To me the word harlot seems like something my grandmother might have called one or two of the girls I spent a little time with during my university years.

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You don’t hear harlot very often these days and when you do you might be forgiven in thinking it was a word related to whore.

It isn’t.

Whore is Old English and has been with us for more than 1000 years.

In 1576 a fellow named William Lambarde wrote a sort of travel guide and county history called A Perambulation of Kent.  In it he relates how William the Conqueror’s mother was named Harlothe, and that she was not in fact the wife of William’s father Robert Duke of Normandy.

These facts are true and for that reason, not the fact that the guy overthrew their native English king, that William the Conqueror was also known as William the Bastard.

What the Perambulation of Kent said that isn’t true, is that William the Conqueror’s mother is the source of our word harlot a word that didn’t show up in English until almost 200 years after his mother died, and when it did show up, referred to men, not women.

It first appeared in one of our favourite old documents, the Ancren Riwle where it did not refer to one’s sexual habits but rather denoted a vagabond.

From there harlot’s meaning moved through “jester” and “manservant” before it became feminized where its meaning stuck unto my grandmother’s day.