁴¹ Doll Tearsheet in The Second Part of King Henry IV curses, ‘a pox damn you, you muddy rascal… you scurvy companion … you poor, base, rascally, cheating, lack-linen mate, away you mouldy rogue’, and calls Pistol ‘the foul-mouth’d’st rogue in England’⁴² In The Comedy of Errors Antipholus berates Dromio, ‘thou whoreson senseless villain’, and calls Adriana ‘dissembling harlot, thou art false in all’.⁴³ ‘You whoreson dog, you slave, you cur,’ shouts King Lear at the hapless Oswald. The disguised Duke of Kent calls the same unfortunate character ‘knave … rascal… rogue… and varlet’ in a powerful cascade of abuse.⁴⁴ ‘Rogue, rogue, rogue,’ cries Timon of Athens to the philosopher Ademantus.⁴⁵ These were dramatized versions of the speech reported in hundreds of defamation cases. Ordinary verbal exchanges may have been less artful, but they were no less damaging to those affected, and no less demanding of redress.

Certain kinds of defamatory language could be actionable in the crown courts if they implied that a crime had been committed. To say of someone, for example, ‘thou art a false knave’, might not be actionable at law if the words were merely insulting. But if the speaker said ‘thou art a perjured knave’, or ‘thou art a thief, and hath stolen my beans’, a case might be made because the defamation imputed a crime. Similarly, to say of someone ‘thou keepest a house of bawdry’ was determinable at common law, whereas simply calling that person a ‘bawd’ was a matter for the spiritual courts. The law gave lawyers endless opportunities to argue which words in which settings would bear an action for slander.⁴⁶ In some jurisdictions, faced with particular language, the law was unwilling to act, for example, ‘for calling the plaintiff quean … by reason of the uncertainty of that word’. The word ‘knave’ by itself was not always actionable, for ‘knave originally was no word of reproach, but signified a man servant, and a knave child a man child’.⁴⁷

Towards the end of the sixteenth century the secular courts were increasingly willing to punish language that caused its victims harm, such as damage to their office, calling, or credit. A case in the Court of Common Pleas in 1577, for example, turned on the plaintiff saying, ‘thou art a false deceitful knave and I will prove thee a false deceitful knave, thou art a rogue and worthy to be set on the pillory’. In another case in 1585, when Joan Coxe of Packington, Leicestershire, called Ralph Leeson ‘a false knave’, the Court of Common Pleas took note that, ‘by reason of the speaking and pronouncement… the same Ralph is not only injured in his good name and fame, but also is grievously harmed in his dealings with divers honest persons’. In 1593, when Richard Ingram of York complained that Elizabeth Knowles called him ‘whoremaster, whoremonger harlot’, his lawyers urged ‘that by reason of the utterance of these defamatory words, the status, good fame and reputation of Richard Ingram are greatly and grievously injured and lessened’. These were ‘verba opprobosia injurioisa convitiosa contumeliosa ac diffamatoria’—opprobrious, injurious, abusive, reproachful, or defamatory. The words were defamatory, not just because of what was said, but because their victim suffered damage by them. By the same token, to call someone ‘villain’ or ‘villein’ was not necessarily defamatory, ‘because these are common and usual words of reproach by a master to servant, and no slander in credit’. But to use the word in a way that ‘touches upon the repute of blood and liberty, of all the land and of all the goods of the plaintiff’ might well be incriminating at law, so said King’s Bench judges in 1595. Offensive words were ‘of greater effect’ if spoken of an office-holder than of someone who was not in office, argued the great Elizabethan lawyer Edward Coke. By amplification, they were all the more scandalous, verging on treason, if spoken about the monarch.⁴⁸

Words against Authority

Words between neighbours could be slanderous or defamatory, but they were not as dangerous to society as insults against magistrates. To speak ill of someone in authority was to violate the fifth commandment and to imperil the political establishment. Any speech against a magistrate was ‘a great scandal and offence to the king’, wrote Ferdinando Pulton in 1610, for it might tend ‘to the breach of the peace, to the raising of quarrels, and effusion of blood’.⁴⁹ Nevertheless, as the records make clear, angry subjects in every reign hurled dangerous abuse at officers of the crown.

Abusive words were often triggered by official demands, such as an attempt to collect taxes or impose fines. If a sheriff’s man came to distrain a debtor’s goods, he might also receive a tongue lashing. If a justice rebuked a parishioner, he might hear rude words in return. The early modern state made myriad demands on its subjects, and sometimes lawful business provoked scandalous verbal responses. Fragments of these exchanges are preserved in the records of quarter sessions and other crown courts. Sometimes the words were ‘so odious that they are not fit to be published in open court nor anywhere else’, and the incriminating phrases are missing. Such was the case of the ‘very railing speeches against the justices’ by Thomas Holman, vintner, of Terling, Essex, when he was presented in 1608 ‘for a common drunkard and for keeping ill rule in his house’. ‘Admonished to keep the peace and to remember that he was bound to his good behaviour’, the same foul-mouthed vintner declared that he cared not, ‘casting up his leg and layering his hand on his tail, making a mouth in a very contemptuous sort’.⁵⁰ A popular theatrics of insult added actions to vocabulary, through derisory gestures of the face, limbs, hands, or thumbs.

In many cases, to secure conviction, a court sought to render the actual incriminating words. In 1599, for example, when magistrates attempted to enforce orders about corn in a time of dearth, one local landowner protested, ‘they are knaves, I will keep none of their bastards, my goods are mine own, they nor the queen nor the Council have to do with my goods, I do what I list with them’. The outburst cost the speaker an appearance before Star Chamber, a fine of a hundred pounds, and a bond ‘for his good a-bearing’.⁵¹

In the 1630s a Yorkshire yeoman, James Parkin, of Mortomley, appeared before the West Riding sessions for using ‘scandalous, malicious and contemptuous words’ of a leading magistrate, saying, to the base example of others, ‘I scorn Sir Francis Wortley’s proposition with my arse, and I worship him with my arse’.⁵² Another Yorkshireman, the peddler Thomas Beale of Marborough, declared in 1639 that ‘he cared not a fart for Sir Francis Wortley’, and Walter Hurt of Bradfield, yeoman, spoke similarly: ‘I care not a fart for Sir Francis’s warrants.’⁵³

A Winchester attorney was ‘suspended and barred of his practice’ in 1632 for ‘divers affronts and abuses to his majesty’s justices of peace’. The lawyer John Trussell had rashly made ‘unseemly… unfitting… unbeseeming speeches’, to the effect that one of the magistrates was a liar.⁵⁴ When Roger Wolfe of Hereford spoke derisively ‘in flouting and scornful manner’ of the governors of the local hospital, the Quarter Sessions forced him to apologise in writing for his ‘unseemly words’.⁵⁵ Town governments also attempted to police the discourse of participants in civic life. At Cambridge, for example, ‘if any shall speak any indecent or unseemly speeches’ before the Common Council, they would be fined 2s. 6d.⁵⁶ The collapse of borough assemblies into tumultuous shouting in the spring of 1642 was a sign of social dislocation.⁵⁷

To slander or defame a clergyman was also to assault the structure of authority. Mockery of the clergy was especially disturbing, because it undercut the spiritual authority of God’s ministers on earth.⁵⁸ When a Lincolnshire man reviled his vicar as a ‘scurvy rascal knave’, when a Buckinghamshire parishioner dismissed his minister as a ‘tinkerly parson’, when a Norfolk parishioner railed at his rector as ‘a wide-mouthed rascal’, and a Yorkshireman compared ‘his minister to a pedlar and his ministerial function to pedlars’ wares’, the ecclesiastical authorities were outraged.⁵⁹ Other parishioners who called their ministers ‘fool’, ‘ass’, ‘liar’, ‘varlet’, ‘rogue’, ‘knave’, ‘rascal’, ‘palterer’, or ‘jackanapes’ were called before episcopal courts or the court of High Commission.⁶⁰ Their words disparaged and demeaned the holy ministry, violated the norms of neighbourliness, and undercut the deferential and reverential conventions on which English religious culture was based. The speakers transgressed against decency and charity, and bruised the honour of a sensitive professional caste. Faced with an outspoken papist in Lancashire in 1618, Archbishop Abbot judged it ‘fit’ to have him ‘scoured… that other of his sort may learn by his example to bridle their tongues, and not to raise slanders at their pleasure’.⁶¹ When the Dorset tailor Walter Bayly spoke rudely of Silas Bushell, the rector of Bridport, in 1640, saying that he was ‘a base knave, a dangerous knave, a base rogue, a dangerous rogue, and sought the blood of honest people’, Bushell reported the matter not to his bishop but to the secular magistrates, who ordered Bayly to appear at the next assizes.⁶²

