madam

   In the Middle Ages this was a title of great respect for a woman of the highest social rank, the equivalent of ‘my lady’. The expression was borrowed from French, where madame had that precise meaning, ‘my lady’. In the early seventeenth century the term was still highly valued. Hostess Quickly, of the Boar’s Head, reminds Sir John Falstaff in Henry the Fourth Part Two, that he had offered to marry her, raising her in the social scale: Did not goodwife Keech, the butcher’s wife, come in then and call me gossip Quickly?… And didst thou not, when she had gone downstairs, desire me to be no more so familiar with such poor people, saying that ere long they should call me madam?

   By the end of the seventeenth century a writer was complaining that use of this term had ‘grown a little too common of late’.

   During the eighteenth century it was much used by the middle classes amongst themselves, and by their servants. Women were capable of turning ‘madam’ into an expression of extreme contempt when using the term to one another, but expected to be given the title by their inferiors, especially once they had married. Samuel Richardson, writing in the 1740s, uses the expression ‘to madam up’, with special reference to young women who hear the title used to them for the first time. During the nineteenth century the social value of ‘madam’ continued to deterioriate and there was an increase in the derisive use of the term. An affected lady, a prostitute, or bold young woman could be referred to as ‘a madam’. In direct address ‘madam’, in modern times, could still be used to a young girl who acts in an autocratic way, like ‘a proper little madam’. By the end of the nineteenth century madam had also acquired a number of different pronunciations, some specifically connected with certain circumstances. For comments on the variants see also the articles on Ma’am, Mam, Mum, Marm,