Category Archives: Insults

1862: Vermont captain invites colonel to kiss his “touch-hole”

William Cronan was born in Burlington, Vermont in 1838. At the age of 22 he enlisted in the Union Army as a lieutenant and quickly rose to the rank of captain. By early 1862 he was a company commander in the 7th Vermont Infantry. Cronan’s regiment was deployed to Louisiana and saw action in the Battle of Baton Rouge (August 1862). Cronan had been a good organiser but combat seemed to bring out the worst in him. He was sent for court martial for having quarrelled with superior officers, saying of one:

“The colonel can kiss my royal majestic brown military touch-hole.”

Captain Cronan was formally reprimanded but continued to serve. He later returned home to be honorably discharged. According to an obituary in Vermont, he died in August 1910.

Source: General Court Martial Orders, 1862, f.83. Content on this page is © Alpha History 2019-23. Content may not be republished without our express permission. For more information please refer to our Terms of Use or contact Alpha History.

1911: Public schools no place for “the sons of Pork Butchers”

In 1907, the British parliament passed the Education (Administrative Provisions) Act, a significant piece of educational reform. One of the provisions of this act was to facilitate full and partly-funded scholarships so that talented working-class boys could attend prestigious but expensive private schools.

Two beneficiaries of these scholarships were Eric Blair, later George Orwell, and the Trinidadian historian and cricket writer C. L. R. James. But the state-funded admission of working-class boys to elitist public schools did not please everyone, and for years there was considerable criticism and debate.

Two examples appeared in The Guardian in March 1911, one from a writer claiming to be a public school headmaster, the other a public school student:

“The real difficulty is not the social or pecuniary inferiority of the elementary boy but his enormous moral inferiority. Most of the other boys that come to us [at public schools] have a very definite idea that certain actions and thoughts are “caddish” or “bad form” or “blackguardly”… I have been dealing with a certain proportion of elementary boys for some years and I have failed to find any parallel idea of the word.”

‘Head Master’

“I wonder whether you have ever considered the matter from the side of a gentleman forced to come into daily contact with the innate vulgarity of the lower orders. Is it not more probable that the sons of gentlemen will be levelled down, rather than the sons of Pork Butchers levelled up, by continual daily contact? The lessons of the gutter are more easily learnt than the traditions of caste.

“The fact that by keeping particular secondary and Public Schools a reserve for a particular class keeps the higher walks of life, in the professions and public services, a preserve for the same class, is surely a great argument in its favour. The lower classes never were a governing class, and why should the master sit side by side with the servant?”

‘Public School Boy’

Source: The Guardian, March 29th 1911. Content on this page is © Alpha History 2019-23. Content may not be republished without our express permission. For more information please refer to our Terms of Use or contact Alpha History.

1590: Just another altercation between London neighbours

In the spring of 1590, Sicilia Thornton of Clerkenwell sued her neighbour, Edith Parsons, for “uttering the lewdest of slanders” . According to a witness, Joanna Gage, Parsons leaned out of her window and screamed a tirade of abuse at Thornton, who was standing in her own doorway.

Some of the words uttered, Gage said, were “past womanhood to name”, however she recalled hearing Parsons shout:

“Thou art a whore, an arrant whore, a bitch… yea, worse than a bitch, thou goes sorting up and down the town after knaves… and thou art such a hot-tailed whore that neither one nor two nor 10 nor 20 knaves will scarce serve thee.”

The court found in Parsons’ favour, however no penalty against Thornton is recorded.

Source: Depositions of London Consistory Court, May 21st 1590, 213. Content on this page is © Alpha History 2019-23. Content may not be republished without our express permission. For more information please refer to our Terms of Use or contact Alpha History.

1509: Machiavelli throws up over ugly prostitute

A pensive and perhaps regretful Machiavelli

In late 1509, the political philosopher Niccolo Machiavelli, future author of The Prince, had a disturbing sexual encounter with a prostitute in Lombardy. He later described this incident in a letter to his good friend Luigi Guicciardini.

