Note 279 — The Table. (continued 2)
Reading edition
(?) God's alms. Browne calls this a dunghill oath:—
"With that the Miller laughing brush'd his cloathes, Then swore by Cocke and other dung-hill oathes."
Britannias Pastorals, lib. i. p. 100 (ed. 1625).
It is very commonly found in the early dramatists, and long before the statute of James the First, By cock and similar phrases were used, in order to evade the charge of profaning the name of the Deity. It is of particularly frequent occurrence in Skelton's Magnyfycence:—
"Cr[afty] Con[veyance]. Cockes armes, thou shalt kepe the brewhouse boule.
Fol[ye]. But may I drynke thereof whylest that I stare?"
Magnyfycence (Skelton's Works, ed. Dyce, i. 268).
But this writer seems to have employed it rather fantastically than from any desire to soften the oath; for elsewhere in the same piece we find By God, Goddes fote, &c. The practice of swearing had grown to such a pitch in the time of Taylor the Water-Poet, that that writer says (Against Cursing and Swearing, Works, 1630, i. 50):—"If the penalty of twelve pence for every oath had been duly paid (as the statute hath in that case provided) I doe verily beleeve that all the coyned money in England would have been forfeited that way." Whitford, in his Werke for Housholders, first printed about 1528 (edit. 1533, sign. c. ii et seqq.), relates several remarkable judgments as having fallen, within his personal knowledge, on profane swearers, who were as plentiful and as reckless in the time of Henry VIII. as they were a century later.