Scandalum Magnatum

An especially transgressive form of abusive speech was when someone spoke scandalously of his social superiors. Traditional English society treasured the distinctions of rank and status, and expected everyone to know their place. With ‘kings on their thrones’ ruling subjects, ‘nobles in their houses’ ordering servants, ‘magistrates on seats of justice’ punishing offenders, and ‘private men in their families’ governing households, the entire social order was constructed as a chain of authority and deference.⁶³ It was natural and proper, within this frame of reference, that a few should ‘bear rule’ while the rest were better ‘fitted for subjection’. The common people had ‘meaner spirits’ and ‘shallower judgement’, explained one theorist of social hierarchy, and should be ‘content in the places wherein God hath set them’.⁶⁴ Inferiors owed ‘suit, service and homage to their superiors’, preached Thomas Hurste in 1637. It was God who decreed ‘that some should ride on horse-back while others walk on foot’, God who justified ‘the just power of one man over another’.⁶⁵ It was, therefore, an offence before God, and damaging to the state, to use defamatory or slanderous language against gentlemen or aristocrats. It was socially disruptive, and dangerous for all concerned, when a commoner spoke ill of a lord.

The Statute of Gloucester of 1378 criminalized the speaking of slander, ‘false news, and of horrible and false lies’ against the nobles and great officers of the realm. Repeated in 1388, and still applicable throughout the early modern era, the law set forth remedies against scandalous ‘debates and discords’ that exposed the kingdom to ‘subversion and destruction’. It was scandalum magnatum to speak disgracefully against men of honour, including the ‘prelates, dukes, earls, barons and other nobles and great men… and also of the Chancellor, Treasurer, Clerk of the Privy Seal, Steward of the king’s house, Justices… and of other great officers of the realm’. The law provided a powerful weapon for aristocrats who believed themselves scandalized by social inferiors.⁶⁶

Scandalous words could be anything that caused offence, no matter whether true or false. Spoken against powerful individuals, against a peer, a judge, or a councillor of the crown, they constituted scandalum magnatum. Two Dutchmen were gaoled at Colchester in 1577 for speaking ‘lewd words of the Earl of Oxford’. They were released when they said they were sorry, ‘that they mistook him for the Earl of Westmorland’, though this was not the most persuasive excuse.⁶⁷

An altercation in 1578 between a Norfolk vicar and a peer of the realm resulted in another action de scandalis magnatum. The law reports of Sir Edward Coke reconstruct some of the offending dialogue. In the course of an argument about preaching and the Book of Common Prayer, Lord Henry Cromwell told the vicar, ‘thou art a false varlet, and I like not of thee’. The cleric Edmund Denny replied rather boldly, ‘it is no marvel that you like not of me, for you like of these that maintain sedition against the queen’s proceedings’. This was enough to bring suit in the court of King’s Bench, and the judges found for Lord Cromwell under the law of Richard II.⁶⁸

It was scandalum magnatum when the Elizabethan William Barnard impugned the honour of Lord Justice Dyer by claiming that his lordship practised sorcery and was familiar with spirits. Stephen Bell committed the like offence when he spread scandal about Lord Abergavenny. Reports of these cases record the range of punishment, from fines and imprisonment to standing in the pillory, having one’s ears cropped, to being made to ride backwards on a horse.⁶⁹

If it was scandalum magnatum to impugn the honour of a nobleman, it was sedition to speak words that undermined the authority of the crown. Thomas Stephens alias Hawkes of Marlborough managed both in January 1580 when he uttered ‘lewd, unreverent and seditious speeches against the duke of Anjou, brother to the French king’. Anjou, of course, was the queen’s suitor, so her highness could not ‘in honour’ allow the words to go unpunished. But the punishment in this case was light, and Stephens was let go with a whipping.⁷⁰ It contrasted with the judicial savagery employed the year before against John Stubbs, whose libellous tract against the royal marriage led to the lopping of his right hand.⁷¹ The incident suggests that writing was more dangerous than mere speaking, and print of more consequence than script, but the more lenient response in 1580 may also reflect an evolution of the political and diplomatic environment.