According to Machiavelli, he was “very horny without [his] wife” and was lured into the home of a washerwoman. Once inside she offered him the services of a woman with “a towel over her head and face”:

“I was now completely terrified, however since I was alone with her in the dark, I gave her a good hump. Even though I found her thighs flabby, her genitals greasy and her breath stinking a bit, my lust was so desperate that I went ahead and gave it to her anyway.”

When their liaison was over, Machiavelli managed to find a lamp and was able to shine a light on the woman:

“My God, she was so ugly that I almost dropped dead… a tuft of hair, half white and half black, the top of her head was bald which allowed you to see several lice taking a stroll… Her eyebrows were full of nits; one eye looked down and the other up. Her tear ducts were full of mucus… her nose was twisted into a peculiar shape, the nostrils were full of snot and one of them was half missing. Her mouth looked like Lorenzo de Medici’s, twisted on one side and drooling since she had no teeth to keep the saliva in her mouth. Her lip was covered with a thin but rather long moustache…”

When the woman spoke to him, Machiavelli was struck by her “stinking breath” and:

“…heaved so much that I vomited all over her.”

Letter from Machiavelli to Guicciardini, December 9th 1509. Content on this page is © Alpha History 2019-23. Content may not be republished without our express permission. For more information please refer to our Terms of Use or contact Alpha History.

1627: London woman accused of privy part boasting

In May 1627, two London women, Mary Peters and Elizabeth Welsh, accused each other of defamation in the city’s Consistory Court. Peters and her husband John, a clerk employed at the Tower of London, were tenants in Welsh’s house, near The Strand.

According to witnesses, both women had slandered each other with terms suggesting infidelity and prostitution. Another lodger testified that Peters had called Welsh:

“..a bawd, pocky bawd, toothless bawd, strumpet… [and] impudent whore.”

Welsh responded by accusing Peters of debauchery while under her roof. Welsh testified that her maid, Elizabeth Hobcock, told her of an exchange between Peters and the acclaimed poet Michael Drayton. According to Hobock’s report to Welsh, Peters:

“..did hold up her clothes unto her navel before Mr Michael Drayton… she clapped her hand on her privy part and said it was a sound and a good one, and that the said Mr Drayton did then also lay his hand upon it and stroke it and said that it was a good one.”

The claim was dismissed when Drayton himself took the stand and denied the incident ever occurred.

Source: London Consistory Court archives, fol.2r-3v, 11r-22r. Content on this page is © Alpha History 2019-23. Content may not be republished without our express permission. For more information please refer to our Terms of Use or contact Alpha History.

1913: Obscene war songs from the Ivory Coast

Maurice Delafosse was a French anthropologist and researcher who spent several years living and working on the west coast of Africa. Delafosse specialised in native languages and other cultural and behavioural aspects of tribal groups.

Writing in the first decade of the 1900s, Delafosse described how native Africans in what is now the Ivory Coast responded to threats or hostility, in this instance from the Okou:

“The women would assemble and, with their back to the enemy, make violent and exaggerated thrusts of the buttocks in the direction of the hostile party, while shouting “My arse for Okou!”

According to Delafosse, the menfolk would resort to a time-honoured tradition: the obscene song. He recorded some of the lyrics used:

“Okou is our enemy, cut off his head!”
“Okou is the excrement out of my backside!”
“Okou enjoys the sexual company of dogs!”
“The genitals of Okou are rotten and smell of feces!”

Source: Maurice Delafosse, Revue d’Ethnographie et de Sociologie, No. 4, 1913. Content on this page is © Alpha History 2019-23. Content may not be republished without our express permission. For more information please refer to our Terms of Use or contact Alpha History.

