Hatchel

1. n. An instrument with long iron teeth set in a board, for cleansing flax or hemp from the tow, hards, or coarse part; a kind of large comb; — called also hackle and heckle.
2. n. To draw through the teeth of a hatchel, as flax or hemp, so as to separate the coarse and refuse parts from the fine, fibrous parts.

The word meanings were obtained from OPTED(The Online Plain Text English Dictionary), which is based on “The Project Gutenberg Etext of Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary” which is in turn based on the 1913 US Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary (See Project Gutenburg), as a text file.