Ox of Boll

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The Ox of Boll (also variously spelled Bolle, Bulle or Bull) is a figure from North British popular culture from around the mid 12th century onwards, which has given rise to a common British English term.

It is thought that Boll may be a variant of Bull, as in John Bull, a suitably generic fictional English name.

The full story of Boll and his oxen is lost, but it is clear from various authorities that one of these oxen was particularly fine (some versions have it that it had horns of gold, others that it was unusually large, still others that it had prodigious strength and was able to plough fields in half the normal time). As is to be expected the qualities of the beast subject to various examples of hyperbole, but scholars believe that the beast was probably a large one of perhaps 450-500 lb, big enough to be remarkable at the time but not exceptional today.

Based on these folk tales it became common to describe an excellent example of any item as being "as good as Boll's Ox", or "The Boll Ox". Over the years this became contracted to "the bollox", and this is still in common parlance as a measure of quality (e.g. "that car is the bollox").

The story of Boll and his ox is said to have finished with the ox being unmasked as a fraud, which may explain why "bollox" is also English slang for something of dubious veracity (e.g. "that story is bollox").

It is typical of British slang that the same term can be used in two diametrically opposed senses with, for the most part, little chance of confusion. This has evidently been the case for some time, since Chaucer in The Reeve's Prologue has Osewold saying of the Miller that "Hys bredde was as thee Bolle Ocks", clearly exploiting the possible double-meaning.

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