An English historian has found the word ‘fuck’ in a court case dating to the year 1310, providing what is now regarded as the earliest known use of the word with a sexual meaning. The unusual evidence comes from the name of a man who repeatedly failed to appear before a medieval court.
Historian Paul Booth of Keele University spotted the name ‘Roger Fuckebythenavele’ in the Chester County Court Plea Rolls from 1310–11. Roger was wanted by the authorities and was repeatedly summoned to appear in court, but could not be found. He was eventually declared an outlaw on September 28, 1311.
The records do not reveal what crime Roger was accused of committing. What makes him famous more than 700 years later is his extraordinary surname.
How did Roger get the name ‘Fuckebythenavele’? Booth believes it comes from ‘fuck through the navel’ or ‘fuck next to the navel’, with two possible explanations:
The first, and most injurious to Roger’s reputation, suggests that he is either a man who has tried to have sexual intercourse through his partner’s navel, rather than through the vagina in the usual way, or is so stupid that he thinks that this is the right way to copulate.
The second meaning could refer to an act of frottage, in which Roger rubbed his penis against his partner’s belly button, possibly in order to avoid conception, which would at least have exonerated him from the charges of naivety or idiocy. Although it is just possible that the name means ‘strike upon the belly’, I feel there can be no doubt that the word ‘fuck’ as employed in this name, written seven times with some minor differences in spelling, has the sexual connotation.
Booth’s discovery pushed the known history of the F-word back by well over a century. It has since been incorporated into the fourth edition of Jesse Sheidlower’s The F-Word, published by Oxford University Press in 2024. The new edition is a major revision of Sheidlower’s history of the word, incorporating more than 2,500 new quotations and over 150 examples that antedate previously known usages.
Were there earlier F-words?
Cheshire County Court Rolls – TNA CHES 29/23 – photo by Paul Booth
Roger Fuckebythenavele may provide the earliest convincing sexual use of the word, but similar-looking names appear in English records even earlier.
One example is John le Fucker, whose name appears in 1278. However, scholars have been reluctant to identify this as the F-word we know today. The name may instead be a variant of ‘Fulcher’, a personal name ultimately derived from Germanic elements associated with people and warriors.
Another intriguing case comes from 1287, when a man was recorded as ‘Ric Wyndfuk’ and ‘Ric Wyndfuck de Wodehous’ in documents connected with Sherwood Forest. The name may be related to the old bird name ‘windfucker’, later used for the kestrel, rather than referring to sexual activity.
Other medieval names containing similar elements have also been identified, but they present the same problem. Medieval forms resembling ‘fuck’ could potentially be connected with other meanings, including striking or beating. Finding the letters themselves, therefore, is not enough to establish that medieval people were using the word in its familiar sexual sense.
That is what makes Roger Fuckebythenavele so important. Booth argues that the complete nickname provides the context needed to understand what ‘fuck’ means.
Fockynggrove
Photograph of the place name Fockynggrove as it appears in Bristol’s 1373 charter, written in Latin. Detail reads ‘clausi vocati Fockynggroue’: close (field) called Fockynggrove. Document transcribed in: Norah Dermott Harding (ed.), Bristol Charters, 1155-1373 (Bristol Record Society publications, Vol. I, Bristol, 1930), p. 154. Photo courtesy Bristol Archives
There is another medieval example that may have a sexual meaning. In 1373, a Bristol charter recorded a field called ‘Fockynggrove’.
The place-name has attracted the attention of Richard Coates, a specialist in place-names, who has argued that the possibility that it literally meant ‘fucking grove’ needs to be taken seriously. Later records continued to preserve versions of the name, although it eventually appeared in the more respectable form ‘Pucking Grove’.
The original spelling can still be seen in the 1373 document preserved by Bristol Archives.
If the sexual interpretation is correct, Fockynggrove provides another example of the word being used in medieval England decades after Roger Fuckebythenavele, but about a century before its famous appearance in a medieval poem.
The F-word in a medieval poem
Before Booth’s discovery, the best-known early appearance of the F-word came from Flen flyys, a satirical poem written around 1475.
The poem attacks Carmelite friars and contains the line “fvccant vvivys of heli”, a Latin/English mixture meaning “…they fuck the wives of Ely.”
There is an additional twist: the crucial word was disguised in the manuscript. The writer encoded it rather than simply writing it openly, producing a form that could be deciphered as fvccant. This makes Flen flyys particularly important because, unlike Roger Fuckebythenavele or Fockynggrove, the sexual meaning is clear from the sentence in which the word appears.
Roger’s nickname nevertheless predates the poem by more than 150 years.
The history of the word itself is considerably older and more complicated than any single surviving written example. In The F-Word, Sheidlower explains that “fuck is a word of Germanic origin. It is related to words in several other Germanic languages, such as Dutch, German, and Swedish, that have sexual meanings as well as meaning such as ‘to strike’ or ‘to move back and forth’.”
The difficulty for historians is that spoken language rarely leaves evidence behind. A word could have circulated for generations before someone happened to write it in a document that survived into the present day. The earliest surviving example is therefore not necessarily the moment when the word entered English.
Roger Fuckebythenavele does, however, offer remarkable evidence that a recognisable form of one of the English language’s most notorious words was being used with an apparently sexual meaning by the early fourteenth century.
During his research into the Chester records, Booth also found other colourful medieval nicknames, including ‘Lirepynrel’, which he translates as ‘irresponsible penis’.
