“Unnecessary Conversations”: Talking Sex in the Early Modern Polish Village

Abstract

This chapter shows us how early modern Polish peasants used to discuss sex. Despite the rules of decorum, conversations about sex were still conducted in private, intimate settings. However, because sexual life was strictly regulated by law and some forms of intimate behaviour were prosecuted by the local judiciary, it was not uncommon for these private conversations to find their way into the interrogation protocols of people accused of transgressing moral norms. Those records are compared and contrasted with folk ditties on sexual themes, which were recorded contemporaneously by proto-folklorists. The chapter shows the potential of cross-referencing different sources to gain access to early modern peasant conversations, especially when it comes to themes deemed to be intimate or taboo.

The Principle of Discretion

Early modern moral norms in the Polish countryside required a fundamental discretion when it came to sexual life—both legal, that is, within marriage and illegal, that is, extra-marital or premarital. This principle of discretion applied above all to actions: no one should ever give the impression of having sex, no matter whether it was marital intercourse or love affairs that violated the declared moral norms.¹ Given the living conditions in peasant huts at that time where the whole family and sometimes farmhands used to cohabit one room and where it was hardly even possible to have one’s own bed, it was naturally difficult to conceal one’s sex life perfectly. Therefore, the implementation of the principle of discretion most crucially required an adequate attitude on the part of the social entourage. As formulated by Catherine Beck in her discussion of social coexistence on British navy ships—that is, in conditions even less favourable than an overcrowded peasant hut—privacy was “created through a system of noticing but not taking notice”, one in which participants “afforded each other privacy by actively not taking notice of certain behaviours which may cross or disrupt the boundaries”.² In the early modern Polish countryside, this attitude was exercised through another side of the principle of discretion—which was not to acknowledge others having sex unless it was an act forbidden by law and custom. It should be noted here that there was quite a large gap between the declared and the observed norm in the early modern peasant community. This especially concerned sexual contact between unmarried people, in particular the youth who, despite the prohibitions of the Church and local legal systems, were treated quite leniently—a blind eye was turned as long as there was no scandal.³

In addition, the principle of discretion also applied to speech. In the case of illicit premarital relations, sex should never be discussed in public as long as its consequences were not visible to the naked eye—that is, until an (illegitimate) child had been conceived. Only then did the issue become a matter of increased interest to the community, and that interest could be expressed by discussing the resolution of the crisis through marriage or alimony as well as by mocking the lovers.⁴

Regarding marital sex, it had to be surrounded by complete silence. We have virtually no source accounts on this subject, except for extremely standardised pastoral instructions that emphasised the reproductive function of marital sex as well as the modesty and unconditional fidelity in marriage, not to mention the obedience of the wife towards her husband’s will (provided that he treated his wife with respect).⁵ In fact, there is practically no information about the reality of sexual lives of married couples. The opposite is the case with extra-marital affairs, since peasants were particularly vigilant about marital infidelity and vigorously discussed those who broke the ideal model and betrayed their legal spouses. However, even then, the implicit expectation was that one should not exaggerate when spreading rumours since slander could oblige the gossiper to pay a very heavy price. The village courts punished adulterers severely, but they also punished those who dared to “sow discord between the married couple”⁶ with their words.

However, the principle of discretion and refraining from talking about sex was not synonymous with prudishness. It was only later, at the end of the nineteenth century, that prudishness began to shape attitudes to sexuality in the Polish countryside due to the joint efforts of the Catholic Church and bourgeois moralisers. In early modern times, despite this principle of far-reaching discretion, we find evidence that peasants used to discuss sex.⁷ Those conversations were, of course, conducted in private, intimate settings so that no one could overhear. However, as sexual life was strictly regulated by law and some forms of intimate behaviour were prosecuted by the local judiciary, it was not uncommon for these private conversations to find their way into the interrogation protocols of people accused of transgressing moral norms.

