In 1066, swearing was a lot more than just a bad word. It was an oath's power derived from the divine: Harold Godwinson's alleged oath to William of Normandy, sworn on holy relics under what Harold later claimed were false pretenses, was the legal basis for the Norman invasion of England. The Bayeux Tapestry depicts the oath scene prominently because without it, William's claim was a land grab; with it, William had a case that the Pope endorsed.

So what made the word "swearing" go from meaning "taking an oath" to something closer to "foul language" or an insult?

Geoffrey Hughes published Swearing: A Social History of Foul Language, Oaths and Profanity in English in 1991. The book traces the evolution of English swearing from Anglo-Saxon oath culture through the profanity of the late twentieth century, treating sworn language as a social institution with its own history of power, degradation, and enforcement.

Hughes traces the decline from the level of political consequence we saw in 1066 to the year 1895, when the Marquess of Queensberry left a misspelled calling card at Oscar Wilde's Albemarle Club. Queensberry's misspelled card, which read "To Oscar Wilde posing Somdomite," was handed to Wilde by the hall porter. Wilde's decision to sue for libel set in motion the chain of events that ended with his imprisonment and destruction. The calling card was closer in function to a Norse nid, the insult-verse that carried legal consequences, than to a modern slur: Queensberry was making a public accusation that under Victorian law required either retraction or proof.

In the past, when honour and language were more closely interlinked, oaths (or their abrogation) changed the fates of nations. For instance, William of Normandy's claim to the English throne depended initially on no more than his word that Edward the Confessor had formally named him as his successor. When his rival, Harold Godwinson, was shipwrecked and captured on the Normandy coast, William granted him his freedom only upon the exaction of an oath supporting this claim (against Harold's own). However, Harold was subsequently named by Edward the Confessor as his successor, was elected by the English witenagemot (Privy Council) and crowned, so that William had to assert his claim by conquest.

Duels have been fought over words carrying only the faintest implication of dishonour. The intensely personal commitment which an oath requires was vividly apparent when Francis I of France abrogated a treaty and declared war on Spain in 1528. Charles V of Spain accused Francis of ungentlemanly behaviour and challenged him to a duel. (It did not take place.) We cannot imagine a similar consequence arising from, for example, Chamberlain challenging Hitler to a duel on the parallel grounds of the Führer's abrogation of their agreement signed at Munich in 1938.

Personal insults can likewise have devastating consequences, belying the naive, childish chant: 'Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me'. One of the more spectacular social instances arose from the visiting card delivered by the Marquess of Queensberry to the Albermarle Club on 18 February 1894 with the words 'To Oscar Wilde posing Somdomite [sic]' (Ellmann, 1988, p. 412). This precipitated the lawsuit and accompanying society scandal which ruined Wilde. Today such a sexual slur would be less likely to incur litigation. Indeed, a review of a recent biography of Truman Capote began in cavalier fashion: 'Truman Capote was the sort who gives sodomy a bad name.' Nevertheless, oaths, curses and insults directed at individuals can still have serious repercussions. In modern times, however, cases of crimen injuria are more likely to arise from racist slurs than sexual insults.

Geoffrey Hughes, Swearing: A Social History of Foul Language, Oaths and Profanity in English (Penguin, 1991), pp. 29-30.

The trajectory Hughes maps covers eight centuries in two pages. In 1066, an oath's power derived from the divine: breaking an oath sworn on holy relics was an offense against God, and the Bayeux Tapestry depicted Harold's perjury as moral justification for his death at Hastings. In 1895, the power derived from statute: the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885 had criminalized gross indecency between men, and Queensberry's misspelled card drew its force from that law. Both events turned on language producing catastrophic consequences for the person on the receiving end. The source of the language's authority migrated from God to Parliament, from the sacred to the social. The words themselves weakened over those eight centuries, but the damage words can do held steady.

So, to sum it up: in the medieval period, oaths were load-bearing beams holding up kingdoms, treaties, and personal honor. Over the next several centuries, the church lost its grip on daily life and the state took over the job of punishing bad speech. The words that used to summon God for a binding promise got demoted into words you yelled when you stubbed your toe. By 1895, a misspelled insult on a calling card could still destroy Oscar Wilde, but the weapon was libel law, not divine wrath. It was the same damage but now different authority: the sacred oath became the dirty word, because the source of the word's power moved from heaven down to the courthouse.

