Green’s Dictionary of Slang

1. to indulge in sexual foreplay; the inference is usu. of feebleness, as exhibited by an ageing lecher.

1508		Dunbar Tua Maryit Wemen and the Wedow in Laing (1834) I 66: Yit leit I never that larbar my leggis ga betueene, To style my flesche, na fumyll me, without a fee gret.
1600		J. Weever Faunus 34: Old men do no good, Yet will be fumbling.
c.1620		Fletcher Women Pleased II vi: Be not long a fumbling, When danger shall appear, I’ll give the ‘larme’.
1637		Fletcher Elder Brother IV iv: She spits his kisses out, And now he offers to fumble she falles off.
1678		Dryden Kind Keeper I i: You will never leave these fumbling tricks, Father, till you are taken on suspicion of Manhood, and have a Bastard laid at your Door.
1687		‘The Converts’ in Lord Poems on Affairs of State (1968) IV 153: An antiquated lord / A walking mummy in a word / [...] / By pox and whores long since undone, Yet loves it still and fumbles on.
1691		‘The Vindication of Top-Knots and Commodes’ in Ebsworth Bagford Ballads (1876–78) 123: Then silly old Fops, that kiss but like popes, / And call us Night Walkers and Fairies, / Go fumble old Joan, and let us alone, / And never come near our canary’s.
1700		‘The Queen of May’ in Playford Pills to Purge Melancholy II 68: Like a Fool, I fumbled, as I had done before [...] And yet alas, did nothing else but Kiss the Queen of May.
1725		View of London & Westminster (2nd part) 35/1: [in list of prostitutes] Miss Fanny Fire, from Exeter-Exchange [Is Visited] By Sir Francis Fumble, Bar[onet] .
1779		Nocturnal Revels I 50: A Kitty Young, or a Nancy Feathers, being new faces to the fumbling Cits, they could easily be passed off for Vestals.
1786		C. Morris ‘The Great Plenipotentiary’ Collection of Songs (1788) 42: 42: A Duchess, whose Duke made her ready to puke / With fumbling and frigging all night.
a.1796		‘He Till’t & She Till’t’ in Farmer Merry Songs and Ballads (1897) II 254: The auld fumbling carl, / Soon began to nod again.
1804		T.G. Fessenden ‘Canto II’ Poems 33: The girls would have none of his fumbling, / But gave him the bag, with a slap.
1888–94		‘Walter’ My Secret Life (1966) I 146: One night as I fumbled a girl, she frigged me vigorously.
1956		‘Count P. Vicarion’ ‘The Great Plenipotentiary’ Bawdy Ballads II: [as cit. 1786].
1970		E. Thompson Garden of Sand (1981) 132: Listen, sister, don’t think I was being fooled all night. I knew what your husband was doin. I been outfumbled by guys like him before.
1980		Maledicta IV:2 (Winter) 197: Alternatively, she may like to play hot cockles or allow someone else to fumble, feel or finger-fuck her.

2. to be impotent; thus fumbling adj., impotent.

[1627		J. Taylor Armado I 77: [The] Fumb-Ling [i.e. a supposed ‘medicine’], which is for their dyets who haue beene long married and can get no children].
1659		Greene & Lodge Lady Alimony V iii: You shall play no more the sharking foist with me, you fumbling fiddler, you.
1702		T. Brown Letters from the Dead to the Living in Works (1760) II 263: Only sacrificing now and then an eleemosynary maidenhead to the fumbling of old impotency.
1714		T. Lucas Lives of the Gamesters (1930) 258: She wanted an heir to an estate, which otherwise upon her fumbling husband’s decease might have parted from her to his relations.
1734		C. Johnson Hist. of Highwaymen &c. 36: The second Wife of the Grasier, on weighing in her Mind the Difference there was between the old fumbling Husband and our Adventurer [...] fondly betrayed an excessive Desire for him.
1791		‘Brother Rook’ Willy Wood & Greedy Grizzle 20: ‘What right, she cry’d, ‘What right had he, / Poor fumbling wretch, to marry me?’.
1896		Farmer Vocabula Amatoria (1966) 30: Bandocher. To be impotent; ‘to fumble’.