Certainly, when analysing these intimate conversations about sex as they were recorded in court files, we need to consider the context in which they were reported. Most of them are parts of court statements submitted under threat of the punishment that awaited fornicators and adulterers. They are cited to prove one’s innocence or at least to diminish one’s guilt. They are also intended to be credible and convincing to the members of the village court, which is why they present how things should have happened rather than how they really were. Nevertheless, we can assume that those records reflected social imagery and the hierarchy of values, repeated commonly used phrases and arguments, and ultimately may even have reported actual events, although we will never know to what extent.

A distinct problem that we must consider is the issue of the editing of judicial protocols by the court scribe. Although we are not dealing here (as in Montaillou)⁸ with the translation of testimonies into minutes, given that both the language of the record and the language used by the interrogated was Polish, we must nonetheless be aware of the fact that the text was edited and possibly censored by the scribe.

Unnecessary Conversations

One particular context in which private conversations about sex in early modern Polish peasant culture becomes visible in court records needs to be highlighted. In many court protocols and sentences in cases of fornication or adultery, we find that one common ground for suspicion of involvement in an illicit relationship between a man and a woman was precisely the fact that they talked to each other in situations beyond the control of the community—that is, either somewhere out of sight, one-on-one, or simply in a hushed voice. In the eyes of the commune, such behaviour was suspicious per se.⁹ Court records often refer to these exchanges as “unnecessary” (zbyteczne), “inappropriate” (nieprzystojne), or “frolicky” (płoche) conversations.¹⁰ The use of the word “conversation” (konwersacja) here is of particular interest. The word comes from the Latin noun conversatio (meaning ‘conduct, behaviour’) which was derived from the verb converso (literally ‘interact with, pass time with’), but since the sixteenth century its meaning had noticeably changed and had begun to mean primarily ‘a talk’ (rozmowa),¹¹ especially in upper class and literary language which by that time had begun to undergo a strong Latinisation. In the language used in the village court protocols, however, the word retained (at least partially) its original meaning until the end of the eighteenth century and was used to describe only those conversations that took place out of public knowledge, in private or in secret, and generally still referred to situations giving rise to suspicions about sexual morality.

A similar change in the meaning of the word ‘conversation’ also took place in French and English at this time. In English, however, the word still retained its ambiguity and, according to Katherine Larson, defined “an individual’s interaction with a select community” as well as “encompassed verbal intercourse, social and sexual intimacy”.¹² This ambiguity was utilised extensively in high literary culture, but it also found an explicit implementation in law by the post-1670 coining of a new type of proceeding before the common law courts of the King’s Bench and Common Pleas—the action for ‘criminal conversation’.¹³ This was a consequence of the “silent decriminalisation of adultery”¹⁴ in England due to the decline of the ecclesiastical courts which had hitherto ruled on such cases. Since there was no longer a proper tribunal to try adultery, the practice emerged of complaints for so-called criminal conversations. Such a complaint could be brought to a common law court by a betrayed husband against his spouse’s lover, although, as Lawrence Stone observes, the offence “was neither criminal nor a conversation in the usual sense of the word”.¹⁵ Such lawsuits, albeit notorious, were extremely rare because of the very high costs they entailed, which is why only men from the social elite could afford them.¹⁶ However, as David M. Turner has pointed out, the legal concept of ‘criminal conversation’ contributed to a general change in the gendered image of masculinity during the eighteenth century.¹⁷

None of the legal systems functioning in Poland between the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries developed a concept similar to ‘criminal conversation’. Instead, adultery and fornication continued to be penalised by both the secular and ecclesiastical courts. The aforementioned instances of ‘unnecessary conversation’ which appeared in the sentences of rural courts did not develop into a phraseme or any distinct legal term. The word “unnecessary” as well as other parallel designators (e.g. “frolicky”, “inappropriate”) denoted in such cases merely a moral evaluation of the behaviour in question and indicated above all the importance that local rural communities attached to the preventive control of the sexuality of their members. In this perspective, any conversation conducted beyond the public gaze could give rise to suspicions of a sexual nature. As one village court put it in its sentence in the case of a married woman accused of adultery: “it so happens that […] [she] is fond of going out with various people at night and conversing, thus giving cause to various suspicions and rumours”.¹⁸ Therefore, ‘unnecessary conversations’ were a specific kind of talk in private which evoked suspicions of flirting precisely because it took place in private. To be fair, this was probably not without reason since in a peasant community where clear divisions between public and private spheres did not really exist; there were few matters that people considered better discussed in private.