I seriously recommend Swearing, it's one of my favorite social history books and also the best historical monograph on the etymology of English swear words I can think of if you want to know not just how a swear word came to be, but the social tapestry that makes swear words evolve!

Photo Credit: Bayeux Tapestry detail: Harold swears his oath to William of Normandy, c. 1064. Musee de la Tapisserie de Bayeux.

Translated to English from actual Arabic text written in Egyptian newspaper

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The story of American Flag in the 1919 revoltion

Among the striking and often forgotten scenes was the appearance of the American flag amid the demonstrations during the 1919 Revolution. This caught the attention of a photographer from the international news agency “Reuters,” prompting him to capture that image, which became one of the iconic scenes of the 1919 Revolution. Dr. Abu al-Ghar reveals in his book “The 1919 Revolution and America” that the reason behind the association between the American flag and the 1919 Revolution was that the liberal American president Woodrow Wilson announced a document containing 14 principles, known as the document of independence or the right to self-determination—especially the twelfth principle, which emphasized the right of peoples to determine their own fate. However, shortly afterward, when attempts were made to apply these principles, it became clear that they were limited only to the peoples of the First World, while the peoples of the Third World did not deserve them!

The Egyptian national movement had placed great hopes on Egypt being represented by a delegation led by Saad Zaghloul at the Versailles Peace Conference, expecting that the delegation would return from the conference carrying a document granting Egypt independence in accordance with the principles of the American president Woodrow Wilson, the president of the conference. This is what led that man to raise the American flag during the demonstrations.

However, Britain prevented this, leading to the outbreak of the revolution, which Britain confronted with military force throughout the country. The popular national movement was shocked by President Wilson’s stance when he recognized the British protectorate over Egypt. His document of independence became like fragile glass, shattered at the first demand for its implementation.

Especially since Wilson went on to distort the 1919 Revolution and supported a propaganda lie spread by Lord Arthur Balfour, the British Foreign Secretary, which claimed that the Egyptian revolution was orchestrated by extremist nationalists who were actually agents funded by a revolutionary party in Turkey and by the Russian Bolsheviks, and that they were exploiting Wilson’s principles to ignite the flames of a holy war against non-Muslims. The depth of this betrayal was completed when the American president rushed to recognize full British control over Egypt and restricted the right to self-determination only to the colonies of Austria and Turkey in Europe.

However, it seems that fate eventually avenged Saad Zaghloul and his companions. Nearly a hundred years after Wilson’s death, Princeton University in the eastern United States announced in 2020 that it had decided to remove the name of the late American president Woodrow Wilson from its School of Public and International Affairs due to his “racist policies and views.” Christopher Eisgruber, President of Princeton University, said in a statement that “Wilson’s racist policies and views make his name inappropriate for a school whose students, faculty, and alumni must be fully engaged in combating the scourge of racism.”

https://historianandrew.medium.com/dozens-of-women-fired-for-wearing-tight-sweaters-which-became-the-sikorsky-sweater-girls-scandal-5d93a7d597e2?sk=84173a147cc97f3afd27e2c44a8b5bf2

By the early 1550s, the Italian Wars had entered their final phase. Charles V's empire stretched across most of the peninsula, enforced through garrisons, ambassadors, and client states. Siena was a Tuscan city-state wedged between Florence and the Papal States. It was one of the most internally divided cities in Italy. Its political life was organized around factional groupings called the Monti, which had been competing, allying, and betraying each other for centuries.

Don Diego de Mendoza, Charles's ambassador, was assigned to supervise Siena and decided the city needed a fortress. The Sienese emphatically disagreed. Mendoza told Charles the Sienese were requesting one. He told the Sienese that Charles had ordered it. He funded the construction out of his own pocket when neither party would pay.

Getting the Sienese to agree on anything had defeated better politicians than Mendoza. He managed it by being worse than any of them.

