In medieval times a heckle, or hackle, was a comb used to split and straighten the fibres of flax; to heckle, therefore, was to dress flax. From this developed the figurative sense ‘to question someone closely in order to reveal their weak points’ and then ‘to scold’, from which the modern sense developed. A similar development is seen in the modern sense of tease, which originally meant ‘to comb wool’.