Brown" bill` (?). [Brown + bill cutting tool.]

A bill or halberd of the 16th and 17th centuries. See 4th Bill.

Many time, but for a sallet, my brainpan had been cleft with a brown bill. Shak.

⇒ The black, or as it is sometimes called, the brown bill, was a kind of halberd, the cutting part hooked like a woodman's bill, from the back of which projected a spike, and another from the head.

Grose.

 

© Webster 1913.

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