So what do we know about what was perceived as private talks about sex that were held in peasant circles? On the basis of the surviving scraps of these conversations in the records, three types can be distinguished. The first type was a straightforward (perhaps even vulgar from our perspective) invitation to have sex. The testimony of a certain Małgorzata Wiszka, who was visited by a publican from Jasionka called Kazimierz Lech, may serve as an example here:

I asked him wherefore he had come, he replied: I have come to ask you whether you have repaid my debt or not. I replied to him: indeed I have already paid my debt unto you. He sat on a bench and began to persuade me to allow him to enter [i.e. penetrate] me. […] At first I resisted but later I did consent.¹⁹

Women also sometimes sent simple invitations to men to have sex, as in the case of Katarzyna Stopinska who instructed Matyjasz Surówka “to visit her at night”:

She said that she slept alone in a barn and told me to come to a certain place, I came at her command and she took me to the barn and induced me to perform this act, that I had to commit this carnal sin with her four times, although I discussed with her and showed that I was an orphan, but she, not respecting this, did force me to this deed.²⁰

The second type of conversation was persuasion with various arguments and promises or outright bargaining for sex. In the two examples cited above, such arguments and bargaining also probably took place, but the court records only speak of an invitation for sex. So what did the argument look like? First of all, the man tried to convince the woman that she would not become pregnant as a result of the intercourse. In some cases, this was presumably a promise of coitus interruptus, a popular method considered to be contraceptive at that time.²¹For example, a publican from Bytomsko, Sebastian Matrasz, while seducing Katarzyna Kubianka, who resisted ‘committing a sin’, “he assured her: ‘Fear not! There will be nothing to you’”.²² Very similar arguments were used by Józef, the hereditary headman of the village of Słotwiny in the demesne of Muszyna, to Anastazja Malarczykowa: “he seduced her saying to her that he would not act in such a way that there would be an effect”.²³ More impertinent was a certain Knapik who, encouraging Zofia Piwowarczonka to have sex, told her “you’re already old, there will be no harm for you”.²⁴

The promise of marriage was regarded as an equally convincing argument. For example, in the demesne of Łąka near Rzeszów in 1794, Jadwiga Wesołowsczanka was being seduced by Szczepan Łyczko who, according to Jadwiga:

[O]n the Sunday after Christmas, […] returning with my mother from the inn […], he entered my parent’s house for supper, and when I went to the stable to feed the cattle, he followed me and tried to talk me into the carnal act with various words, and when I refused, he promised to wed me […].²⁵

In fact, it was fairly easy to convince a girl to have sex with the promise of marriage. In rural customs, the commencement of sexual relations signified primarily a readiness to get married, and if a child was conceived, it was necessary to bear the consequences of one’s actions.²⁶Rural opinion saw nothing wrong with such a manner of establishing future couples, and village authorities seem to have acted as the allies of pregnant women, demanding their lovers to fulfil the marriage vows. Treating marriage as an emergency exit in the event of a ‘slip-up’ was summed up most cynically by Senko of Czukiew who, while wooing Hasia Tuledzyna, told her, “You’re a widow, I’m a bachelor. If I do it, I will take you. If I don’t, then too bad”.²⁷

Occasionally, however, we come across the remains of slightly more romantic conversations. One Gasper Grzybowski, while entertaining in the inn with a certain Marianna Brzanina, took her by the hand and led her through the back door to a secluded place. There “they lay on the manure and he said: ‘O, my Molly, my Molly, you are my heart’ and she replied ‘Just do not press too hard’”.²⁸ In another case, Marcin Łukaszewicz “declared marital friendship” to his lover Regina and “with genuine love did allow himself corporal acts […] and that during Corpus Christi after the act when she was crying, I petted and caressed her saying that ‘as much I loved you, so much I do now’”.²⁹

