[f. SQUIRE sb. + -een, Ir. Gael. -ín diminutive suffix.] A petty squire; a small landowner or country gentleman.
The first group of quots. illustrates the orig. Irish usage.
(a) 1809–12. Mar. Edgeworth, Absentee, vii. Squireens are persons who, with good long leases or valuable farms, possess incomes from three to eight hundred a year, who keep a pack of hounds, take out a commission of the peace [etc.].
1825. Lockhart, in Scott’s Fam. Lett. (1894), II. 297. Warned by a Mr. Hutcheson (apparently a squireen) not to travel on the Drogheda road after 7 p.m.
1846. J. Keegan, Leg. & Poems (1907), 421. I … said I would no longer be a slave to any squireen of them all.
1883. S. C. Hall, Retrospect, II. 314. The ‘half-sirs’ or ‘squireens,’ a class peculiar to Ireland, are, I believe, unknown now.
attrib. 1841. Lever, C. O’Malley, x. There were scores of squireen gentry.
(b) 1834. Medwin, Angler in Wales, II. 264. A young lout of a squireen took yesterday, with worms,… thirty pound of trout in one rapid.
1878. trans. Dumas’ Three Musketeers, ii. A reserve of courage, wit, and shrewdness, which often makes a Gascon squireen better off than the richest gentleman of other provinces.
1898. J. A. Gibbs, Cotswold Village, 67. Hunting, shooting, coursing, and sometimes fishing are enjoyed by most of these squireens.
Hence Squireeness, a female squireen.
1872. Contemp. Rev., XX. 106. Can we not endeavour to dissociate the Irish nation from those Hibernian squireens and squireenesses?
