1) A stall in a cow-house.
Although this term finds no place in most dictionaries its meaning has been discussed by several writers who agree that it referred to the stalls in a cow-house. For Stanley Ellis, the skell-bewse was the boarded wall at the head of the stall, through which there was access to the mewsteead and that was also the opinion expressed by Marie Hartley and Joan Ingilby. In both these accounts a drawing showed the position the skell-boose occupied. That appears to differ from the definition offered by Canon Atkinson who defined it in his Cleveland Glossary, under the heading skel-beast, as ‘a boarded partition between stall and stall’. The distinction may be one of chronology or geography but as recently as 1985, Miss Annie Walker of Slaithwaite in the West Riding said that her family used the word for ‘the divisions between the beasts in the mistal’. Early references confirm that it was made of wood but they do nothing to further clarify the meaning: 1362 ‘Megota broke burnt and destroyed one Skelbose’, Yeadon
1456-7 In repar. de Skelbuse per Wm Horner xxd, Fountains Abbey. On other occasions it was used in contexts that link it with other wooden objects and place it in a barn or cow-house: 1570 horse hecke and skelbuses
1571 skelboises with the horse crib and the manger .