Finally, the third type of talk was that which contained some witty concept, paradoxical argument, or cutting response. A popular theme here was a perverse reversal of the Church’s teaching on sin. One suitor, according to the story of the girl he was courting, “came [to me] once and began to insist that I consent to his approaches, saying that if you do not satisfy my desire, you will commit a sin, for it is not only us simple people who commit such a sin, but also the clergy who do so”.³⁰Another man persuaded a girl to commit the “carnal act”, convincing her that “if she failed to do it for him, her sin would be all the greater because he could die as a result”.³¹

Such statements do not seem to have been invented ad hoc. More likely, they were related to the use of some jokes or sayings functioning in peasant society or perhaps even subversive carnival knowledge. In the above cases, the wit was used by men, but it should be stressed that rural society also highly valued this skill in women. When peasants described why they found a given woman attractive, in addition to her beauty and youth, they emphasised that she was “witty in discourse” and “sociable”.³² I will touch upon how such skills were acquired and developed shortly. Here, I must add that a sharp tongue made it easier for women to function in the patriarchal rural society. This can be seen in the testimony concerning a certain Jan Wciesło, accused of committing bestiality with a mare. As he confessed during the interrogation, he “had the urge” to rape a maid in his house, but the maid replied “you have a wife, so go to hell and leave me alone”. The reprimand had its effect, because the maid managed to free herself from him and walk off, whereas he “in his passionate lust” went to the barn and committed the “deed” with the mare.³³

These examples show that the surviving records of peasant ‘talks in private’ about sex are really only scraps, fragments, or crumbs. This may indicate that private conversations about sex were genuinely effective in not reaching the public, but it mostly shows that in general, nobody bothered to record them in writing unless they were mentioned in a testimony during a judicial investigation. However, even in such rare cases, the record was limited to just a few words, and these must suffice for us to imagine the details of the conversation and its style.

Folk Ditties with Sexual Themes

However, we can confront these surviving fragments of talking sex with folk ditties (that is, short songs) on sexual themes which were recorded contemporaneously by proto-folklorists, or more precisely by collectors of bawdy rhymes. Several small collections of these texts dating back to the eighteenth century were found and published over half a century ago by Czesław Hernas, a literary and linguistic researcher,³⁴ but have not yet received much attention from scholars, except for an excellent folkloristic study by Dobrosława Wężowicz–Ziółkowska who compared them with materials collected by the leading Polish ethnographer of the nineteenth century, Oskar Kolberg.³⁵ However, the eighteenth-century collections are fundamentally different in terms of their motivation and methods of composition from the materials collected—and especially from those published—by Kolberg. Collectors who wrote them down in the pre-Enlightenment period were not motivated by an interest in folk poetry or customs but were instead attracted by the coarse, vulgar humour, and cutting wit of these works which corresponded in some way to the taste of Polish Baroque culture which was eager to explore various extremes. Some of these collections were published at the time in cheap prints, undoubtedly for commercial purposes, which means that they found readers among people who were obviously better educated than their authors (as Polish peasants in the eighteenth century were an essentially illiterate group).

More than a hundred years later, ethnographers encountering these vulgar sexual texts faced completely different problems. First, the very existence of such texts was inconsistent with the vision of ‘the people’ on which they were just elaborating, and second, the burden of their bourgeois culture rejected such topics and such methods of depiction. As a result, Oskar Kolberg and other ethnographers of the time simply omitted such texts when publishing folklore collections or bowdlerised them. In the case of Kolberg’s legacy, however, they fortunately remained in his manuscripts. In fact, the first deliberate collection of such texts since the emergence of professional ethnography was compiled at the end of the nineteenth century by the Polish linguist Jan Baudouin de Courtenay and published anonymously in the periodical Kryptadia, a private imprint put out by a group of prominent European ethnographers with similar interests.³⁶ This collection shows the persistence of fundamental motifs and even the survival of many verses in their entirety although they, as a rule, functioned only in oral circulation. On the other hand, being much more extensive than pre-Enlightenment collections and compiled on the basis of ethnographic research methodology, it shows an additional context for the functioning of this type of literature.

