If you’re shopping for clothes, one option might be something made of “gabardine.” The dictionary says it’s a “firm, tightly woven fabric of worsted, cotton, polyester, or other fiber, with a twill weave,” which unfortunately does absolutely nothing to ensure that I’d be able to look at a coat and say “oh, that’s made of gabardine”. But that’s okay, because this isn’t really about “gabardine” at all. It’s really about beads.
“Bead” did not originally mean little round things you string together; it used to mean “prayer.” It acquired the meaning it has today because of the Rosary in the Catholic religion, which of course is a set of beads. Nevertheless, before that occurred, in medieval Scotland the king granted licenses to some people to travel around the kingdom and say prayers for people in exchange for a bit of money or something else. It was sort of a form of licensed begging, and the practitioners were called, sensibly enough, “beadsmen.”
Beadsmen customarily wore robes similar to what you might see on a monk, but the beadsmen’s robes were blue. That gave rise to another term for these guys: “bluegowns.” But another word for their robes — and here you’re in luck if you’ve been hoping that first paragraph up there might eventually get connected to the rest of them — was “gaberdine.” It seems “gaberdine” (the word for the robe) predated “gabardine” (the word for the fabric), and quite likely is its source. But “gaberdine” also spawned yet another term for the king’s licensed beggars: “gaberlunzie.” You can find “gaberlunzie” in various places in Scottish literature; there’s an old ballad called “The Gaberlunzie Man,” a story by James Ballantine called “The Gaberlunzie’s Wallet,” and Sir Walter Scott refers to them in a few of his works, including “Redgauntlet,” which includes this bit:
“Better say naething about the laird, my man, and tell me instead, what sort of a chap ye are that are sae ready to cleik in with an auld gaberlunzie fiddler?”
By the way, “cleik” means to connect with somebody; it’s from an obsolete word for a hook. It’s the source of one of the versions of the word “click,” but not the version you’re familiar with; this “click” is still a hook.
In any case, if you do find yourself shopping for clothes and have a choice of gabardine, just remember there’s a certain historical and etymological context (in Scotland, at least) that might influence your decision — especially if your gabardine coat is blue.
