> "He cut the throat of the goat with a knife, which is the most kind way to do it,"
Not everyone with a homestead does that though. I know it's the traditional Jewish and Islamic way of doing things but it's cruel to drown an animal in its own blood or letting it die slowly from blood loss when you could just disable the brain in an instant.
As with many other archaic words in English, I'm guessing that "Swind" and "Swynde" came from Scandinavia and Germany where they've kept their old meaning to this day: