A coarse cloth resembling sacking

Usage examples of sackcloth.

Humbled by a public confession, emaciated by fasting and clothed in sackcloth, the penitent lay prostrate at the door of the assembly, imploring with tears the pardon of his offences, and soliciting the prayers of the faithful.

He snatched her fine white muslin carriage dress from the clothespress and tossed it onto the bed as if it were made of sackcloth.

I passed completely empty canvases on easels, canvases poked from behind in a few places by pegs, so that the sheetlike surfaces were broken into geometric shapes, and I passed gray-brown-green sackcloth forms in frames, forms whose material the eye could recognize only very close up -- shreds of netting stuck under mastic or glue, iron fillings, rubber shells -- but at the next work I stopped.

And if thou canst find no sackcloth, then thou shalt have a double portion of ashes, ye knaves, and so I promise you.

They spread the cousin's sackcloth on the grass, and put the stores of the alforjas into requisition, and all three sitting down lovingly and sociably, they made a luncheon and a supper of it all in one.

Doubled up in this manner, wrapped in brown sackcloth, her long, lank grey hair falling over her face down to her feet, she presented at first sight a strange figure standing out from the dark ground of the cell, a sort of dun triangle which the ray entering at the window showed like one of those spectres seen in dreams, half shadow and half light, pale, motionless, gloomy, cowering upon a grave or before the grating of a dungeon.

The boundary was trod by the bishop and his clergy, barefoot, in sackcloth and ashes.

The prayers that did begin then, and the lamentations in sackcloth and ashes, and the holy processions, none of these have ceased nor night nor day.

While he groaned and prayed in sackcloth and ashes, his brother, the eunuch John, smiled at his remorse, and enjoyed the harvest of a crime of which himself was the secret and most guilty author.

He had not actually been indulging in self-pity, or - the notion amused him - wearing mental sackcloth and ashes.

I didn't know that that was what one meant by sackcloth and ashes--do please get up, father.

And a hermit's got to sleep on the hardest place he can find, and put sackcloth and ashes on his head, and stand out in the rain, and --”.

Then, in sleeveless sackcloths once again, the three infamous operatives regrouped and climbed aboard the mecha that would deliver them back to the SDF-1 and its world of delights.

He regarded the three couched men in sackcloths for a moment, then began to review what they'd told him.

Grouped together on the tabletop and clothed in the only suitable garments available-sleeveless sackcloths cinched at the waist by rough cords-were the three now "micronized" operatives, Rico, Konda, and Bron.