sb. pl. [SWADDLING vbl. sb.] Clothes consisting of narrow lengths of bandage wrapped round a new-born infant’s limbs to prevent free movement. Also transf. an infant’s long-clothes. Now chiefly fig. or allusively in reference to the earliest period of the existence of a person or thing, when movement or action is restricted.
α. 1580. Hollyband, Treas. Fr. Tong, Le Berceau d’vn enfant, les langes & petits drapeaux, a childes cradle, and swatheling clothes.
1596. Shaks., 1 Hen. IV., III. ii. 112 (Qo.). This Hotspur Mars in swathling cloaths, This infant warrier.
1612. R. Carpenter, Soule’s Sent., 84. Some lie in their sinnes as children in their swathling cloathes.
β. 1535. Coverdale, Luke ii. 7. She brought forth hir first begotten sonne, & wrapped him in swadlinge clothes, and layed him in a maunger.
1579. W. Wilkinson, Confut. Fam. Love, 48 b. Miracles serued the Church in her swadlyng clothes.
1588. Greene, Metamorph., Wks. (Grosart), IX. 52. How did fortune frowne that thou wert not stifled in thy swadling cloathes?
1599. Nashe, Lenten Stuffe, Ep. Ded. This Encomion of the king of fishes was predestinate to thee from thy swadling clothes.
1687. A. Lovell, trans. Thevenot’s Trav., I. 47. They take care that even their Sucking Children in Swadling Cloaths do not defile themselves.
1712. Arbuthnot, John Bull, II. iii. A child in swaddling clothes.
1796. H. Hunter, trans. St.-Pierre’s Stud. Nat. (1799), III. 442. He was for many ages in swaddling clothes, begirt by the Druids with the bands of superstition.
1849. G. P. R. James, Woodman, ii. I have never seen him since I was in swaddling-clothes.
1861. Maine, Anc. Law (1874), 26. To understand how society would ever have escaped from its swaddling-clothes.
1886. Hall Caine, Son of Hagar, I. viii. A great child just out of swaddling-clothes.
1897. Allbutt’s Syst. Med., II. 834. The efficacy of this treatment of snake-poisoning … seems then undoubted; but it is not yet in a position to put off the swaddling-clothes of the laboratory.
