Not far from where I live in Wicklow I heard a farmer use the verb chavel. He was speaking about the damage rats did to his store of oats; they had chavelled in under the floorboards, and then they had chavelled the oats. The dialect dictionaries tell me that the word, which means to gnaw, nibble, tear with the teeth, is confined to Yorkshire, Derbyshire, Lincolnshire and Leicestershire, and even the great English Dialect Dictionary failed to find the word here in Ireland. But in Wexford, Wicklow and Carlow I've heard horsemen speak of an animal chavelling the bit.
None of my Irish informants has come across the English dialect chavellings, the fragments of what has been gnawed or nibbled, or chavvelment, "the ill-formed utterance of a toothless person". The verbal noun, chavelling, chattering, "jawing", is found in The Owl and the Nightingale, which dates from before 1250; it has, "mid chavling and mid chatere." I was glad to find that D. H. Lawrence had no scruples about using this old dialect word in The White Peacock: "The bracken lay sere under the trees, broken and chavelled by the restless wild winds of the long winter."
Chavel is from Middle English chauel, the jaw, jowl, cheek, itself from Old English ceafl.
God rest John Doyle, the miller of Old Ross, Co Wexford, who died recently in his 90s. Not long before he died he sent me some old milling words. One was fleam, a mill race. I had heard this in my youth in St Mullins, Co Carlow, where there was a milling tradition dating back 1,300 years, to the time when St Moling comforted the dying Suibhne, the hard pressed king of Dal nAraide, near his own fleam by the Barrow. Heaney has given us a beautiful translation of the medieval story, as no doubt you know. At any rate, fleam is from Middle English flum, from Latin flumen, a river. This appears to be the oldest meaning of the word. A manuscript from 1300, St Margarete, refers to "the fleme iurdan" (Jordan). Later, perhaps about 1500, the word came to be used specifically of a mill race. Fitzherbert's Survey of 1523 speaks of a "mylne fleme made with mens hande."
I was in St Mullins recently. Sad to relate, the little river that fed both Moling's mill and, in my time, Odlum's (now, thankfully, to be preserved), rushed down into the lovely Barrow in eddies of pernicious, bubbling, white foam. Does anybody care?