in commerce, a warm woolly sort of stuff, light and loose woven, chiefly used in bedding. The manufacture of blankets is chiefly confined to Witney in Oxfordshire, where it is advanced to that height, that no other place comes near it. Some attribute a great part of the excellency of the Witney blankets to the ablative nitrous water of the river Windrush, wherewith they are scoured; others rather think they owe it to a peculiar way of loose spinning which the people have thereabouts. Be this as it will, the place has engrossed almost the whole trade of the nation for this commodity; insomuch that the wool fit for it centres here from the furthermost parts of the kingdom. Blankets are made of felt-wool, i.e. wool from off sheep-skins, which they divide into several sorts. Of the head wool and bay wool they make blankets of twelve, eleven, and ten quarters broad; of the ordinary and middle sort blankets of eight and seven quarters broad; of the best tail wool blankets of six quarters broad, commonly called cuts, serving for seamen's hammocks. See HYKES.

**Tossing in a BLANKET**, a ludicrous kind of punishment, of which we find mention in the ancients under the denomination sagatio. Martial describes it graphically enough. *Ibis ad excussum, niffus ad altra, fago*. A late writer represents it as one of Otho's imperial delights. But this is turning the tables: that emperor's diversion, as related by Suetonius, was not to be the subject, but the agent, in the affair; it being his practice to stroll out in dark nights, and where he met with a helpless or drunken man to give him the discipline of the blanket.