Eyes on the Ball(s): Testicle Nicknames in Early Medieval England

We return this week to the endlessly amusing, and often entirely incomprehensible, nicknames of early medieval England

We’ve seen previously how many early medieval English nicknames can be both shocking and offensive. Nicknames can often also reference the physical body - limbs, organs, hair, size. But there’s one particularly interesting sub-section of nicknames that synthesise these two groupings together: nicknames that appear to reference testicles.

These testicle nicknames are relatively frequent in early medieval England. There are two straight-forward examples. Lewin Balloe (‘testicle’) is recorded as a burgess of Winchester during the reign of king Edward the Confessor, in the first survey of the Winton Domesday written c. 1110.¹ In the same text an individual named simply Balloc appears holding a tenement alongside a man named Edwacer; this is presumably the same individual, and is important evidence for a process of simplification employed by scribes, by which an individual might be referred to solely by their nickname if mentioned more than once.² In Lincoln, we find the moneyer Matathan Balluc minting coins during the reigns of Cnut and Harald Harefoot (‘hare’s foot); when moneyer’s names appear on coins, they are relatively frequently accompanied by some form of nickname.³

There are also two other, presumably more metaphorical, examples. Humphrey Aurei Testiculi (‘golden testicles’), who appears misappropriated one hide of land in Plesingho (Essex) from a free man in Domesday Book, is perhaps our most famous example.⁴ Alfred Taddebelloc (‘toad testicles’) held a single tenement outside the West Gate of Winchester during the reign of Edward the Confessor.⁵

This all begs one rather obvious question: why? (also, why didn’t I do a real PhD like physics or chemistry or something…)

David Postles has suggested nicknames that refer to testicles may have been intended to criticise aspects of sexuality; perhaps promiscuity, or ‘unacceptable’ expression of sexuality.⁶ Certainly, it is clear from a wealth of studies into naming from a broad range of cultures, that nicknames often act to shame individuals who step outside of established norms.⁷ We see lots of possible examples of this in early medieval England; in the Suffolk section of Domesday Book we find an individual named simply Malus uicinus (‘bad neighbour’), who must have been a pain to live alongside.⁸

Their allusions could perhaps be more positive, gesturing towards masculinity, fertility, or general virility. We see plenty of nickname references to macho characteristics and ability in war - is this a similar metaphor? Or perhaps they might reference a medical condition; individuals whose nicknames mention a single body part - as in the case of Ælfstan Ære (‘ear’) in the Feudal Book of Abbot Baldwin⁹ - are often understood to represent some kind of impairment.

It’s not impossible, of course, that to translate these nicknames as denoting testicles is misleading. Redin suggests that the nickname Balloc instead comes from a ‘Celtic’ first name, and that when it appears after another name it is acting as a patronymic.¹⁰ Smart’s suggestion that Matathan Ballluc’s name instead represents the Irish for ‘boy, young fellow’ is not impossible given that his first name is Irish in origin.¹¹ But Redin bases his conclusion on a squeamish assumption, popular among many older texts, that the very Sensible and Serious people of the past couldn’t have possibly has such silly and childish nicknames - I must say, I disagree with this conclusion!

Let’s just be glad that, unlike other nicknames from this period, these testicle nicknames have not become modern hereditary surnames.

If you’d like to help pay my bills (or buy me gluten-free beer), you can donate here. But you don’t need to - everything here is free!

1. ‘The Winton Domesday’, ed. and trans. F. Barlow in M. Biddle (ed.), Winchester in the Early Middle Ages: An Edition and Discussion of the Winton Domesday (Oxford, 1976), 31-142, at 43.

2.  ‘The Winton Domesday’, ed. and trans. Biddle, 54.

3. ‘EMC 1013.175’, ‘EMC 1027.0429’, ‘EMC 1014.1751’, EMC 1001.0787’,

‘EMC 1051.083’, ‘EMC 1040.0312’, https://emc.fitzmuseum.cam.ac.uk/

(Accessed 17 May 2022).

4. LDB 100b (Essex 90:30).

5. The Winton Domesday’, ed. and trans. Biddle, 50.

6. D. Postles, ‘'Oneself as Another' and Middle English Bynames’, Nomina 22/1 (1999), 117-32, at 119-20. Postles’ work on medieval onomastics is outstanding, and criminally under-referenced - a selection of his work can be found online for free on his website here http://www.historicalresources.myzen.co.uk/

7. Perhaps my favourite study of the social role of nicknames is found in J. Morgan, C. O’Neill and R. Harré, Nicknames: Their Origins and Social Consequences (London, 1979).

8. GDB 447b (Suffolk 76:1).

9. Feudal Documents from the Abbey of Bury St. Edmunds, ed. D. C. Douglas (München, 1981), 33.

10. M. Redin, Studies on Uncompounded Personal Names in Old English (Uppsala, 1919), 153.

11. V. Smart, ‘Osulf Thein and Others: Double Moneyers’ Names on the Late Anglo-Saxon Coinage’ in K. Jonsson (ed.), Studies in Anglo-Saxon Coinage (Stockholm, 1990), 435-53, 444.