The Rude Nicknames That Show How Cultures Mixed in 1066

Some of the nicknames people used around the year 1066 are rude enough that a history magazine can build a headline out of them: a word for a man's private parts, a word for a child born outside marriage, and a nickname about a large bottom. Those nicknames are not just a joke. They are leftovers from a country where English, Scandinavian and Norman people were living together, marrying each other and getting each other's names wrong.

Swannecks, Hard Rulers and Fair Ladies

In the 11th century a person often carried a second name, a byname, that said something about them. Harold Godwinson's unofficial wife was known as Edith Swanneshals, or Swanneck. A woman in the same world was recorded in Domesday Book as Edeva Pulchra, meaning The Fair; she was listed as being incredibly rich, and the two are often assumed to be the same person, though that is by no means certain.

Men carried the same kind of label. The Norwegian king who attacked England in 1066 was Harald Hardrada, Hard Ruler. Earlier English kings had them too: Æthelred the Unready and Eadwig All-Fair. Bynames were everyday words about looks, bodies and character, handed out by the people who knew you.

One Name, Several Queens

The Bayeux Tapestry, the famous embroidery of the conquest, carries only 15 names, and just one of them belongs to a woman. She is labelled ÆLFGYVA, or Ælfgifu, and nobody knows who she was. Part of the reason is that the name was extremely common. Three English queens had been called Ælfgifu by the turn of that century: the wives of Edmund I (ruled 939–46), Eadwig All-Fair (r. 955–59) and Æthelred the Unready (r. 978–1013 and 1014–16). The embroidery shows a naked figure in the border below her, which may hint at a scandal.

When Æthelred married Emma of Normandy, the great-aunt of William the Conqueror, she was given a new English name: Ælfgifu. After Æthelred died she switched sides and married England's new Danish king, Cnut, in 1017, replacing his earlier wife, who was also called Ælfgifu. Harold Godwinson had a sister called Ælfgifu as well. Any of these women could be the one named in the embroidery.

Names That Sounded Alike

By the 11th century several names had come to sound similar:

• Eadgyth (Edith)
• Eadgifu (Edeva)
• Ealdgyth (Aldith)
• Ealdgifu (Aldeva)

Norman scribes writing down unfamiliar English names made the muddle worse, and later writers merged them all into the single modern name Edith. That confusion is still with us. In the 2025 BBC drama King and Conqueror, three women called Edith were renamed so viewers would not be lost: Edith Swanneck kept her forename, Edith of Wessex became Gunhild, and Edith of Mercia became Margaret. The irony is that they may not all have shared that name in the first place.

Something similar happened with the men. Hastings was the last of three big battles that decided England's fate in 1066, and the two rival kings at the centre of events carried almost the same name: Harold Godwinson and Harald Hardrada. The Viking raids that began in the eighth century were dramatic, but it was the long-term settling down and intermarrying of English natives and Scandinavian newcomers that left the deepest mark. Scandinavian names became widely used across England.

So the rude nickname, the duplicated queen and the byname about a bottom all survive from the same tangle of peoples and languages.