Page:Notes and Queries - Series 10 - Volume 11.djvu/235

 10 s. XL MAR. 6, 1909.] NOTES AND QUERIES.

191

New S 1 " ; and in " New Remarks of London, collected by the Company of Parish-Clerks," 1732, it is merely named, with six other Falcon Courts in different parts of the town. It is marked in Ogilby and Morgan's map of 1677. Perhaps I need hardly add that many sculptured signs were put up in London after the Great Fire. Several still in existence have on them the dates 1668, 1669, and 1670, but I cannot call to mind another dated 1671. PHILIP NOBMAN.

Falcon Court, Shoe Lane, is given in W. Stow's ' Stranger's Guide,' circa 1721. It is liable to be confused with Falcon Court on the south side of Fleet Street.

J. HOLDEN MACMlCHAEL.

RATTLESNAKE COLONEL : THE RATTLE- SNAKE EMBLEM (10 S. x. 189 ; xi. 17, 135). This " Rattlesnake Colonel," identified by MB. MATTHEWS (ante, p. 17) as Col. Thomas Cresap, was an experienced frontiersman living on the western outskirts of Maryland, and not long before the date of Mrs. Browne's visit he had been occupied in blazing for the new Ohio Company that trail over the mountains and through the wilderness which became the historic highway known, among other appellations, as " Braddock's Road " and the " Cumberland Pike " the trail so soon 'to be followed by Washington on the expedition that set the fires of war alight. In such a life, no doubt Col. Cresap had had enough encounters with rattle- snakes to justify a designation akin to that of "Buffalo Bill" to-day; but in fact the epithet was no more a merely personal one than Whig or Tory would have been at a later period.

Before the thought of rupture with the mother country had even a whispered expression, there was a growing unrest among the Colonists that was shown, among other ways, in the popularity of the rattlesnake emblem, particularly in the middle Colonies. It seems to have arisen in a suggestion made in April, 1751, in The Pennsylvania Gazette, Benjamin Franklin's paper, following a trenchant editorial written on the occasion of a trial for murder com- mitted by a convict transported from Eng- land, wherein England was arraigned for the practice of transporting convicts to per- petrate villainies in the Colonies. In a succeeding issue of the paper a correspondent commented on the editorial, and made the sarcastic suggestion that in reprisal the Colonists should send over " a cargo of

rattlesnakes " to be distributed about the parks and gardens of England. The vivid Colonial imagination seized upon this figure, and it was not quickly forgetten. In 1754 the same Gazette, in an endeavour to in- fluence the Colonies to act in concert against the Indians and their French abettors, was headed by the device of a sinuous rattle- snake cut into pieces, each marked with the initial of a colony, and with the motto, " Join or die." In later years, when the contest with England was fairly faced, many newspapers adopted this device, changing its motto to " Unite or die," and, as is well known, the rattlesnake, showing thir- teen rattles, and either coiled to strike or stretched as if in motion toward its prey with the motto " Don't tread on me " was the device on many a flag that was carried by a brigade, or, especially, was used in the navy. On a plate depicting the devices on fifteen flags in use between 1775 and 1777, five of them show rattlesnakes. In the uniforms for the navy adopted at Boston in 1777, that ordered for the " post- captains " had " the figure of a rattlesnake embroidered on the straps of the epaulettes, with the motto ' Don't tread on me,' ' and waistcoat buttons showing the same device and motto.

But in 1755 Col. Cresap's cognomen doubt- less indicated his interest in and connexion with the incipient French and Indian con- test, including his probable advocacy of the co-operation toward which Franklin's severed-rattlesnake device had been prompt- ing especially the Pennsylvanians and Mary- landers ; and the extract from Mrs. Browne's journal which MB. MALLESON cites in his query is extremely interesting in showing how far the influence of the rattlesnake emblem had then gone, as evidenced in nicknames familiar even to a visitor.

But a variant explanation is possible. Instead of repeating popular phraseology, Mrs. Browne or her friends, looking upon the Colonists from the superior English view-point of that day, may have used the epithet in this and other cases as a half- contemptuous, half-humorous equivalent for " Colonial," on the jocular theory that if Franklin's severed rattlesnake could repre- sent the Colonies, then an untrained Colonial colonel must be "a Rattlesnake Colonel." The general tone of Mrs. Browne's journal would, perhaps, show whether this sup- position may be true.

I may add that most of these facts about the emblem, with many more, are found in Rear-Admiral's Preble's ' The Flag of the