That should be "Counsell" in my earlier post. I'm getting lots of missed characters with this keyboard!

He was quite a character himself, always with a tale to tell.

He also had another one which my late father was trying to research. It had four or possibly five verses and listed bread, cheese, beer and meat(?) in one line of each verse, each verse being about one of them. They may have been listed in a different order in each verse.