The simple answer is no. To the medieval mind, cunt was simply a descriptive word, a little bawdy perhaps as cunts tend to be, but certainly not offensive. The fact that cunt would make it into de Worde’s dictionary and medical texts shows how everyday the word was. John Hall’s sixteenth-century translation of Lanfranc of Milan’s medical text Chirurgia Parua Lanfranci is not cunt shy and describes ‘in wymmen neck of the bladder is schort, is made fast to the cunte’.{9} The earliest cunt citation in the Oxford English Dictionary dates to 1230, and is a London street in the red-light district of Southwark – the beautifully named ‘Gropecuntelane’.{10} It did exactly what it said on the tin: it was a lane for groping cunts. There were Gropecuntelanes (or variations of Grapcunt, Groppecuntelane, Gropcunt Lane) found throughout the cities of medieval Britain. Keith Briggs locates Gropecuntlanes in Oxford, York, Bristol, Northampton, Wells, Great Yarmouth, Norwich, Windsor, Stebbing, Reading, Shareshill, Grimsby, Newcastle and Banbury. Sadly, all of these streets have now been renamed, usually as ‘Grape Lane’ or ‘Grove Lane’.{11}
While Scottish folk may be calling their friends cunts, medieval people seem to have been calling their children cunts. Cunt actually turns up in a number of medieval surnames (though they are quite possibly aliases): Godwin Clawecunte (1066), Gunoka Cuntles (1219), John Fillecunt (1246) and Robert Clevecunt (1302) have all been recorded. And if the possibility of meeting Miss Gunoka Cuntles on Gropecuntelane was not an exciting enough prospect (and it should be), a Miss Bele Wydecunthe appears in a Norfolk Subsidy Roll of 1328.{12} While we are on the subject of cunt monikers, in his study of humorous names, Russell Ash found a whole family of Cunts living in England in the nineteenth century: Fanny Cunt (born 1839), also her son, Richard ‘Dick’ Cunt, and her daughters, Ella Cunt and Violet Cunt.{13}
Medieval literature is similarly awash with cunts. The Proverbs of Hendyng (c. 1325) contains this advice to young women: ‘Give your cunt cunningly and make (your) demands after the wedding’ (ʒeve þi cunte to cunni[n]g, and craue affetir wedding).{14} The fifteenth-century Welsh poet Gwerful Mechain advised fellow poets to celebrate the ‘curtain on a fine bright cunt’ that ‘flaps in a place of greeting’.{15} Medieval society was far more sexually liberated than we give them credit for, and one reason cunt wasn’t considered offensive is because sex wasn’t that offensive to them. It was certainly not a sexually liberated utopia, but neither were medieval people waddling about in chastity belts, as popular mythology would have us believe. Sex was a source of great humour, eroticism and absolutely central to married life; finding sex deeply offensive is something that came into its own during the early modern era.
Historically, the most heavily tabooed language has shifted from the blasphemous to bodily functions, and is now in a process of moving to race. Swear words that would get you into serious trouble in the Middle Ages were blasphemous ones. If you caught your soft areas in a zipper in the thirteenth century, you might cry out something like ‘God’s teeth’, ‘God’s wounds’ (Z’wounds) or ‘God’s eyes’. Cunt, by comparison, was a descriptive word and suitable for all occasions. It was not euphemistically twee, overly medicalised or humorously grotesque – cunt was cunt.
One medieval author who dropped the C-bomb with the precision of a military drone is Geoffrey Chaucer (1343–1400). The word that Chaucer uses in The Canterbury Tales and House of Fame is not ‘cunt’ but ‘queynte’. However, the reader is left in little doubt as to what a queynte is – the Wife of Bath is quite clear:
Chaucer’s most famous cunt joke is in ‘The Miller’s Tale’, where ‘queynte’ means both knowledge and cunt (remember the root to both cunning and cunt?):
The use of ‘quaint’ as a synonym for cunt is seen in a variety of other works. In his 1598 Italian/English dictionary, John Florio uses ‘quaint’ as a synonym for cunt and defines potta as ‘a cunt, a quaint’, and a pottuta as ‘that hath a cunt, cunted, quainted’.{18} The playful double meaning of ‘quaint’ turns up again in Andrew Marvell’s ‘To His Coy Mistress’:
It has also been suggested that William Shakespeare’s ‘acquaint’ in his Sonnet XX (1609) is a play on ‘quaint’ and ‘cunt’. And if any man knew the comedic power of a well-placed cunt it was Shakespeare. In Act III, Scene 2 of Hamlet, the eponymous hero asks Ophelia, ‘Lady, shall I lie in your lap?’ Ophelia replies, ‘No, my lord.’ Hamlet then asks her, ‘Do you think I meant country matters?’{20} When David Tennant played Hamlet, he paused on the first syllable to emphasis this: ‘Cunt-ry matters’. In Twelfth Night (Act II, Scene 5) Malvolio describes his employer’s handwriting: ‘There be her very Cs, her Us, and her Ts: and thus makes she her great Ps’ – making for a simultaneous pun on ‘cunt’ and ‘piss’.{21} The immortal bard’s status as a smut peddler has been discreetly swept under the cultural rug, but his work is full of innuendo and nob gags. In 1807, a shocked Thomas Bowdler edited out all the rude jokes so women and children could safely read it, and published The Family Shakespeare (which was completely cunt free). Among the many changes made in The Family Shakespeare, Ophelia doesn’t commit suicide in Hamlet, the character of Doll Tearsheet ( a sex worker) is entirely edited out of Henry IV, and in Romeo and Juliet, Mercutio’s saucy ‘the bawdy hand of the dial is now upon the prick of noon’ was altered to read ‘the hand of the dial is now upon the point of noon’.{22} This led to the addition of the word ‘bowdlerise’ to the English language, which means to remove passages of a text that are considered objectionable.