Nobody is quite sure what the origins of the F-word are – with the belief that it meant to “fornicate under command of the king” now widely ignored. But we have, at long last, finally found the earliest known usage of it, and it comes from a 14th-century court case.
Dr Paul Booth, a professor of English history at Keele University, uncovered the F-word. On December 8th, 1310, a man by the impressive name of Roger Fuckebythenavele made an appearance in some county court plea rolls, where his identity was registered by a clerk.
If the name looks odd, it’s probably because it isn’t real, Dr Booth says. It is more likely to be part of a legal process to outlaw an act committed by the likely inexperienced young Roger. You can see an image of the text and its complicated-looking writing style below:
[Geek]
In an interview with the history website the Medievalists, Dr Booth says that the surname recorded in the document “is presumably a nickname,” suggesting one or two meanings; Roger’s surname could either “mean an actual attempt at copulation by an inexperienced youth, later reported by a rejected girlfriend, or an equivalent of the word ‘dimwit’ i.e. a man who might think that that was the correct way to go about it.”
The earliest recorded use of the F-word prior to Booth’s 1310 discovery was in the 1475 poem Flen flyys. The poem contains the line “fvccant vvivys of heli,” which linguists say is a code-switching mix of English and Latin, translating as “... the f*** the wives of Ely.”
