kirtle

A knee-length tunic.

All in a kirtle of diſcolourd ſay / He clothed was, ypaynted full of eies; / And in his boſome ſecretly there lay / An hatefull Snake, the which his taile vptyes / In many folds, and mortall ſting implyes.

Few words have occasioned such controversy among the commentators on our old plays, as this; and all for want of knowing that it is used in a two-fold sense, sometimes for the jacket merely, and sometimes for the train or upper petticoat attached to it. A full kirtle was always a jacket and petticoat, a half kirtle (a term which frequently occurs) was either the one or the other; but our ancestors, who wrote when this article of dress was every where in use, and when there was little danger of being misunderstood, most commonly contented themselves with the simple term, (kirtle,) leaving the sense to be gathered from the context.

A short jacket.

KIRTLE, […] a Sort of ſhort Jacket.

A man's jacket was also called a kirtle.

A woman's gown; a woman's outer petticoat or skirt.

Per[igot] VVell decked in a frocke of gray, / Wil[ly] hey ho, gray is greet, / Per. And in a kirtle of green ſay, / [Wil.] the greene is for maydens meet.

A cap of flowers, and a kirtle / Embroidered all with leaves of myrtle;

To clothe or cover with, or as if with, a kirtle; to hitch up (a long garment) to the length of a kirtle.

Eastward the Night / Climbs slow with hooded brows, and languid Day / Kirtles her robe fantastical, and leans / To take the embrace of darkness.

Father Fogen led the way, his skinny shanks a gleaming white as he kirtled his cassock about his thighs. I was obliged to do the same, for the hillside above the house was thick with grass and thorny shrubs that caught at the coarse wool skirts of my borrowed robe.