Dialectal or archaic past tense of 'fall' or a variant spelling of 'fell,' meaning to cut down or cause to fall.
From Old English feallan or fellan, dialectal variants that differ by region and time period. These older spellings persist in some regional dialects and historical texts.
Feil shows how English spelling was still somewhat flexible even in printed texts—different regions would spell the same word different ways, and none of them were technically 'wrong'!
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