Note E453 — 90.
Reading edition
The Skreene was a wooden settee or settle, with a high back sufficient to screen the sitters from the outward air, and was in the time of our ancestors an invariable article of furniture near all kitchen fires, and is still seen in the kitchens of many of our old farm-houses in Cheshire. The meaning of the two lines:
"If ploughman get hatchet or whip to the skreene, maides loseth their cock if no water be seene,"
is, "if the ploughman can get his whip, ploughstaff, hatchet, or anything he wants in the field to the fireside (screen being here equivalent to fireside) before the maid has got her kettle on, then she loses her Shrove-tide cock, which belongs wholly to the men."