Chapter 62

p. 198 _Plymouth Cloaks._ Obsolete slang for a cudgel ‘carried by one who walked _en cuerpo_, and thus facetiously assumed to take the place of a cloak’. Fuller (1661), _Worthies_, ‘Devon’ (1662), 248, ‘A Plimouth Cloak. That is a Cane or a Staffe whereof this the occasion. Many a man of good Extraction comming home from far Voiages, may chance to land here [at Plymouth] and being out of sorts, is unable for the present time and place to recruit himself with Cloaths. Here (if not friendly provided) they make the next Wood their Draper’s shop, where a Staffe cut out, serves them for a covering’. Ray, _Prov._ (1670), 225, adds, ‘For we use when we walk _in cuerpo_ to carry a staff in our hands but none when in a cloak’. _N.E.D._, which also quotes this passage of _The Rover._ cf. Davenant:—

Whose cloak, at Plymouth spun, was crab-tree wood.

p. 199 _Album Græcum._ The excrement of dogs and some other animals which from exposure to air and weather becomes whitened like chalk. It was formerly much used in medicine.