In older language you might have a faggot fence - you might know it as
picket fence - 4 foot sticks, rough cut, about 1 inch square and held
together by twisted wires top an bottom so it could be rolled up and
re-used. As you point out the sticks were "Faggots". However I think that
comes from earlier times (Shakespearian?) when faggots were also thin stick
used for firewood, and a common method for lighting other things like
candles was to pull a burning faggot out of the fire. As the flame went out
you might be left with a smoldering faggot which looked rather like a
cigarette, so one school of thought suggests that this resemblance in the
dark to a glowing stick is where the slang term came from. Interesting
though that this would most often occur after you had used a stick to light
something else, so perhaps the connection to matches is in there somewhere.

Bearing this in mind I am left to wonder where the famous Northern delicacy
"Faggots" came from - these being a sort of spicy meatball like thing in
gravy, or some approximation thereof. If you see a Lancastrian eating a
"Faggot and pea batch" it is not a form of cannibalism, it is simply a
person with no taste buds devouring a mixture of ground offal, glue made
from dead animals and laced with a portion of otherwise innocuous legume
seeds. Batch = burger style bread bun by the way.

http://www.ciao.co.uk/Mr_Brains_Pork_Faggots__5303376

As for reckoning yes, still in use.

http://www.dti.gov.uk/er/redundancy/ready.htm

The original "Ready Reckoner" was a small book similar to log tables in
which money, weights and measures were tabulated in fractions and multiples,
and every respectable household had one :)

Charlie