Looking through the word lists sent to me over the years by the late Peadar O Casaide from Monaghan, I came across the word coat. A coat to the oldtimers in his part of the world meant a petticoat; also a woman's dress.
Rab Burns had a petticoat in mind when he wrote, in Galla Water, I'll kilt my coats aboon my knee And follow my love through the water.
Scots literature, especially Scots poetry, is full of glimpses of these coats.
The word is also very common in northern England, in east Anglia, and in the southwestern counties. This meaning is old. The Knight de la Tour, written before 1450, has "This woman had tenne diverse gowns and as many cotes".
The English Dialect Dictionary has coat, meaning a woman's dress or gown, from Cavan. A correspondent sent the sentence "I bought some of yon print to make a coat", when she meant a dress. This meaning is still common in Yorkshire, where women speak of buying a low-cut coat to wear to a dance.
Coat, in all its meanings, is from Middle English cote, from Anglo-French cote, from Middle Fench cotte, a petticoat. The French words came from Medieval Latin cotta, which also gave Portuguese and Spanish cota, and Italian cotta.
They are still arguing about where the Medieval Latin came from. Some say from the Germanic languages, where, for instance, Old Saxon has cott, a woollen cloak or coat, and Old High German has chozzo. These are supposed to be native words, and the ultimate sources of the Romance words, but the converse may be true.
Mary Mackey from Limerick city wonders about the noun eavesdropper. It may be traced back to the ninth-century eaves-drop, the water that falls in drops from the eaves of a house. Later this word was applied to the ground on which the drops fell; in medieval English law a man building a house would require a special permit to allow his eavesdrops to fall on another man's property. And we think that planning laws are an invention of our day.
As to the noun eavesdropper, it was in use in law in 1527, as this quotation from Termes de la Ley by John Bastell shows: "Eavesdroppers are such as stand under wals or windowes by night or day to heare newes, and to carry them to otheres, to make strife and debate among their neighboures: those are evill members in the commonwealth, and therefore are to be punished." Proper order.