Definition of "besom"

As a kid I went to the Russian Bath with my own father. … Down in the cellar men moaned on the steam-softened planks while they were massaged abrasively with oak-leaf besoms lathered in pickle buckets.

1976 September, Saul Bellow, Humboldt’s Gift, New York, N.Y.: Avon Books, page 56

"Eh, but she was a besom, if a' tales be true !"

1903, Samuel Rutherford Crockett, The Dark O' the Moon: A Novel, page 130

Janet's eyes began to look dim, and I had to frown at her very hard; then I had to turn my frown on Jean ... and Janet, the besom, took advantage of my divided attention.

1917, A.S. Neill., A Dominie Dismissed, page 10

Uncle Angus went on about the behavior of the car. "She's a besom, a proper besom, her and her gears. She'll be the death of me yet one of these days."

1963, Margaret McLean MacPherson, The Shinty Boys, page 187

"She's a besom but no' bad at times, like now," Agnes said as she bit into a dough-ring.

2013, Nora Kay, Best Friends

"The march of an army through a conquered country supposing it to be a highly civilized one, is a besom of destruction, whose havoc, moral and material, it would take at least a century to recover."

1851, “A Few Words about War and the Peace Congress.”, in Littell’s Living Age, volume 28, page 364

Now, in her iceberg-white, holily laundered crinoline nightgown, under virtuous polar sheets, in her spruced and scoured dust-defying bedroom in trig and trim Bay View, a house for paying guests at the top of the town, Mrs Ogmore-Prichard widow, twice, of Mr Ogmore, linolium, retired, and Mr Prichard, failed bookmaker, who maddened by besoming, swabbing and scrubbing, the voice of the vacuum-cleaner and the fume of polish, ironically swallowed disinfectant...

1954, Dylan Thomas, Under Milk Wood, page 13