dwarf-holder

plural dwarf-holders · alternative dwarfholder · alternative dwarf holder

1. A poor farmer with a very small holding, especially one smaller than required for subsistence.

   It represented the rural middle classes against the bigger men, especially against their creditors, but it neither represented nor cared for the dwarf-holders, still less the agricultural labourers.

   1956, Carlile Aylmer Macartney, October Fifteenth: A History of Modern Hungary, 1929–1945, volume 1, page 122

   2 more examples

   The fund would consist of land confiscated from all owners, individual and institutional, who, according to the new bill, held more than was socially acceptable; the confiscated land would be redistributed amongst the landless and the dwarf-holders.

   1987, Richard J. Crampton, A Short History of Modern Bulgaria, →ISBN, page 89

   This was a time of land hunger and severely declining living standards for the teeming mass of smallholders, cottagers, and landless laborers who crowded onto the land. The world of the Halesowen dwarf-holders was terrible.

   2001, David Levine, At the Dawn of Modernity: Biology, Culture, and Material Life in Europe, →ISBN, page 282