I always thought of hewing as work for a broad axe. But I was thinking in terms of bigger logs. The Dogfather handled that scantling very well, and so did you, Momaw.

Thomas Tusser was an Elizabethan courtier, when he wasn’t running a manor farm. He wrote Five Hundred Points of Good Husbandry, a book of advice on successful farming. The book is written rhyming quatrains. (I did mention that he was an Elizabethan, didn’t I?) Five Hundred Points became the bible of English manor farming for the next three centuries. Tusser offered this advice on hewing:

Sell bark to the tanner, ere timber ye fell,
Cut low to the ground, else you do not do well.
In breaking save crooked, for mill or for ships,
And ever in hewing save carpenter chips.

I’m sure you will be as relieved as I was, to learn that carpenter chips are made by, not of, carpenters.