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John le Fucker

John le Fucker was an Englishman mentioned in an administrative record of 1278. His distinctive byname has been proposed by some scholars as the first written record of a variant of the English swear word fuck.

According to an entry in the Close Rolls of the chancery of Edward I for 26 April 1278, John le Fucker was imprisoned for a double murder and seeking bail. As published in 1900 in summary calendar form, the entry reads:

John le Fucker of Tythinge, imprisoned at Peterborough for the death of Walter de Leyghton and William de Leyghton, wherewith he is charged, has letters to the sheriff of Northampton to bail him.

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In John’s time, the word “fuck” would have been a perfectly acceptable word meaning “to strike” (an archaic name for the kestrel was “windfucker”, from how it flew), with the sexual euphemism only coming in around the 15th century or so (displacing the now disused word “swive”). So John Le Fucker could have been more of a badass nom de guerre than anything else.

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