A dispute between Somerset gentlemen in 1624 sharpened when one of them spoke ‘scornfully and scandalously’ against his higher-ranked neighbour. John Boyes ‘in a very peremptory … and mocking manner… spoke disgracefully’ of Sir Robert Phelips, calling him ‘a fool’, and telling the company, ‘God’s blood, I am as great a man as he’. An intermediary, Henry Wescombe, asked Boyes ‘to forbear such language’, but observed that ‘nevertheless he doth at all times continue the same or worse whenever they meet’. These were defamatory words, likely to cause a breach of the peace, which could well have led to proceedings in Star Chamber.⁷² In 1634 Star Chamber resolved a dispute between Lord Morley and Sir George Tibold, in which the baron said to the knight, ‘what a proud rascal is this? I am no companion for such a base fellow, such a dunghill rogue as you are … Go out of the house, thou base rascal, I will cut thy throat,’ and then punched him on the breast. The verbal offence was aggravated by physical violence, and made worse by taking place at court, ‘nigh to the chair of state in that room where their majesties were’. Though Morley confessed that ‘it was done in passion’, and craved the court’s mercy, his outburst cost him a fine of ten thousand pounds.⁷³

A few cases of outrageous speech came before the high court of parliament, especially if they encroached on the honour of its members. The records of the House of Lords occasionally permit us to eavesdrop on conversations of this sort. In May 1628 a band of soldiers drinking at the Lion tavern at Banbury, Oxfordshire, fell into argument with local civilians. One of them, Ancient Rynd (the standard-bearer), armed with a bill he had taken from a watchman, threatened other drinkers and told them ‘they were base dogs’. The altercation might have been quickly forgotten, and would not have entered the historical record, had not Rynd accused the Banbury men of complaining to parliament, ‘and if it had not been for the Lord Say, that puritanical base dog, you had not sped so well, but for him he cared not a fart’. Rynd went on to swear ‘God damn him’, threatened ‘he would send them to heaven or hell before their times’, and used ‘other great presumptuous words’ that are not recorded. By including Lord Say in his rant, the soldier had committed scandalum magnatum. Neighbours who had been menaced by the soldiers told their story to the mayor and justices of Banbury, who sensed its political sensitivity and forwarded a report to Westminster. It was one thing to insult an Oxfordshire haberdasher, quite another to spread aspersions against a noble in the House of Lords.⁷⁴

A Buckinghamshire correspondent of Archbishop Laud complained in 1636 that the Londoner Isaac Pennington (later Lord Mayor and regicide) had committed scandalum magnatum by blaming the archbishop for the increase of popery and arminianism. Pennington had spoken in the parish of Chalfont St Peter, a place ‘where government is so slackly looked to, men of some little fortunes are persuaded they may say and do anything against government or governors, whether ecclesiastic or laic, without control’. In this case there would be no prosecution, but Pennington became subject to increased scrutiny.⁷⁵

Another venue for prosecuting socially corrosive language was the High Court of Chivalry. Medieval in origin, the court was reformed by the Earl Marshal in the 1620s and formally reconstituted in 1634. Here an aristocrat who had been insulted by a commoner could vindicate his honour. Armigerous gentlemen also used this court against verbal affronts to their name. If one nobleman insulted another, it might lead to a challenge at arms, but no man of breeding would stoop to a duel with an inferior. They might, however, resort to the chivalry court, until its suspension at the end of 1640.⁷⁶

In January 1640 a meeting to set Ship Money at the Red Lion inn, Fareham, Hampshire, descended into shouting and shoving as rival gentlemen hurled insults at each other. Each ‘had drunk very much wine and beer’ and spoke ‘in a violent and angry manner’. Robert Rigges apparently berated Thomas Badd as ‘a base fellow and the son of a cobbler, and no gentleman’, to which Badd responded by calling Rigges a ‘rogue, rascal, no gentleman and the son of a brewer’. These were ‘vilifying words… by way of disgrace’, in disparagement of the other’s breeding. Each laid claim to several generations of gentility, and each man claimed to be performing the king’s service, Badd as the captain of a trained band and Rigges as a Ship Money commissioner. Each brought suit in the High Court of Chivalry for scandalous words provocative of a duel. While this case was proceeding Rigges brought another bill of indictment against Badd at the Hampshire summer assizes, for speaking scandalous words against the king. The matter lay unresolved when the High Court of Chivalry was suspended in December 1640.⁷⁷

