Than lichery, that lathly cors,
Come berand lyk a bagit hors;
And Idilnes did him leid;
Thair wes with him ane vgly sort
And mony stynkand fowll tramort
That had in syn bene deid.
(Dunbar)
[Then lechery, like a stallion, came bearing that loathesome corpse and Idleness led him; there was with him an ugly crowd and many a stinking half-decayed corpse that had died in sin.]
One sense of Lust is simply pleasure, enjoyment or delight, as is obvious from the wholly innocent quotation from The Foly of Fulys and the Thewis of Wysmen (c1460): Vysdome . . . is . . . suetar als and of mare lust Than erdly thing that man may gust [Wisdom is sweeter and of more delight than any earthly thing that man may taste]. But then the killjoys got their hands on it and gave it additional senses of sensual or vicious pleasure, self-indulgence, and intemperance, excess and sexual promiscuity. So we find Gavin Douglas in the Prologue to his Aeneid (1513) making the rather world-weary comment about love Begynnyng with a fenyeit faynt plesance [false feeble pleasure], Continewit in lust and endyt with pennance and John Knox roundly condemns those Gevin to the filthy loostis of the fleshe. This is understandable, given the behaviour described by William Dunbar in his Ballate Against Evil Women where he likens a woman who is not choosy about her partner to a bitch on heat: Quhone the biche is jolie and on rage Scho chesis not the grewhound in the hour, The foulest tyk [scruffy dog] quhill scho hir lust aswage. Women with such appetites would have been well pleased to meet these gentlemen: The nychtis ar ouer schort to gentil men to commit there libedeneus lust (Sir David Lindsay,The Complaynte of Scotland 1549), unless the shortness of the night is not a reference to their prodigious staying power but a comment on the long hours of summer daylight in Northern latitudes. In spite of their outwardly straight-laced attitude to sex, lust or love, the Scots have never had any difficulty talking about such things.