haircloth

plural haircloths

1. countableuncountableA coarse cloth made of the mane or tail hairs of a horse, associated with furniture upholstery, and with uncomfortable clothing worn by people practising religious asceticism.

   A buttoned hair-cloth lounge spread scrolling arms / Under a crayon portrait on the wall / Done sadly from an old daguerreotype.

   1914, Robert Frost, “The Black Cottage”, in North of Boston, page 53

   4 more examples

   And amongst these, there are some so rigidly Religious, that their upper Garment is hair-Cloth, their inner of the finest Linnen; and on the contrary, others wear Linnen without, and hair next their skins:

   1668, Desiderius Erasmus, translated by John Wilson, The Praise of Folly, page 108

   On that day, the Mufti, and other ecclesiastical servants, cloathed with penitential garments of hair-cloth, with down-cast eyes, beards uncombed, and all in tears, shall repair first to the public places, and afterwards to the mosques,

   1783, Thomas Holcroft, The Family Picture, volume 2, pages 43-44

   The man who could live in such a room, unconstrained by poverty, must either have his vision fed from within by an intense passion, or he must have chosen that least attractive form of self-mortification which wears no haircloth and has no meagre days, but accepts the vulgar, the commonplace and the ugly, whenever the highest duty seems to lie among them.

   1858, George Eliot, chapter 11, in Scenes of Clerical Life, volume 2, page 205

   He looked about the best room of a farm-house that had never adapted itself to the tastes or needs of the city boarder, and was as stiffly repellant in its upholstery, and as severe in its decoration as haircloth chairs and dark brown wall-paper of a trellis-pattern, with drab roses, could make it.

   1894, William Dean Howells, chapter 7, in A Traveler from Altruria, page 154

   Synonyms: horsehair