Dagger guard, design by Hans Holbein the Younger

A bollock dagger or ballock knife is a type of

dagger A dagger is a fighting knife with a very sharp point and usually two sharp edges, typically designed or capable of being used as a thrusting or stabbing weapon.State v. Martin, 633 S.W.2d 80 (Mo. 1982): This is the dictionary or popular-use de ...

with a distinctively shaped hilt, with two oval swellings at the guard resembling male testes (" bollocks"). The guard is often in one piece with the wooden grip, and reinforced on top with a shaped metal washer. The dagger was popular in Scandinavia, Flanders, Wales, Scotland and England between the 13th and 18th centuries, in particular the

Tudor period The Tudor period occurred between 1485 and 1603 in England and Wales and includes the Elizabethan period during the reign of Elizabeth I until 1603. The Tudor period coincides with the dynasty of the House of Tudor in England that began with t ...

. Within Britain the bollock dagger was commonly carried, including by

Border Reivers Border reivers were raiders along the Anglo-Scottish border from the late 13th century to the beginning of the 17th century. They included both Scottish and English people, and they raided the entire border country without regard to their v ...

, as a backup for the lance and the sword. Many such weapons were found aboard the wreck of the ''

Mary Rose The ''Mary Rose'' (launched 1511) is a carrack-type warship of the English Tudor navy of King Henry VIII. She served for 33 years in several wars against France, Scotland, and Brittany. After being substantially rebuilt in 1536, she saw her ...

''. The bollock dagger is the predecessor to the Scottish

dirk A dirk is a long bladed thrusting dagger.Chisholm, Hugh (ed.), ''Dagger'', The Encyclopædia Britannica, 11th ed., Vol. VII, New York, NY: Cambridge University Press (1910), p. 729 Historically, it gained its name from the Highland Dirk (Scot ...

. In the Victorian period, weapon historians introduced the term kidney dagger, due to the two lobes at the guard, which could also be seen as kidney-shaped, in order to avoid any sexual connotation. The hilt was often constructed of

box A box (plural: boxes) is a container used for the storage or transportation of its contents. Most boxes have flat, parallel, rectangular sides. Boxes can be very small (like a matchbox) or very large (like a shipping box for furniture), and ca ...

root (dudgeon) in the 16th and 17th centuries, and the dagger was sometimes called a dudgeon dagger or dudgeonhafted dagger in this period. The dagger first started appearing on continental

effigies An effigy is an often life-size sculptural representation of a specific person, or a prototypical figure. The term is mostly used for the makeshift dummies used for symbolic punishment in political protests and for the figures burned in certai ...

around 1300–1350, and has one of the longest usage periods of any of the five main types of medieval daggers.

References

External links

Spotlight: The Ballock Dagger
(myArmoury.com article)
Mary Rose Trust
Daggers Blade weapons {{UK-hist-stub