A condition on an affine central subalgebra Z of a noetherian algebra A of finite GelfandKirillov dimension, which we call here unruffledness, is shown to be equivalent in some circumstances to the flatness of A as a Z-module. Unruffledness was studied by Borho and Joseph in work on enveloping algebras of complex semisimple Lie algebras, and we discuss applications of our result to enveloping a...