# Bæddel and bædling
**Bæddel** and **bædling** are two obscure [Old English](https://www.edgepedia.org/old-english) terms that appear to refer to categories of sex, gender, or sexuality outside the norm of Anglo-Saxon England, although their precise meanings are debated by scholars[1](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/379577188_Religion_and_Trans_Literature). Both words survive only in learned contexts, glossaries and a penitential (church handbook listing sins and their required penances), and their rarity has made their interpretation one of the contested questions in the study of sexuality in early medieval England[2](https://pase.ac.uk/domesday/name/2682/).
| Key fact | Detail |
|---|---|
| Attestations | *Bæddel* occurs twice in surviving texts; *bædling* appears four times[1](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/379577188_Religion_and_Trans_Literature) |
| *Bæddel* glosses | Latin *homo utriusque generis* ('man of both sexes') and *Hermafroditus*, the latter alongside Old English *wæpenwifestre* ('weaponed-woman')[1](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/379577188_Religion_and_Trans_Literature) |
| *Bædling* glosses | Latin *molles* ('soft, effeminate person'), *Effeminati molles*, and *Cariar*[1](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/379577188_Religion_and_Trans_Literature) • [3](https://bosworthtoller.com/39415) |
| Penitential source | The Old English Canons of Theodore, probably composed in the eighth century, prescribe penances for sex involving a *bædling*[4](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/302920010_The_Pejoration_ofGaedeling_From_Old_Germanic_Consanguinity_to_Middle_English_Vulgarity) • [3](https://bosworthtoller.com/39415) |
| Scholarly reading of *bæddel* | Most scholars take it to mean "hermaphrodite", a medieval category close to the modern concept of intersex[1](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/379577188_Religion_and_Trans_Literature) |
| Etymology | The Oxford English Dictionary treats *bæddel* as perhaps related to Modern English *bad*, an etymology whose direction of derivation is disputed[5](https://blog.oup.com/2015/07/history-word-bad-origin-etymology-3-dutch/) |
| As a personal name | *Bædling* is recorded in Domesday Book (spellings Bedling, Bellinc) as the name of a landowner before the Conquest[2](https://pase.ac.uk/domesday/name/2682/) |
## Attestations
The two words are known from a handful of glosses and one legal-pastoral text. In one glossary, *bædle* renders the Latin phrase *homo utriusque generis*, "man of both sexes"; in a second, both *bædle* and *wæpenwifestre*, literally "weaponed-woman", gloss *Hermafroditus*[1](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/379577188_Religion_and_Trans_Literature).
*Bædling* has a slightly wider footprint. It translates *molles*, a Latin term for a soft or effeminate person, in one text; glosses *Effeminati molles* ("effeminate soft ones") in another; and glosses *Cariar* in a third, a word that may allude to Caria, the region of Turkey whose spring Salmacis was mythically connected with the blurring of male and female[1](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/379577188_Religion_and_Trans_Literature). The Bosworth-Toller dictionary defines *bædling* as "an effeminate person; mollis ( = qui alterius fornicationem sustinet)" and cites the gloss *bædling* over *cariar* in the Würtzburg Vocabulary[3](https://bosworthtoller.com/39415).
## The penitential context
The most substantive source is the Old English translation of the *Poenitentiale Theodori* (the Canons of Theodore), a penitential probably composed during the eighth century[4](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/302920010_The_Pejoration_ofGaedeling_From_Old_Germanic_Consanguinity_to_Middle_English_Vulgarity). Its canon reads: "Sé ðe mid bædlinge hǽme, oððe mid óðrum wǽpnedmen, fæste .x. winter" (he who has sex with a *bædling*, or with another man, shall fast ten years), and continues that sodomitical acts carry a seven-year fast, asking further what penance applies "gif se bædling mid bædlinge hǽme", if a *bædling* has sex with a *bædling*[3](https://bosworthtoller.com/39415).
On the basis of these canons, the historians Allen Frantzen and David Clark agree on the existence of the "bædling" as a category indicating an effeminate man who often had sex with other men[6](https://www.imc.leeds.ac.uk/imcarchive/2013/sessions/512/). In her survey of this work, Clark's analysis is summarized as positing a continuum of sexuality from "manly-men" at one extreme, through effeminate men, to women and children at the other; among these weaker men, the *bædling* would be ostracized for his choice to take the passive role, which the term signifies in the penitential[7](https://www.oenewsletter.org/OEN/archive/OEN44_2.pdf).
## Meaning and interpretation
The two terms carry different scholarly readings. Most scholars, including Clark and R. D. Fulk, take *bæddel* to mean "hermaphrodite", an offensive word whose primary medieval meaning seems close to the modern category of intersex[1](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/379577188_Religion_and_Trans_Literature). *Bædling*, by contrast, seems to designate a gender-non-normative person, and one recent study argues it also carried a ethnic implication through its association with the gloss *Cariar*[1](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/379577188_Religion_and_Trans_Literature).
The rarity of the words shapes what can be said about them. Both occur only in glossaries and a penitential, which has led the Prosopography of Anglo-Saxon England to observe that they look like words coined for the occasion, or specialized applications of words with other meanings in ordinary usage[2](https://pase.ac.uk/domesday/name/2682/). A dissertation by Colleen Ann Reilly of Purdue University, using semantic-field analysis of early medieval English terminology, found that while some writers began to associate sexual relations between men with a particular category of person by the [Middle English](https://www.edgepedia.org/middle-english) period, there was still no clear connection between a male's gender and his sexual object choice[8](https://docs.lib.purdue.edu/dissertations/AAI9914544/).