A flood of actions for scandalum magnatum in the reign of Charles I led to crippling awards of damages against defendants. Anyone foolish enough to call a noble a ‘paltry lord’ or ‘base fellow’ risked an appearance before the courts. The law survived the revolution, and was exploited vindictively and for profit in the reign of Charles II. The Earl of Pembroke prevailed in 1672 against a commoner who called him ‘a pitiful fellow’ of ill reputation. Lord Salisbury won judgment in 1677 against another who invited his lordship to kiss his arse, saying, ‘I care not a turd for him, he keeps none but a company of rogues about him’. The Earl of Shaftesbury famously brought an action of scandalum magnatum against a Londoner who called him a traitor. Charles II’s brother the Duke of York used the same device against political enemies who blamed him for the fire of London and called him a ‘papist dog’. Between 1682 and 1684 the duke launched at least ten cases of scandalum magnatum.⁷⁸ The rash of legal actions, with huge awards for damages, led to calls in parliament that the noble privilege be abolished. ‘Commoners have had £20,000 verdicts against them; and a peer thinks himself dishonoured unless the jury gives what he demands,’ complained Sir William Williams in March 1689. A peer might ‘call me rogue and rascal’, but if a commoner should say ‘he cares for a peer no more than a dog’, his lordship was likely to prevail.⁷⁹ Cases of scandalum magnatum became rarer in the eighteenth century, but the law that permitted them was repealed only in 1887.⁸⁰

Disgraceful Libels

Libels, strictly, were not so much sins of the tongue as sins of the pen. Derived from the Latin libellus (a little book), a libel was a saying or writing, or some other form of expression, directed against someone, usually someone powerful, that offered scandal or disgrace to its intended victim. A libel against a great man could be scandalum magnatum, wrote William Vaughan in 1630, for ‘libelling… despoils a man of his fame’.⁸¹

Though most libels were in scriptis, in the form of a handwritten epigram, statement, or verse, a libel could also be sine scriptis, by means of a gesture, image, or symbol. ‘Speaking’ could sometimes be voiceless, through a variety of insulting theatrics. Libelling could also be done ‘by scandalous words, scoffs, jests, taunts, or songs’, without pen ever touching paper.⁸² A West Country man, Thomas Case, was fined in 1639 ‘for contriving a libel against John Blundell by sending him a lamb’s skin with sheep’s horns and cuckolds in it’.⁸³ Other libels were chanted aloud and spread by word of mouth. The later deployment of calves’ heads (in posthumous derision of Charles I) or turnips and cuckold horns (in mockery of George I) had similar libellous effect.⁸⁴

Libels that were ‘destructive of all government’ or ‘dangerous to the peace of this kingdom’ might be labelled ‘seditious’.⁸⁵ Any libel that offered ‘dishonourable interpretations of her majesty’s godly actions and purposes’ was ‘villainous, treasonable, and seditious’, according to an Elizabethan proclamation.⁸⁶ Their effect, said Lord Chief Justice Popham, was ‘to scandalize her majesty’ and ‘to set sedition betwixt the prince and the subjects, which is the kindling of all rebellions’.⁸⁷ Lord Keeper Egerton urged magistrates in 1599 ‘to search and root out such traitorous vipers’ who railed or libelled against the queen or her government. ‘I call them traitors’, he continued, ‘because the ancient laws of England account them so, for mouere seditionem regii is originally high treason, howsoever the statute 25 Edward III being accommodate to that time, hath dulced and qualified it.’⁸⁸ Lord Treasurer Sackville was even more outraged by the flood of ‘scandalous and seditious libels’ against her majesty’s late proceedings in Ireland. ‘These viperous and secret libellers’, he declared, ‘do much more in my opinion deserve death than those which commit open rebellion against the state.’ Declared rebels, he argued, were easily suppressed, whereas against hidden libellers ‘there is no resistance’.⁸⁹ Every libel was a ‘heinous offence’, declared Star Chamber judges in 1608, but libelling the monarch or the state could verge on treason.⁹⁰

