We have also many surnames due to physical resemblances not extending beyond one feature. Birdseye may be sometimes of local origin, from ey, island (Chapter XII), but as a genuine nickname it is as natural as the sobriquet of Hawkeye which Natty Bumppo received from the Hurons. German has the much less pleasing Gansauge, goose-eye; and Alan Oil de larrun, thief's eye, was fined for very reprehensible conduct in 1183. To explain Crowfoot as an imitative variant of Crawford is absurd when we find a dozen German surnames of the same class and formation and as many in Old or Modern French beginning with pied de. Cf. Pettigrew (Chapter XXI) and Sheepshanks. We find in the Paris Directory not only Piedeleu (Old Fr. leu, wolf) and Piedoie (oie, goose), but even the full Pied-de-Lièvre, Professeur à la Faculté de droit. The name Bulleid was spelt in the sixteenth century bul-hed, i.e. bull-head, a literal rendering of Front de Boeuf. Weatherhead (Chapter XIX) is perhaps usually a nickname
"For that old weather-headed fool, I know how to laugh at him."
(Congreve, Love for Love, ii. 7.)
Coxhead is another obvious nickname. A careful analysis of some of the most important medieval name-lists would furnish hundreds of further examples, some too outspoken to have survived into our degenerate age, and others which are now so corrupted that their original vigour is quite lost.
Puns and jokes upon proper names are, pace Gregory the Great and Shakespeare, usually very inept and stupid; but the following lines by James Smith, which may be new to some of my readers, are really clever—
Men once were surnamed from their shape or estate
(You all may from History worm it);
There was Lewis the Bulky, and Henry the Great,
John Lackland, and Peter the Hermit.