CAMLET, or CAMBLET, a stuff made sometimes of wool, sometimes of silk, and sometimes of hair, especially that of goats, with wool or silk. In some, the warp is silk and wool twisted together, and the woof is hair.
The true Oriental camlet is made of the hair of a sort of goat frequent about Angora, and which constitutes the riches of that city. Camlets are now made in Europe. Writers of the middle age mention stuffs of camel's hair, under the denominations of cameletum and camelinum, whence probably the term; but these are represented as coarse and rough, and seem to have been chiefly used among the monks by way of mortification, as the hair shirt of later times.