1755: Connecticut town sentences a letter to 40 lashes

In late 1755 the Connecticut Gazette reported a minor scandal: the circulation of a “false and scurrilous” letter in the colony. The author of this offensive missive was Edward Cole, an officer in the Rhode Island militia, who was described elsewhere as “a fellow of no reputation”. Much of the vitriol in Edward Cole’s letter was aimed at Connecticut-born Major-General Phineas Lyman, in particular Lyman’s conduct during the Battle of Lake George. Cole’s attack on local hero Lyman caused such a ruckus in Milford, Connecticut that the town elders there resolved to take stern action:

“…it was thought proper that [the letter] should be publicly whipped, as tending to beget ill will… Accordingly it was here at 4 o’clock this afternoon, after proper notice by beat of drum, [the letter was] publicly whipped… 40 stripes save one, by the common whipper, and then burnt.”

Source: Connecticut Gazette, November 29th 1755. Content on this page is © Alpha History 2019-23. Content may not be republished without our express permission. For more information please refer to our Terms of Use or contact Alpha History.

1757: Farmer whipped, fined for venting his frustration with women

In 1757 Samuel Rhodes, a yeoman farmer from Stoughton, Massachusetts, was charged with “wilfully and maliciously” uttering “false and blasphemous words”. According to witnesses Rhodes was overheard saying to another person:

“God was a damned fool for ever making a woman.”

The court found Rhodes guilty and sentenced him to be:

“…set upon the gallows with a rope about his neck for the space of one hour; that he be publicly whipped twenty-five stripes; and that he become bound by way of recognisance in the sum of twenty pounds… for the term of twelve months and that he pay [the] costs of prosecution.”

Source: Minutes of the Superior Court of Judicature of Massachusetts Bay, Suffolk County, November 1757. Content on this page is © Alpha History 2019-23. Content may not be republished without our express permission. For more information please refer to our Terms of Use or contact Alpha History.

1662: Maryland magistrate dumped for genital slur

Thomas Baker arrived in the colony of Maryland as an indentured servant, sometime in the mid-1650s. In 1661 the Maryland governor, Philip Calvert, appointed Baker as magistrate of Charles County. This generated a firestorm of protest. There were questions about Baker’s suitability: he was of very humble origins, questionable sobriety and very coarse behaviour. Just how coarse became a matter of public record in 1662, during a series of defamation hearings. Witnesses accused Baker of slandering several men and women, the latter with sexual slurs. He was alleged to have described Mrs Joan Nevill:

“…in so gross a manner that if [the things Baker said were] true… she would not be a creature modest enough to keep the brutals of the forest company.”

Two other witnesses, Richard Roe and William Robisson, testified that Baker had said that:

“…[Francis] Pope’s wife’s c–t was like a shot bag, and Miss Alice Hatch’s c—t would make sauce enough for all the dogs in the town.”

No official sanction or decision against Baker was recorded, however he never again sat as a magistrate, suggesting that the governor quietly ordered Baker’s removal.

Source: Records of Charles County, Maryland, 1658 and 1662. Content on this page is © Alpha History 2019-23. Content may not be republished without our express permission. For more information please refer to our Terms of Use or contact Alpha History.

1848: Abraham Lincoln represents accused pig fornicator

In 1848 William Torrance of Illinois, represented by future US president Abraham Lincoln, filed a defamation suit against Newton Galloway. According to Lincoln’s submission, Galloway had uttered “false, scandalous, malicious and defamatory words” to Aaron Vandeveer and “diverse good and worthy citizens”. Among Galloway’s remarks were claims that Torrance had:

“…caught my old sow and f–ked her as long as he could…”

And:

“…knocked up my old sow and it is now bellying down [heavily pregnant] and will soon have some young bills.”

Torrance and Lincoln demanded $1,000 in damages, however, the case was thrown out and Torrance was ordered to pay costs.

Source: Torrance v. Galloway, 1848, Abraham Lincoln Legal Papers. Content on this page is © Alpha History 2019-23. Content may not be republished without our express permission. For more information please refer to our Terms of Use or contact Alpha History.