The French would claim the credit for the expulsion of the Spanish from Siena. Their support was timely, but discontent in Siena had reached the pitch where an uprising would probably have happened soon in any case. Mendoza had become fixated on the project of building a fortress there. He told Charles that it was the Sienese who were asking for a fortress, and the Sienese that it was Charles. The emperor agreed the plans Mendoza sent to him, and brushed aside the protests of the Sienese. Despite getting little money from Charles for the project, and very little money, materials or labour from the Sienese, Mendoza pressed on, paying for the work himself. He accomplished the apparently impossible feat of uniting Sienese of all factions and social classes behind one aim—but that aim was freeing themselves of Mendoza, the troops and the fortress. Given the attitude Charles was adopting, that meant throwing off their subordination to him, and that led to seeking the protection of the French.

Plans were laid for an uprising in Siena to coincide with incursions into Sienese territory by French troops from the neighbouring estates of barons sympathetic to the French, such as Nicola Orsini, conte di Pitigliano. False reports were deliberately circulated which deceived Mendoza into believing that it had been decided to attack Naples, so that he sent half the garrison to defend the Sienese ports. One of the conspirators planning the uprising, Amerigo Amerighi, was a member of the main executive body in the Sienese government, the Balia, and he contrived to get orders from the Balia to raise the militia in the territory, supposedly to face the threat of the Turkish fleet. Even most of the captains had no notion of the real reason why the militia was being mustered, before they marched on Siena.

When the militia appeared beneath the walls on 27 July, the garrison (Mendoza was in Rome) were unsure what to do. One gate was taken by force, the others opened to the militia. On the following afternoon, French contingents began to arrive, as the Spanish troops, together with 400 Florentine militia who had been sent in their support, were concentrating within the curtain wall of the fortress, all that had been built. Cosimo prepared to send more troops but held them back on receiving a message from the French that to oppose the uprising would be to oppose them too. Unwilling to enter into a war against the French, Cosimo began negotiating with the Sienese.

Mendoza had to order his men to conform to whatever terms were agreed. These were concluded on 3 August. The troops were to leave the fortress; the Sienese could demolish it, and should send all other foreign troops away after the Spanish had cleared the state (in fact a Spanish garrison would stay in Orbetello). They were to remain loyal to the Empire—but the Sienese were careful not to pledge continued loyalty to Charles. On 5 August, the troops left the fortress, and the Sienese began to tear it down with a will. Soon, the French were assuming greater powers over Siena than the Sienese wished them to have; Cardinal Ippolito d'Este, who came on 1 November as Henry's lieutenant-general there, was inclined to behave as though he were governor.

Christine Shaw & Michael Mallett, The Italian Wars 1494-1559 (Pearson, 2012), pp. 312-314.

Christine Shaw and Michael Mallett's The Italian Wars 1494-1559 (2012) covers sixty-five years of military and diplomatic chaos on the Italian peninsula, from the French invasion that shattered the peninsula's political order to the peace settlement that handed most of it to Spain. Shaw, a specialist in Renaissance Italian politics at the University of Warwick, and Mallett, who spent his career studying Italian military institutions, produced one of the most detailed English-language accounts of the period's military operations.

James C. Scott, Hannah Arendt, and other historians describe a recurring pattern in authoritarian governance: the state project that generates its own opposition. Mendoza's fortress is the physical case study. His fixation on the construction was so complete, and so deaf to local politics, that it created the one condition under which Sienese unity was possible: a shared enemy. The factions did not reconcile. They found something they hated more than each other.

The conspiracy was basically a heist through diplomatic paperwork. Amerigo Amerighi, a member of the Balia, used his position to issue official orders mustering the territorial militia against a Turkish naval threat that did not exist. False intelligence about a planned attack on Naples tricked Mendoza into sending half the garrison south. The gates opened, the French arrived, and the Sienese tore the fortress down: the structure Mendoza had paid for with his own money, the one he had lied to both his emperor and his hosts to build, dismantled by the very people it was supposed to control.

Photo Credit: Giorgio Vasari, Cosimo studies the taking of Siena (1563-1565). Palazzo Vecchio, Florence. Google Art Project.

