1) A word formerly common over a wide area, said to mean a narrow passage or alley.
It survives in minor place-names such as Twitchill Farm in the Derbyshire parish of Hope, on record from 1376, and in Nottingham where a street was described as the common twechell in 1435. It is considered to be from an Old English word twicen which is a derivative of ‘two’, descriptive of the fork between two roads, perhaps at a junction or cross roads. That does not exactly fit the meaning in Yorkshire where it referred in the earliest records to pieces of arable land. A Flockton deed of 1311 describes a holding ‘in the fields of Floketon’ lying in the place called le Thwychel, between lands held by Baldwin le Tyas on one side and John the Miller on the other
the same two men are referred to again in 1343 when half an acre of arable lay in different parts of ‘the place called Twechill’. Similarly, two Byland Abbey charters mention a ‘culture’ called Twychel in the period 1204-9: this was said to lie ‘in the region of Denby’. That reference is to the Denby on Grange Moor which would have been very close to Flockton, but there is nothing in the records which directly links the two localities. Other Yorkshire examples are the ‘land called Twytchill’ in Bradfield in 1568, and Twitch Hill in Horbury.