An old Wexford friend of mine, Paddy Murphy, the Enniscorthy potter, died recently. Years ago David Shaw-Smith made a beautiful film about him and I helped out as best I could with the script. The last time I met him Paddy gave me some words connected with his craft and advised me to collect words that belong to other crafts near extinction, that of cooper, for example.
Prof Gordon Quin of Trinity College Dublin, members of whose family were coopers in Guinness's brewery, gave me a few words of his father's. One of them was skeel. You'll find it in many of the glossaries of English and Scots dialects; the Concise Ulster Dictionary has a few skeels but not this one.
It is described in various glossaries as a wooden pail, wooden bucket, a tub, a shallow wooden vessel. In Durham it was described as a peculiarly shaped bucket, formerly used in colliery villages to carry water for household use. They were carried on women's heads, and a piece of wood was made to float on the top to prevent overspills.
In the farms around Shakespeare's birthplace, the butter skeel was used for working the butter in by pressing it with the hand, as the dough skeel was used for kneading bread by hand. In Gloucestershire skeels were used for setting milk in, to stand for cream; Marshall's Rural Economy (1789) informs us the skeels were made in the tub manner, with staves and hoops, and two stave handles, and that they were various sizes, from 18 in to 2 ft 6 in in diameter, and from 5 to 7 in deep. In both Gloucestershire and Northumberland the skeel was also used to cool beer.
What it was used for in Guinness's long ago, I'm afraid I've forgotten. At any rate skeel has been associated with Viking ale for a long time. The Old Norse was skjola, a wooden bucket.
And how about this for a survivor? Down in the Lobster Pot in Carne, my favourite Wexford watering hole, an old man once asked me to teach him his pint. He wanted me to reach across and to hand it to him. Teach is from Old English taecan, in the meaning "to show something to somebody".
That was 30 years ago. I doubt if the old word has survived modernity's baneful influences.