It must be emphasised at this point that the singling out of lyrics with subject matter and language which could best be described as ‘obscene’ from among the folk collections was a product of ethnographic research; in folk culture itself, they did not constitute a distinct category. It reflected the taste and judgements of nineteenth-century scholars who decided that such songs should be relegated to the margins of folk literature. In addition, the process of the Catholic moralisation of manners in the Polish countryside, which was developing around the same time, also played its part. We can be sure that songs of this type were certainly not marginal to folk culture, at least up to the end of the eighteenth century. Indeed, they were in fact the dominant type among the folk songs written down at that time, although such an impression also results from the preferences of the ‘pre-ethnographic’ collectors who tended to choose such songs.³⁷

What did such ditties written down in the eighteenth century look like? One such example is:

Verse

Verse Girl, you sleep hard, you sleep hard, Give me this hole with which you piss.Footnote

“Dziewcyno, twardo spis, twardo spis, / A dajze mi tej dziurecki, co nią scys”. The Princes Czartoryski Library in Krakow, MS 783, 540 (transl. by George Szenderowicz).

This verse, recorded in the first half of the eighteenth century, was actually censored by a communist censor in 1965 and had to be removed from the scholarly edition prepared by Czesław Hernas.

The speaker of the ditty cited above was male, but the female subject was also very popular, such as in this song:

Verse

Verse I don't want the guy whom it dangles down, he’s a foe to my muff, I prefer the one, Whose thing stands firm, he’s a friend of my muff.Footnote

“Nie chcę tego, / co mu wisi, / nieprzyjaciel moi pisi. / Wolę tego, / co mu stoi, / przyjaciel to pisi moi”. Hernas, W kalinowym lesie, vol. II, 55.

From the point of view of the categorisation of private conversations about sex presented above, this would belong to the first category: a straightforward invitation to have sex. However, such ditties were intended to be performed in public and—as we might guess—above all in taverns, where people entertained themselves, drank, and danced to the music.

Folk music at that time was usually performed by an ensemble that included a fiddle and a drum and the performers were often already semi-professionals. Researchers believe that in traditional folk dance music, no singing was ever done while the instruments were playing and therefore bands never included singers. Songs were performed when the orchestra stopped playing, and the people attending the party sang short songs to the tune of the piece played earlier or dictated the tune of the next piece to the musicians. Such straightforward songs as that quoted above were rather rare. Nevertheless, as Dobrosława Wężowicz–Ziółkowska’s research indicates, sexual themes permeated folklore, usually via metaphor. As a result, the sexual act in folk ditties could be described by various euphemisms, such as work in the fields or farmyard, gathering fruit, various handicrafts (such as blacksmithing), dancing and playing musical instruments, cooking meals, ruining clothes, or injuring the body. However, they were still too coarse and obscene to be included in folklore collections of the nineteenth-century ethnographers.⁴⁰

Performing such lyrics in a public place such as in a tavern could undoubtedly be a kind of comparatively risk-free flirting, because one could always withdraw and declare that the metaphor was overinterpreted. On the other hand, a valued social skill was to respond to a taunt in a similar form—that is, by singing an adequate riposte. Consequently, ad hoc singalong dialogues appeared in the ethnographic (and sometimes historical) records. For example:

Verse

Verse —Tell me this once, where’ve you got it? —By the thigh, you dumb chap, Why do you ask?Footnote

“—Powiedz–że mi raz, Kędy ją ty masz?—Wedle uda, chłopie, duda, Cego się pytasz?” Hernas, W kalinowym lesie, vol. II, 57.

Yet another example is:

Verse

Verse —Yoo–hoo, my dear, You promised, so give me. —I promised, so I will, As your tail will swell, As we get home.Footnote

“—Chajze, moja, chajze, Obiecałaś, dajze.—Obiecałam, to dam, Jak ci stanie ogon, Jak pójdziemy do dom”. Hernas, W kalinowym lesie, vol. II, 62.

It is probable that it was during these tavern games that both genders developed and practiced the skills of talking about sex with the use of mostly covert metaphors and jokes. At the same time, during these improvised playful discussions, they could refer to or simply apply folk literary texts from the oral repertoire which were apparently quite popular and durable, since the same ditties were recorded at the beginning of the eighteenth and the end of the nineteenth centuries (as well as in the middle of the twentieth century, as indicated by later ethnographic research). It can be assumed that these verses—which were listened to in public places such as inns—also provided a useful context for discussing the topics and manners of speaking about sex in private, framing the functions of metaphorical motifs and folk imagery associated with this field while at the same time delineating the boundaries between the private and the public spheres regarding intimate issues.

