Definition of "befeathered"

He bore about the same relation to his tall, good-looking wife, with her balloon sleeves, abundant mantle, and a large befeathered and beribboned bonnet, as a small fishing-smack bears to a brig with all its sails spread.

1860, George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss‎, Book I, Chapter 7

It was the zenith of London’s last, maddest “season”; but her pleasure crowd—the dancers in her night-clubs; the befeathered scantily-draped women of her Opera House; the placemen, the panderers and the nincompoops who made pretence of governing her—had departed; were “week-ending” in pseudo-rusticity, twenty, thirty, a hundred miles away.

1920, Gilbert Frankau, Peter Jameson: A Modern Romance‎, New York: Knopf, Part Three, § 1

[…] here is a conversation between this towering Christian and his absolute antithesis in the imperial hierarchy, a befeathered pagan rain-doctor of the Bakwain tribe in central Africa—the very class of man, one might suppose, for whose enlightenment Victoria’s Empire existed.

1973, Jan Morris, Heaven’s Command: An Imperial Progress‎, New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, published 1980, Part Two, Chapter 16, p. 321

Biting works well against other attacking ants but not against befeathered birds.

2016, Justin O. Schmidt, The Sting of the Wild, Johns Hopkins University Press, page 116