In the York Castle Museum some 20 years ago I saw some bills (arms) that were obviously derived from bills (tools) - by the addition of spikes and hooks welded to the body. For information below is part of an essay I wrote on the derivation of the word billhook. (Note the Italian for billhook is roncola, although other words are used in different regions)
The origins of the word for billhook and those for other edge tools, allows us to trace their ancestry, or that of the peoples that make up the country where they are found. The word ‘billhook’ although frequently used today was not in common usage until the mid to late 19th century. It is used in Francis Blakie’s ‘A treatise on Hedges and the Management of Hedgerow Timber’ in 1828, but rarely in John Claudius Loudon’s ‘Encyclopaedia of Farming’ (1829) or Encyclopaedia of Gardening’ (1830), and not in Henry Stephens’ ‘The Book of The Farm’ (1852). Both these latter authors use the more common term hedge-bill or hedging bill, or just the word bill (also switching bill and cutting bill) as did Samuel Johnson in his 1773 ‘Dictionary of the English Language’. Early catalogues, such as Joseph Smith’s ‘Explanation or Key to the Manufactories of Sheffield’ (1816) also used the term ‘bill’ (and reserve ‘hook’ for reaping hooks, pruning hooks and furze hooks). Generally hedge-bill refers to a long handled bill, used with two hands (c.f. a slasher) and a bill for one-handed use is called a hand-bill.
The word billhook(1), sometimes and, in my opinion, erroneously written as two words, bill hook, or joined with a hyphen as bill-hook, is shown in OED the as having the following origin:
Bill-hook: (bi-l,huk) 1611 [f. bill sb.1 ] A heavy thick knife or chopper with a hooked end, used for pruning etc.
Bill: (bil) sb.1 [OE. bil = OS. bil, OHG bil (MHG. ; but G. bille fem., axe) :- WGme. bilja 1. A kind of sword mentioned in OE. poetry. 2. An obsolete weapon carried by soldiers and watchmen varying in form from a concave blade with a long handle, to a kind of concave axe with a spike at the back and its shaft ending in a spearhead; a halberd ME. 3. Short for BILLMAN 1495. 4. An implement having a long blade with a concave edge (cf. BILL-HOOK), used for pruning, cutting wood etc. OE. 5. A pickaxe - 1483.
The earliest known reference in the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), above, is 1611, and for a synonym, hook-bill, it is 1613. Shakespeare ca 1580 to 1600 used bill (Richard 111 1,4; Romeo and Juliet 1,1 & As you like it 1,2), and his less well known contemporary Sir Philip Sidney in ‘The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia’ ca 1580 also used bill; hedging bill and forest bill.
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