Free Holy Sh*t: A Brief History of Swearing by Melissa Mohr Page B

peeping through the apparently sizable gap between the door frame and his front door, or Sara Bonivall and John Crosbie (also fornicators), who were seen through a hole in the wall that separated Crosbie’s house from his adjoining neighbor’s. In cases like these, it seems that early modern people in London might have even had less privacy than in the Middle Ages, when London itself was not as crowded with people looking for work, and when people remaining in the country could have sought out a bush more private than urban bedrooms. See Orlin, Locating Privacy , 152–55,

For more about the expurgation of oaths in Shakespeare, see Gary Taylor’s “‘Swounds Revisited,” in Shakespeare Reshaped, 1606–1623 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), 51–106. I have simplified what is actually a complicated situation.

For more about this great social transition, see T. C. W. Blanning, The Oxford History of Modern Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).

“are ugly, in form and in sound”: Ibid., 15.

* This was a popular motif. It also appears in a 1613 epigram by Henry Parrot:
Cacus constraind on suddaine to untrusse,
Turn’d up his podex in the open street
But hid his face and to them answerd thus
That passed by, and told him t’was unmeet,
Ther’s none (quoth Cacus ) by mine arse that knows me,
How beastly els soever they suppose me.
—Laquei ridiculosi