Note 104 — Chapter II · LEARNED LADIES IN ENGLAND FROM 1650 TO 1760

On swearing note the following extract from a sixteenth-century writer: "There is no regyon nor countrie that doth use more swearynge than is used in Englande, for a chyld that scarse can speake, a boy, a gyrle, a wenche, now-a-days wyl swere as great othes as an old knave and an old drabbe.... As for swearers a man nede not to seke for thym, for in the Kynges courte and lordes courtes in cities, borowes and in townes, and in every house, in maner there is abbominable swerynge, and no man dothe go about to redresse it, but doth take swearyng as for no sinne, which is a damnable synne; and they the which doth use it, be possessed of the Devill, and no man can helpe them but God and the Kynge." (Hill, Georgiana: Women in English Life, vol. I, p. 116.)

See p. 317 for reprobation of "female swearers" in The Ladies' Calling (1671). Swift's Polite Conversation (1738) bears the same implication as to the manners of good society in the first quarter of the eighteenth century.