The word also left traces on its neighbors. One study of the Old English kinship term *gædeling* argues that its pejoration was reinforced by its rhyme with *bædling*, a taboo word; taboo words tend to affect the status of phonetically similar words, and since *bædling* is attested in the eighth-century Canons of Theodore, this pressure could have begun early in the Anglo-Saxon period[4](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/302920010_The_Pejoration_ofGaedeling_From_Old_Germanic_Consanguinity_to_Middle_English_Vulgarity).
## Etymology and the word "bad"
The [Oxford English Dictionary](https://www.edgepedia.org/oxford-english-dictionary) treats *bæddel* as perhaps related to [Modern English](https://www.edgepedia.org/modern-english) *bad*, and the connection has been debated for over a century[5](https://blog.oup.com/2015/07/history-word-bad-origin-etymology-3-dutch/). The etymologist Anatoly Liberman, professor emeritus at the [University of Minnesota](https://www.edgepedia.org/university-of-minnesota) and author of *An Analytic Dictionary of English Etymology*, notes that before *bade*, the earliest recorded form of *bad*, surfaced in a Middle English text of 1297, it appeared as part of proper names, including the form Badde[5](https://blog.oup.com/2015/07/history-word-bad-origin-etymology-3-dutch/). Liberman argues against deriving *bad* as a back-formation from *bæddel*; in his view, *bæddel* ("a bad man") was formed from an older baby word *bæd*, which in Old English remained outside literature, the standard adjective for "bad" being *yfel*, the ancestor of "evil"[5](https://blog.oup.com/2015/07/history-word-bad-origin-etymology-3-dutch/). The linguist Richard Coates, in a 1988 article on "Middle English badde and related puzzles", derived *bæddel* and *bædling* from a hypothetical Old English *badde*, possibly meaning "worthless"[2](https://pase.ac.uk/domesday/name/2682/). An earlier textbook account by T. A. Waldron related *bad* to *bæddel* ("hermaphrodite") and *bædling* ("effeminate person") and suggested the root word meant "imperfect, undeveloped in growth", a narrower sense than today's[9](https://theses.gla.ac.uk/39019/1/1996OwerMPhil.pdf).
William Sayers, a scholar of medieval Celtic and English philology, examined the question in a 2019 article in *ANQ* titled "The Etymologies of Old English *Bædling* 'Sodomite' and Modern English *Bad*", which cites the Old English translation of the *Poenitentiale Theodori* as the key attestation[10](https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/0895769X.2019.1573132).
## Bædling as a name
Despite its pejorative glosses, *Bædling* also existed as a masculine personal name. The Prosopography of Anglo-Saxon England records a landowner named Bædling holding land tempore Regis Edwardi (before the [Norman Conquest](https://www.edgepedia.org/norman-conquest)), entered in [Domesday Book](https://www.edgepedia.org/domesday-book) under the spellings Bedling and Bellinc[2](https://pase.ac.uk/domesday/name/2682/). Olof von Feilitzen, in his 1937 study of the pre-Conquest personal names of Domesday Book, took the name to be a nickname formed from the noun *bædling*, meaning "an effeminate man, a homosexual"; the PASE discussion cautions that the insult of effeminacy stretches credibility as a name for a man of high social standing, and notes that the northern English dialect word *badling*, "a worthless person, a good-for-nothing", is arguably a more plausible source for a nickname[2](https://pase.ac.uk/domesday/name/2682/). PASE concludes that the meaning of the name cannot be resolved with complete satisfaction, but that it clearly existed[2](https://pase.ac.uk/domesday/name/2682/).
## References
1. [The Bæddel and the Bædling: Old English Gender Categories?, in "Religion and Trans Literature" (ResearchGate)](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/379577188_Religion_and_Trans_Literature)
2. [Bædling, Prosopography of Anglo-Saxon England, Domesday name 2682](https://pase.ac.uk/domesday/name/2682/)
3. [bædling, in Bosworth-Toller, An Anglo-Saxon Dictionary Online (Charles University, Prague)](https://bosworthtoller.com/39415)
4. [The Pejoration of Gædeling: From Old Germanic Consanguinity to Middle English Vulgarity (ResearchGate)](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/302920010_The_Pejoration_ofGaedeling_From_Old_Germanic_Consanguinity_to_Middle_English_Vulgarity)
5. [Anatoly Liberman, "The history of the word 'bad', Chapter 3", OUPblog, 15 July 2015](https://blog.oup.com/2015/07/history-word-bad-origin-etymology-3-dutch/)
6. [Session 512, International Medieval Congress archive, Leeds (2013)](https://www.imc.leeds.ac.uk/imcarchive/2013/sessions/512/)
7. [Old English Newsletter, Volume 44, Number 1 & 2 (review discussing Clark on bædling)](https://www.oenewsletter.org/OEN/archive/OEN44_2.pdf)
8. [Colleen Ann Reilly, "Interrogating the boundaries of masculine gender: A study of early medieval English texts", Purdue University dissertation](https://docs.lib.purdue.edu/dissertations/AAI9914544/)
9. [MPhil thesis, University of Glasgow, discussing Waldron on bad, bæddel, and bædling](https://theses.gla.ac.uk/39019/1/1996OwerMPhil.pdf)
10. [William Sayers, "The Etymologies of Old English Bædling 'Sodomite' and Modern English Bad", ANQ 33.1 (2020), pp. 9–11](https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/0895769X.2019.1573132)
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