The first recorded fuckers were actually monks. There was a monastery in the English city of Ely, and in an anonymous fifteenth-century poem somebody… - Mark Forsyth

" "

The first recorded fuckers were actually monks. There was a monastery in the English city of Ely, and in an anonymous fifteenth-century poem somebody mentioned that the monks might have acquired some dirty habits. The poem is in a strange combination of Latin and English, but the lines with which we are concerned run thus:

Non sunt in celi
Qui fuccant wivys in Heli

Which seems to mean:

They are not in heaven
Who fuck wives in Ely

The modern spelling of fuck is first recorded in 1535, and this time it’s bishops who are at it. According to a contemporary writer, bishops ‘may fuck their fill and be unmarried’. In between those two there’s a brief reference by the Master of Brasenose College, Oxford to a ‘fuckin Abbot’. So it seems that the rules of celibacy weren’t being taken too seriously in the medieval church.