Of course, these are only assumptions, because—as mentioned earlier—from the conversations about sex held in private among peasants, only small fragments—mostly scraps, in fact—can be found in the records. However, in the aforementioned case of persuading a girl to have sex, threatening that the refusal would lead to the suitor’s death because of her, do we not hear an echo of the following ditty recorded in the eighteenth century:

Verse

Verse —I will die, I will die, If you do not give it to me! —Do not die, I will give it to you right away.

⁴³

Singing Songs, Committing Sin

Finally, let us examine in more detail the case of adultery between Jan Klimek and Żołnina (the wife of Marcin Żołna) committed on 15 September 1751. As both parties had spouses, their act was seen as a serious infraction according to law and custom. They were also unlucky enough to be found in flagranti—out in the open, somewhere in the bushes—by a group of their village neighbours returning from a fair. Under interrogation, they adopted different defence strategies. Żołnina tried to argue that it had been an isolated incident—actually an impulsive intercourse—and that she had simply succumbed to Jan Klimek’s persuasions, protesting that she would not have succumbed had he not invoked the ‘religious’ argument now familiar to us: reassuring her “that we will confess of this” (meaning that they would approach the sacrament of penance with the confidence of absolution after repentance—or, to put it in other words, that the sin was worth penance). Jan Klimek, on the other hand, was willing to put all the responsibility on his mistress who he stressed had been seducing him for a long time. He told the court that he could provide witnesses who had seen that Klimek

had no peace because of her in the inn, even though he was running away from her, she still followed him, sat next to him, and when she came out of the dance, she sang to him various unnecessary songs, which made others uneasy, and this happened several times.⁴⁴

What we have here is a testimony of the above-described practice of singing sexually explicit songs during breaks in tavern dances. In this case, it was the woman who was the party provoking the man to respond with her songs, but we do not know whether she used any of the rhymes from the commonly known repertoire or whether she made up her own verses. Klimek’s testimony suggests that he was unable to respond adequately to her taunts and simply tried to avoid her. This situation caused a scandal in the village.

Eventually, as Klimek further testified, on the fateful day they were caught in the act, Żołnina ambushed him on his way back from the mill and, when he arrived, she started to sing to him and in this way made him “commit a sin”. We do not know what she sang to him—perhaps they were the same songs as in the tavern? If so, this would confirm that the content of the publicly performed sexually explicit verses was either transferred to the talks in private or at least transferred their form, which was the singing of (presumably metaphorical) encouragement for sex.

In conclusion, it can be stated that using the concept of private conversations as an analytical category for the examination of early modern peasant societies has allowed us to reformulate to some extent our perception of peasant privacy and to discern distinctive fields and practices for its observance. Although we generally agree that the early modern peasantry enjoyed little privacy owing to living conditions and social organisation, there is evidence in the surviving sources that talks in private did take place and that they often focused on sex.

The fact that it was sex which was the subject of talk kept from the public was due to the need to maintain the principle of discretion that peasant communities usually applied to such sexual behaviour which did not breach local custom. Only in this way—by maintaining discretion with regard to the behaviour of others, or the rule of ‘noticing but not taking notice’—was it possible to find the necessary intimacy in the material conditions of peasant life at that time.

Nevertheless, these indications suggest that the relative absence of talks about sex did not result from the prudishness of peasants, since sexual topics were in fact the subject of popular discourse. Widely known folk songs were performed during tavern entertainments, and using these songs was also a socially acceptable type of flirting. The ensemble of these texts, their topics, and the metaphors used in them undoubtedly trained men and women to talk about sex, to woo, and to reject courtship even in intimate situations. They also created a framework for socially acceptable behaviour, showing the hierarchy of observed moral norms (which were different from the norms declared in compliance with the teachings of the Church). This leads us to presume that in intimate situations; men and women may have talked about sex in the language of folk poetry.