James Morton looks at some of the verbal mistakes that have made witnesses the butt of judicial jokes, and asks why the term 'meadow lady' became a major ground for divorce

Over the years, barristers and judges in particular have treated the poor and uneducated with some contempt and as butts for what passes as judicial humour. There is the judge who, receiving a note from a juror to ask whether he might be excused because his wife was about to conceive replied, 'I think you mean confined but whichever it is I think you had better be present'.

I once watched a nullity suit brought by a middle-aged lady against her slightly older husband. He challenged the case on two grounds. First, he maintained he had consummated the marriage and secondly, that even if he had not she, by her conduct, had accepted the non-consummation. They had lived together for many years and when she finally left him she still returned to bring him shopping and do the ironing. For his part, he wrote a series of letters pleading with her to return. Asked why she thought her husband was unable to consummate the union she blushed scarlet and finally muttered, 'He masticates'. (Lord Goddard used to tell a similar story of the defendant who was chewing: 'Stop masticating', I said, 'and he took his hands out of his pockets'.)


I heard this poor woman myself. Her counsel was a large, rotund man with, as Dashiel Hammett described, 'bubbs that jounced'. He read out her husband's letters with some enthusiasm. The man had done his best but then ill-advisedly added at the end, 'Please bring some cornflakes'. This produced a most enjoyable moment. 'My Lord,' tittered counsel, 'he can't decide whether he loves his wife or his stomach more'. Which coming from him seemed a bit rich.


Before I was launched into the criminal world I did most of my firm's divorce work, much of it supplied by the local doctor, known imaginatively as 'Doc', a florid man who, in the days before abortions became legal, also specialised in what he called 'd and c'. There was a steady stream of mostly women who wanted out of unhappily contracted marriages and it was Doc who was the key to unlocking the door. In the early 1960s, misconduct still had to be proved and Doc was always on hand with the medical evidence to show their health had been injured and so ensure the key was turned.


Much of the cruelty alleged was verbal. Wives could not stand being called whores, prostitutes and so forth. All this went faithfully into the petition. For example: 'Paragraph 6 - the respondent subjected your humble petitioner to a stream of abuse at the breakfast table referring to her as a slag, bitch (etc) much to the distress of your humble petitioner.' Much of this had to be dragged out of the poor women who looked at the carpet while repeating and, I suspect, sometimes inventing, their husbands' abuse. They could usually be coaxed and eventually, quite improperly, I suppose, I took to leading them. 'And he called you a tart?' Nod. 'And a slut?' Nod. And so paragraph 6 was complete.


However, there was one term of abuse that none of them could bring themselves to utter. It was the abuse that dared not speak its name. This was certainly one that had to be written down and with which I was initially unfamiliar.


But from the floods of tears it produced I recognised its gravity. It was 'meadow lady'. And so down into the petition it would go along with slag and all the others. Eventually, I came across one less bashful potential divorcee and actually asked her what it meant. Even she would only letter it for me. 'C-O-W'. So there it had been all the time and no judge had ever, to my knowledge, sought an explanation.


I still do not really know why cow was regarded with such horror. In my circles it was almost a term of endearment. I knew one girl who hit her boyfriend after he had called her a 'gannet', but cow as such was unremarkable. I made inquiries and found that meadow lady itself was almost wholly confined to the area in which our practice was based. A divorce solicitor a few streets away had never come across it. A cow was a cow was a cow, as Gertude Stein would have put it. Years later I found cow in a dictionary of slang. It is a Glaswegian term for a woman who accepts sex from a line-up of boys. However, I cannot believe that meaning had turned up uninvited in a London suburb in the late 1950s to cause such distress.



As a postscript, at the end of the 18th century in his Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue, the estimable lexicographer Francis Grose included the phrase 'to sleep like a cow' as sleeping back to back or, as Australians put it in modern times, 'bum to mum'. Perhaps this was the humble petitioner's real complaint.



James Morton is a former criminal law specialist solicitor and now a freelance journalist