15 December 2020
Harlot is a term of abuse, now rather old-fashioned, for a woman. It means prostitute, promiscuous woman, slut. But originally, the word referred to men. It comes from the Anglo-Norman harlot. The harl- root is of uncertain origin, but it is probably related to harlequin. The -ot is a no-longer-productive suffix forming a diminutive of a noun.
The earliest English sense of harlot is a vagabond or beggar. The earliest extant appearance is in the text known as Ancrene Riwle, a handbook for anchoresses, that is female hermits. It was written before 1200 C.E. and survives in a number of copies. A passage in a manuscript which was copied c. 1230 reads:
Scheome ich cleopie eauer her. beon itald unwurð. & beggin as an hearlot gef neod is here liueneð
(I call it shameful to be always judged contemptible and begging, as a harlot, if need be, for one’s sustenance.)
Over the next century or so, harlot also acquired the sense of a lecher or libertine. From the poem Of Arthour and of Merlin, probably written before 1300, and appearing in the Auchinleck manuscript, which was copied c. 1330:
Hir moder was ded acurssedliche
And hir fader starf reuliche
And hir broþer yslawe also
And hir soster quic doluen þo
Hir oþer soster hore strong
Þat al harlotes ȝede among.(Her mother was damnably dead
And her father died pitiably
And her brother was also killed
And her sister was then buried alive
Her other sister a great whore
That all the harlots waxed poetic about.)
Also over time, the word became associated with entertainers, perhaps because such entertainers often solicited payment like present-day street performers do—or perhaps because of the harl- root the association was there all along; the medieval record is full of holes. The earliest version, the A-text of William Langland’s poem Piers Plowman, written c. 1376, uses harlot to mean minstrel or entertainer:
Holde wiþ none harlotis ne here nouȝt here talis,
And nameliche at mete suche men eschew[e],
For it arn þe deuelis disours I do þe to undirstonde.(Associate with no harlots, nor hear their tales
And especially eschew such men at meals,
For they are the devil’s minstrels I want you to understand.)
And by the late fifteenth century, harlot could be used to refer to both male and female entertainers. The 1483 Catholicon anglicum, an English–Latin glossary contains this entry:
an Harlott; balatro (histrio A.) rusticus, gerro, mima (palpo A.) ioculator, -trix, pantomima, parasitaster, histrix, nugator, scurrulus
(a Harlot: fool (actor), peasant, buffoon, actor in pantomime (flatterer), jester, female jester, female jester, actress in pantomime, parasite, actress, storyteller, clown
The sense of a prostitute appears at about the same. From an anonymous translation of Ranulf Higden’s Polychronicon, translated before 1425:
Wherefore the harlottes at Rome were callede nonariæ, for hit was not lawefulle to theyme to passe theire places, leste they schoulde lette yonge men from the commune vtilite.
(Why were the harlots of Rome called nuns? Because it was not lawful for them to leave their quarters, lest they should let the young men of the community make use of them.)
Harlots translates meretrices (prostitutes) in Higden’s Latin.
The male senses of harlot fall out of use by the seventeenth century, leaving only the sense of a prostitute or licentious woman.
Sources:
Catholicon anglicum. Sidney J. H. Herrtage, ed. Early English Text Society, O.S. 75. London: N. Trübner and Co., 1881, 175. London, British Library, MS Additional 15562. HathiTrust Digital Archive.
Langland, William. Piers Plowman: The A-Version, Will’s Visions of Piers Plowman and Do-Well. George Kane, ed. London: Athlone Press, 1960, lines 7.47–49, 318. Trinity College MS R.3.14. HathiTrust Digital Archive.
Macrae-Gibson, O. D., ed. Of Arthour and of Merlin, vol. 1 of 2. Early English Text Society, 268. London: Oxford UP, 1973, lines 787–92, 61. Edinburgh, National Library of Scotland, MS Advocates 19.2.1. HathiTrust Digital Archive.
Middle English Dictionary, 2019, s.v. harlot, n.
Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, June 2020, s.v. harlot, n.
Polychronican Ranulphi Higden monachi cestrensis, vol 1 of 9. Churchill Babington, ed. London: Longman et al., 1865, 249. London, British Library, Harley 2261. HathiTrust Digital Archive.
Tolkien, J. R. R., ed. Ancrene Wisse: the English Text of the Ancrene Riwle. Early English Text Society, 249, 182. London: Oxford UP, 1962. Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 402. HathTrust Digital Archive.