An English historian has found the word ‘fuck’ in a court case dating to the year 1310, providing what is now regarded as the earliest known use of the word with a sexual meaning. The unusual evidence comes from the name of a man who repeatedly failed to appear before a medieval court.
Historian Paul Booth of Keele University spotted the name ‘Roger Fuckebythenavele’ in the Chester County Court Plea Rolls from 1310–11. Roger was wanted by the authorities and was repeatedly summoned to appear in court, but could not be found. He was eventually declared an outlaw on September 28, 1311.
The records do not reveal what crime Roger was accused of committing. What makes him famous more than 700 years later is his extraordinary surname.
How did Roger get the name ‘Fuckebythenavele’? Booth believes it comes from ‘fuck through the navel’ or ‘fuck next to the navel’, with two possible explanations:
The first, and most injurious to Roger’s reputation, suggests that he is either a man who has tried to have sexual intercourse through his partner’s navel, rather than through the vagina in the usual way, or is so stupid that he thinks that this is the right way to copulate.
The second meaning could refer to an act of frottage, in which Roger rubbed his penis against his partner’s belly button, possibly in order to avoid conception, which would at least have exonerated him from the charges of naivety or idiocy. Although it is just possible that the name means ‘strike upon the belly’, I feel there can be no doubt that the word ‘fuck’ as employed in this name, written seven times with some minor differences in spelling, has the sexual connotation.
Booth’s discovery pushed the known history of the F-word back by well over a century. It has since been incorporated into the fourth edition of Jesse Sheidlower’s The F-Word, published by Oxford University Press in 2024. The new edition is a major revision of Sheidlower’s history of the word, incorporating more than 2,500 new quotations and over 150 examples that antedate previously known usages.
Were there earlier F-words?
Roger Fuckebythenavele may provide the earliest convincing sexual use of the word, but similar-looking names appear in English records even earlier.
One example is John le Fucker, whose name appears in 1278. However, scholars have been reluctant to identify this as the F-word we know today. The name may instead be a variant of ‘Fulcher’, a personal name ultimately derived from Germanic elements associated with people and warriors.
Another intriguing case comes from 1287, when a man was recorded as ‘Ric Wyndfuk’ and ‘Ric Wyndfuck de Wodehous’ in documents connected with Sherwood Forest. The name may be related to the old bird name ‘windfucker’, later used for the kestrel, rather than referring to sexual activity.
Other medieval names containing similar elements have also been identified, but they present the same problem. Medieval forms resembling ‘fuck’ could potentially be connected with other meanings, including striking or beating. Finding the letters themselves, therefore, is not enough to establish that medieval people were using the word in its familiar sexual sense.
That is what makes Roger Fuckebythenavele so important. Booth argues that the complete nickname provides the context needed to understand what ‘fuck’ means.
Fockynggrove
There is another medieval example that may have a sexual meaning. In 1373, a Bristol charter recorded a field called ‘Fockynggrove’.
The place-name has attracted the attention of Richard Coates, a specialist in place-names, who has argued that the possibility that it literally meant ‘fucking grove’ needs to be taken seriously. Later records continued to preserve versions of the name, although it eventually appeared in the more respectable form ‘Pucking Grove’.
The original spelling can still be seen in the 1373 document preserved by Bristol Archives.
If the sexual interpretation is correct, Fockynggrove provides another example of the word being used in medieval England decades after Roger Fuckebythenavele, but about a century before its famous appearance in a medieval poem.
The F-word in a medieval poem
Before Booth’s discovery, the best-known early appearance of the F-word came from Flen flyys, a satirical poem written around 1475.
The poem attacks Carmelite friars and contains the line “fvccant vvivys of heli”, a Latin/English mixture meaning “…they fuck the wives of Ely.”
There is an additional twist: the crucial word was disguised in the manuscript. The writer encoded it rather than simply writing it openly, producing a form that could be deciphered as fvccant. This makes Flen flyys particularly important because, unlike Roger Fuckebythenavele or Fockynggrove, the sexual meaning is clear from the sentence in which the word appears.
Roger’s nickname nevertheless predates the poem by more than 150 years.
The history of the word itself is considerably older and more complicated than any single surviving written example. In The F-Word, Sheidlower explains that “fuck is a word of Germanic origin. It is related to words in several other Germanic languages, such as Dutch, German, and Swedish, that have sexual meanings as well as meaning such as ‘to strike’ or ‘to move back and forth’.”
The difficulty for historians is that spoken language rarely leaves evidence behind. A word could have circulated for generations before someone happened to write it in a document that survived into the present day. The earliest surviving example is therefore not necessarily the moment when the word entered English.
Roger Fuckebythenavele does, however, offer remarkable evidence that a recognisable form of one of the English language’s most notorious words was being used with an apparently sexual meaning by the early fourteenth century.
During his research into the Chester records, Booth also found other colourful medieval nicknames, including ‘Lirepynrel’, which he translates as ‘irresponsible penis’.
His study, “An early fourteenth-century use of the F-word in Cheshire, 1310–11,” appeared in Transactions of the Historic Society of Lancashire and Cheshire, Vol. 164 (2015).
Want to learn more? See Medieval Swear Words: What People Really Said in the Middle Ages
Top Image: Luttrell Psalter – British Library MS Add. 42130, fol.66r
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