I read (in Jane Austen: Her Life by Park Honan) that when Britain anticipated a Napoleonic invasion in the months before Trafalgar, British schoolgirls went to sleep with ‘Napoleon blankets’ underneath their beds. He offers no further explanation. Actually he does that a lot and I’m becoming increasingly annoyed with this biography. However, that is another topic altogether.

Does anyone know what ‘Napoleon blankets’ are? Was this the hysteria-driven Regency equivalent of plastic sheeting and duct tape?