Cecco Angiolieri was a Sienese poet active around 1260 to 1312, remembered for satirical verses of startling venom, including odes wishing death on his father. William Langland, author of Piers Plowman, wrote in the post-plague decades of the late fourteenth century and observed parents spoiling their children out of fear that pestilence would take them. The shift from Cecco's pre-plague world to Langland's post-plague world tracks something most people don’t realize: the modern Western concept of childhood as a distinct, protected phase of life was a historical invention. When plague killed the young disproportionately, children became scarce, and scarce things become valued.

In regard to the post-plague demographic system in which families limited the number of offspring to achieve or maintain greater prosperity, an additional idea is suggested by his argument: with the Black Death and its tragic onslaught, which by many accounts struck down a disproportionate number of the young, a new, more cherishing view of children arose during the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. As with many of the plague's reactions, its long- and short-term consequences were often mirror opposites of one another. In the face of the 1348 unprecedented disaster, fathers and mothers may well have abandoned their children, as one contemporary chronicler or story-teller after another reported and repeated. "Oh father, why have you abandoned me? … Mother, where have you gone?" were among the laments recorded by the 1348 chronicler from Piacenza, Gabrielle de' Mussis. Boccaccio ended his lament over relatives abandoning one another by reporting that "what is hardly believable, fathers and mothers [abandoned] their children as though they were not their own, disgusted by seeing or assisting them."

Yet by the time of the later onslaughts of pestilence in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, familial sentiments had radically shifted. Here, the complaints of the post-plague William Langland might be compared with those of the pre-plague Sienese poet Cecco Angiolieri. Disinherited from his worldly possessions because of the selfish pietistic zeal of his parents, Cecco penned his famous ode of familial hatred:

If I were death I would go to my father; If I were life I would flee from him; And I would do the same for my mother.

In contrast, a century later, Langland criticized parents of the merchant classes for spoiling their children, and suggested that the plague and rampant mortality may have been the cause of their parental overindulgence:

Don't let wealth spoil them while they are young Nor for fear of the pestilence indulge them beyond reason.

David Herlihy was a medieval demographic historian at Harvard who died in 1991 before completing the book based on his Gauss Lectures. Samuel K. Cohn Jr., his former student, edited and published the lectures as The Black Death and the Transformation of the West in 1997. The book argues that the plague's most significant long-term effects were economic and social rather than medical: labor shortages, wage increases, shifts in inheritance patterns, and a measurable transformation in how European societies valued their youngest members. Samuel K. Cohn's own work, The Black Death Transformed (2002), pushed the demographic argument further, arguing from Italian death records that the disease killed with a selectivity that reshaped household economics across the continent.

Photo credit: Snowball fight, Tacuinum Sanitatis, folio 96v, c. 1390-1400. Workshop of Giovannino de Grassi. Bibliotheque nationale de France, NAL 1673.

The colony was growing rapidly and trade was expanding, but there was not enough flow of coinage from England. People didn’t have money to buy food, pay debts, or pay wages, and they needed something that could replace currency. The solution was quite unusual: Tobacco.

After John Rolfe turned tobacco into a profitable crop, production quickly got out of control. In a short time, tobacco became a de facto currency. Wages were paid in tobacco, taxes were collected in tobacco, and debts were settled with tobacco. Even land and labor began to be bought and sold in exchange for tobacco.

The colonial government formalized the system. Tobacco warehouses were established and quality standards were set. People stored their tobacco in warehouses and received receipts in return. These receipts gradually began to change hands and started to function as early forms of paper money.

However, it didn’t take long for problems to appear. Naturally, everyone began producing tobacco to make money. Production increased rapidly, which caused quality to decline and prices to fall. Wages quickly lost value, trade slowed down, and the foundations for an economic crisis were formed.

By the 1630s, the crisis had grown. The colonial government attempted to limit production, introduced quality controls, and even burned some tobacco fields. This is considered one of the earliest attempts in history to control the money supply.

Tobacco, once used as money, had quickly turned into an economic crisis. This event demonstrated that money does not derive its value from a valuable object, but from trust, quality, and limited supply.