14 August 2020
The phrases the devil to pay and hell to pay are based on a rather obvious metaphor, that of a Faustian bargain or payment for sins committed
Of the two, the devil to pay is older. It’s first recorded in a fifteenth century macaronic poem appearing in the manuscript Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Douce 104, fol. 112v. That manuscript is most famous for containing one of the copies of William Langland’s poem Piers Plowman, but this anonymous lyric appears in the manuscript after its better-known companion. The poem condemns women who gossip in church instead of listening to the mass, and features a demon named Tutivillus, who records the names of such sinners in a book. Tutivillus more famously appears in the c. 1470 play Mankind. But here the poem opens with the lines:
Tutiuillus, þe deuyl of hell,
He wryteþ har names soþe to tel,
ad missam garulantes.Better wer at tome for ay,
Þan her to serue þe deuil to pay,
sic vana famulantes.(Tutivillus, the devil of hell,
He writes down their names, truth be told,
[who] chatter during mass.It would be better to remain at home forever,
Than their deserving the devil to pay,
thus [they are] attending in vain.)
[My translation here assumes tome, which appears in both Brown and the older Wright edition, is a transcription error for home. Unfortunately, the Bodleian has not made this folio of the manuscript available online, so I cannot check the manuscript itself. Otherwise, tome is nonsensical here.]
The phrase appears again in a 1703 piece of epistolary fiction, A Continuation or Second Part of the Letters from the Dead to the Living. In this work the devil to pay is used both literally, referring to damnation, and metaphorically. First the literal:
Don’t you know damnation pays every Man’s Scores, and tho’ we Tick’d in the other World for Subsistence, ‘twas not with a design to cheat you or any body else, for we knew we should have the Devil to pay one time or other.
And then the metaphorical:
In this manner we spent the Evening as merrily as so many Tars under the Tropicks, over their Forfeitures, till at last we had the Devil to pay with empty pockets.
The variant hell to pay appears by 1758 in the poem The Miscellaneous and Whimsical Lucubrations of Lancelot Poverty-Struck. Here it is used literally:
The grand Contrast my Muse shall tell,
‘Twixt the Hellish John, and John of Hell;
Before that either gain’d the Day,
By Heaven! there was Hell to pay.
The Duke of Wellington also uses hell to pay in a pair of dispatches from Spain in 1811. In a dispatch to Marshal W.C. Beresford on 28 August 1811 he writes:
I have no doubt that unless the design has been altered since the end of June and beginning of July, we shall have the Emperor in Spain and hell to pay before much time elapses.
And in a letter to Henry Wellesley on 16 October 1811 he says:
We hear that there is hell to pay at Cadiz; but I do not understand about what.
The phrase the devil to pay is commonly touted to have a nautical origin, with it being a clipping of the devil to pay and no pitch hot. Alexander Hamilton, not the man who was the first U.S. Secretary of the Treasury and posthumous Broadway star but a Maryland doctor from a generation earlier, is the first one to record this particular variant. It appears in his 1774 Gentleman’s Progress:
There was a necessity for the first to bear with the stupidity of his satire and for the others to admire his pseudosophia and quaintness of his speeches and , att [sic] the same time, with their blocks, to turn the edge and acuteness of his wit. He dealt much in proverbs and made use of the one which I thought pritty [sic] significant when well applied. It was the devil to pay and no pitch hot? An interrogatory adage metaphorically derived from the manner of sailors who pay their ship’s bottoms with pitch. I back’d it with great cry and little wool, said the devil when he shore his hogs, applicable enough to the ostentation and clutter he made with his learning.
Smith and Belcher’s 1867 The Sailor’s Word-Book defines this variant thusly:
DEVIL TO PAY AND NO PITCH HOT. The seam which margins the waterways was called the “devil,” why only caulkers can tell, who found it sometimes difficult for their tools. The phrase, however, means service expected and no one ready to perform it. Impatience, and naught to satisfy it.
Since it appears some 300 years after the first known appearance of the shorter the devil to pay, it clearly is not the origin. And, in fact, the sense of devil meaning a ship’s seam only appears in this this phrase; it’s not known to have been used generally. It would seem this is version is playful variation on the older phrase, not its origin.
Sources:
Brown, Carleton, ed. “On Chattering in Church.” Religious Lyrics of the XVth Century. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1939, 277.
A Continuation or Second Part of the Letters from the Dead to the Living. London: 1703, 124 and 138. Eighteenth Century Collections Online.
Hamilton, Alexander. Gentleman’s Progress: The Itinerarium of Dr. Alexander Hamilton (1744). Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh Press, 1992, 83. HathiTrust Digital Archive.
The Miscellaneous and Whimsical Lucubrations of Lancelot Poverty-Struck. London: 1758, 84. Eighteenth Century Collections Online.
Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, June 2017, s.v. devil, n.; June 2008, s.v. hell, n. and int.
Smyth, W. H. and E. Belcher. The Sailor’s Word-Book (1867). Almonte, Ontario: Algrove, 2004, 245.
Wellington, Arthur Wellesley, Duke of. The Dispatches of Field Marshal the Duke of Wellington, K.G. During his Various Campaigns in India, Denmark, Portugal, Spain, the Low Countries, and France. From 1799 to 1818, vol. 8. London: John Murray, 1837, 227 and 340.