Thus it was that, labouring under the ban of priestly exaction, and confronted on all sides by the ghostly emblems of wrath and condemnation, there descended upon England in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, a torrent of the hardest and direst of verbal abuse. Not mere words of intemperate anger came bubbling to the surface, but sullen and defiant blasphemies, execrations that proclaimed open warfare with authority and a lasting separation from everything that was tender in men's faith. Imprecations were contrived from every incident in the narrative of the Crucifixion. The limbs and members of the slain Christ were made the vehicle of revolting profanation. The didactic writers of the time, no less than epic poets and sprightly versifiers, give full testimony to the prevalency of the offence. The laureate, Stephen Hawes, Lydgate, Chaucer and the "moral Gower," all are alike loud in their expression of horror and renunciation. Among the later writers replete with instances of the scandal is the epigrammatist, Robert Crowley, who enumerates a lengthy catalogue of expletives current in his day. Although by the time Crowley appeared upon the scene the language of blasphemy had become a little softened by the admixture of rather more innocent particles, as "by cock and pye," or "by the cross of the mousefoot," the author still finds it necessary to record a set of hard, grating oaths pronounced by the "hands," the "feet," and the "flesh" of Christ. To refer, for instance, to the use of the one word "zounds!" This strikes us now-a-days as anything but a very solemn or a very momentous form of adjuration. But in unreformed England--the England that still adored the _Genetrix incorrupta_, and had earned among the devout the title of Our Lady's Dower, it was absolutely impossible to surpass in blasphemy the hideous import that had been imparted to the user of the word. It was in fact nothing else than a rebellious and mutinous rendering of the once sacred oath taken by the wounds of the Redeemer. There are few who can probably now realise the conspicuous place then occupied in the Catholic worship by the legends relating to the five several incisions in the body of Christ. The monkish representations of the wounds were depicted in countless rosaries and Books of Hours. Confraternities were formed in the Church for their greater veneration. There were occasions when papal absolution was specially extended to those worshippers who paid their devotions to the wound in the side of Christ. The so-called measurement of them was even preserved in families, and was reputed to be a charm.[22] In the great northern insurrection of 1536, known as the Pilgrimage of Grace, the Five Wounds was the badge under which York and Lincoln farmers marched to avenge the spoliation of the monasteries. Such was the oath in the days of the last King Henry. Its more modern application scarcely requires illustration,