My last post, then I'll shut up, I promise.

While I maintain that "By our Lady" is, or may be, the original source for "Bloody" (and I'm backed up by a Judge on this point, but ignore that if you consider that a Judge is only a time-honoured shyster), it certainly would very quickly have come to mean by association, the horrible mess you create when you kill and cut up a cow, pig or sheep with crude tools and methods.

(For a comment on mediaeval attitudes to animal welfare, I am reminded of the awful joke which says that castrating animals is perfactly painless, unless you catch your thumb between the two bricks).

However, even for mediaeval tastes, the inconvenience, smell and sight of a street heaped with blood, offal and inedible bits of animals, was a bit much, and slaughter was supposed to take place outside towns and cities only. The execption to this would be large cities such as York, where this might lead to inconvenient traffic volumes, so it would be OK for animals to be led or driven to a street set aside for animal slaughter. Such a slaughterhouse was a "Shambles" (and there is a street of that name in York to this day).

"Shambles" to the mediaeval mind, must have meant a dreadfully gory sight reminiscent of the aftermath of a battle. I think Shakespeare uses the term (in Henry IV Part 2 ??? I wonder if there were any monarchs outside Britain who came as a serial, but I am straying a bit, so...)

Unfortunately, the term has now come to mean, "walks in an uncoordinated fashion", (perhaps with knuckles trailing on the ground), so when my boss tells me my work is a shambles, he means merely "untidy" as opposed to "ghastly" (I hope).

....

So, when Duncan refers to his bloody sergeant, the man should be made up so as to be practically cut to pieces, or given several yards of fresh animal tripes to wear as a trophy, not merely a head bandage with a patch of red on it.