A particular problem with libels was that people were inclined to believe them; official attempts to suppress libels only added to their credibility. ‘These malicious pamphlets are thought to be the flying sparks of truth, forcibly kept down and choked by those which are possessed of the state, inasmuch as they carry with them a presence and countenance of liberty of speech,’ noted a late Elizabethan councillor. The only remedy seemed to be to persuade people to give libels less attention: ‘answer not a fool according to his folly lest thou also become like him.’ The same author declared it ‘a corrupt and perverse practice of evil subjects to sow abroad libels and invectives of purpose to deface their governors’, and warned that ‘this pestilent infection’ served ‘to discourage, divide, and discredit’ public officials and ‘to put their country in disquiet and tumult’.⁹¹ It did not matter in law if the substance of the libel was true, or well deserved. A libel was damaging because it was injurious, provoked disorder, or was liable to cause a breach of the peace. Even entering a libel into court in the course of prosecution risked disorder; as a Star Chamber judge noted in 1634, ‘some have been punished in this court for laughing when they have heard a libel read’.⁹²

Notwithstanding these strictures, the spreading of libels grew to near-epidemic proportions in Elizabethan and Jacobean England. They were found nailed to posts and crosses, on windowsills and tavern tables, or scattered in the street. Townsmen and villagers made extempore rhymed verses to spread scurrilous and insulting tales about their neighbours and betters. These libels often originated in alehouses, fuelled by alcohol and boisterous conversation, when a literate member of the company was pressed to set the words down in writing. Recent work on news culture and the origins of the ‘public sphere’ reveals the contribution of libels to the diversity and vitality of early modern popular opinion.⁹³

Two Somerset gentlemen, Hugh Smith and John Coles, were called to account in May 1575 ‘for the making, rehearsing or publishing of certain slanderous rhymes made against Sir John Young, knight, a thing of very evil example and not to be winked at’.⁹⁴ In 1601 Hugh Barker, the barber of Chelmsford, Essex, asked the schoolmaster Thomas Chitham to ‘pen a few verses… upon a pretty jest I shall tell you’. Composed with ‘lascivious terms and undecent speeches’, the illiterate Barker’s libel was ‘of one Clement Pope, a glover of Chelmsford, and one Whale’s wife’, who had apparently committed adultery together. Barker’s ‘lascivious, villainous and beastly rhymes’ were soon winging their way through the town, in both oral and textual form.⁹⁵

A bawdy libel against the godly mayor of Nottingham, ‘better to be sung than said, to the tune of Bonny Nell’, enjoyed brief notoriety in 1616. Its offence, claimed Jacobean authorities, was ‘bringing the professors of true religion and religion itself into contempt and dislike, and striking up debate and dissension in the said town’. Directed primarily at local individuals, the libel was ‘seditious’, claimed Attorney General Yelverton, because it undermined established authority and tended to raise tumult and sedition.⁹⁶ Another ‘false and scandalous libel in metre or verse… set to the tune of Tom of Bedlam’, mocked the sexual couplings of ‘the purer sort’ at Rye, Sussex, in 1632.⁹⁷

In part a response to local news, the libel itself entered the regional news stream to be remarked upon as well as repeated. Discourse engendered discourse, to be further stimulated if the victim or the authorities brought legal action.

Notorious libels in Charles I’s reign targeted the Duke of Buckingham. Libellous songs against the over-mighty duke led the Star Chamber judges to recommend exemplary punishment for any who ‘nourish dissention and jealousies between the king and his subjects’. Three musicians arrested at Staines, Middlesex, in 1627 for singing a libellous song were each fined five hundred pounds. But, because ‘it was not expected that being poor people they could pay any part of it, and because corporal punishment was more fit for them, it was agreed they should be whipped and pilloried’ at Cheapside in the centre of London, at Ware on the great north road, and at Staines on the road to the west. Noting that the offensive libel had the chorus ‘the clean contrary way’, Justice Richardson added the twist that the offenders should be ‘carried upon horses from Westminster to Cheapside the clean contrary way, that is with their faces to the horses’ tails’.⁹⁸

