hammercloth

plural hammercloths

1. archaichistoricalThe cloth that covers a coachbox.

   The mulberry-colored coach, apparently not too large for what it contained, though she alone was in it; the handsome, jolly coachman and his splendid hammer-cloth loaded with lace

   1898, Kate Douglas Wiggin, chapter VI, in Penelope’s Progress […], Boston, Mass.; New York, N.Y.: Houghton, Mifflin and Company […], →OCLC, part 1st (In Town), page 54

   1 more example

   Nevertheless, a hackney-coachman, who seemed to have as many capes to his greasy great-coat as he was years old, packed me up in his coach and hemmed me in with a folding and jingling barrier of steps, as if he were going to take me fifty miles. His getting on his box, which I remember to have been decorated with an old weather-stained pea-green hammercloth motheaten into rags, was quite a work of time.

   1860 December – 1861 August, Charles Dickens, chapter I, in Great Expectations […], volume II, London: Chapman and Hall, […], published October 1861, →OCLC, page 2