Slippery things are etymologies.

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I learned recently that in 1381 in London an unruly crowd cornered a bunch of Flemish people in a church then set up a block outside and proceeded to behead 35 of them one after the other.

The reason for the animosity was that native English felt that their livelihoods were under threat from these immigrant workers.

The author of the book I got this from said that the reason the Flemish workers were there in the first place was that earlier it had been official government policy to invite these workers because of their skill in textile manufacturing. A prime example was the Flemish factory owner Thomas Blanket who’s name gave us the name of the warm cloth.

“Aha,” I thought, “here’s the stuff of a podictionary episode.”

But what I found wasn’t quite what I was expecting.

I could only find a single authoritative dictionary that mentions Thomas Blanket. That was The Oxford English Dictionary and it referred to poor Thomas with derision.

I actually think that this OED entry is an example of some quaint Victorian wording that likely won’t survive the revisions now taking place for the 3^rd edition.

What it actually says is “the Thomas Blanket to whom gossip attributes the origin of the name, if he really existed, doubtless took his name from the article.”

He certainly seems to have existed. His name survives because he was fined by the City of Bristol and appealed to King Edward III who sided with Thomas.

But the OED is right that blankets didn’t get called blankets because Thomas flooded the market with a new kind of beadspread.

The first citation in English for the word blanket was more than 30 years before Thomas set up his looms in Bristol and the first meaning the word took reveals its true etymology.

Before blanket meant a warm piece of fabric it referred to the undyed woolen fluff that went into making the blanket. Undyed is the operative word here.

Most sheep are white—or mostly white—and the French word for “white” is blanc and a blanket is called a blanket because it was made from this white fluff that was also called blanket.