In June 1628 a famous handwritten challenge appeared on a post in Coleman Street, London: ‘Who rules the kingdom? The king. Who rules the king? The duke. Who rules the duke? The devil.’ The libellers warned that ‘if things be not shortly reformed, they will work a reformation themselves. At the sight whereof, they say his majesty was much displeased.’⁹⁹ After Buckingham’s death, with the principal target for public libels departed, determined scribblers could direct their attention to the crown. ‘Oh king, or rather no king… thou hast lost the hearts of thy subjects,’ began a handwritten diatribe of 1629.¹⁰⁰ Another libel ‘abusive of the state’ was hung on Cheapside Cross in 1635.¹⁰¹ Libels concerning the Scots were cast abroad in the king’s privy lodgings and gardens in 1639.¹⁰² More cascades of derisory libels accompanied the crisis of the 1640s, as an underground scribal culture coexisted with the radically expanded press. Moving from individuals to public causes, libels satirized the Puritans, the bishops, the parliament, and the cavaliers.¹⁰³

The words of libels often survive in the records of the courts where they were prosecuted. Some libels were so interesting, or so scandalous, that they were shared among members of the elite. Reports of them arrived in gentle correspondence, ‘to entertain you’, or ‘to make you a little merry withal’, and some were transcribed into commonplace books.¹⁰⁴ The Suffolk clergyman John Rous remarked that ‘light scoffing wits… can rhyme upon any the most vulgar surmises’, and rhymed himself in his notebook in 1640: ‘I hate these following railing rhymes | Yet keep them for precedent of the times.’¹⁰⁵ Fortunately for the historian, not everyone followed the advice of the Countess of Lindsey, who sent the latest libels to Lord Montague in March 1642, ‘which when you have read I pray commit to the fire’.¹⁰⁶

Rumour and False News

When Rumour enters, ‘painted full of tongues’ to begin Shakespeare’s 2 Henry IV, he calls on the audience to ‘Open your ears, for which of you will stop | The vent of hearing when loud Rumour speaks?… Upon my tongues continual slanders ride j… Stuffing the ears of men with false reports.’ Rumour’s eager audience embraced the people of England, ‘the blunt monster with uncounted heads | The still discordant wavering multitude’. The voice adopted here was of the scoundrel, but it understood the unquenchable appetite for information. The news in this case was of noble rebellion and royal battle, noised abroad though not necessarily trustworthy.¹⁰⁷

The spreading of ‘false rumours’ or ‘vain rumours and bruits’ was another of the sins of the tongue. Because of its potential for sedition, the spreading of rumour was subject to law. Tales about private individuals were relatively harmless, but when rumours touched majesty or policy the state became actively concerned.

Edward I’s Statute of Westminster of 1275 criminalized ‘devisors of tales’ who caused conflict between the king and his subjects. It became an offence to ‘tell or publish any false news or tales, whereby discord or occasion of discord or slander may grow between the king and his people’. Anyone who spread such tales, or reported such rumours, was liable to be imprisoned until ‘the first author of the tale’ was brought into court.¹⁰⁸ This was powerful legislation, which later authorities could cite to show that ‘slander spoken of the king is punishable under the Statute of Westminster’.¹⁰⁹

The law was sharpened in the course of Henry VIII’s reformation, so that certain rumours touching the king could be treason.¹¹⁰ Other Tudor statutes criminalized ‘seditious words and rumours’ against Philip and Mary,¹¹¹ and ‘false, seditious or slanderous news, rumours, sayings or tales’ affecting Queen Elizabeth. Short of the capital crime of treason, offenders faced the pillory, disfigurement, and prison for their misdemeanours.¹¹²

The rumours that spread in the first decade of the reformation—that parish churches would be pulled down and their chalices taken, that the kingdom was about to be invaded, and that Henry VIII and his family were dead—formed part of a contested popular political culture. Similar rumours spread in every subsequent reign: that King Edward was still alive, that Elizabeth was bearing bastards, that King Charles had accepted the popish mass, that a foreign invasion threatened, or that the current ruler had died. Some people did not just spread these rumours but commented on them, voicing opinions that could be construed as seditious: that such a monarch was unfit to govern, that a foreign force would be welcomed, or that the kingdom would be better if such a ruler was dead.¹¹³ The tongue indeed was a troublesome member, and speech a medium of peril.