Crossword-Solution: WOAD 4 letters, 27 clues 🏆 scrabble score: 8

The savages in my Tin Islands go naked and stain themselves blue with woad, and are very filthy and brutish to look upon.

Albans they were wellnigh at blows with the Lord Abbot's soldiers; that north away at Norwich John Litster was wiping the woad from his arms, as who would have to stain them red again, but not with grain or madder; and that the valiant tiler of Dartford had smitten a poll-groat bailiff to death with his lath-rending axe for mishandling a young maid, his daughter; and that the men of Kent were on the move.

The First Man, a Briton stained with woad and hung with skins, had tilled the luscious greenness of the lands richly rolling now within hedge boundaries.

For the dregs of Colan's company-- Lost down the other road-- Had gathered and grown and heard the din, And with wild yells came pouring in, Naked as their old British kin, And bright with blood for woad.

The war-paint of the American savage reappeared in the woad with which the ancient Briton stained his body; and Tylor suggests that the painted stripes on the circus clown are a survival of a custom once universal.