farmling

plural farmlings

1. rareA small farm.

   ‘ . . . I, the son of John and Grace Barnes, was born at Rush-hay, a farmling at Bagber in the Parish of Sturminster Newton in the Vale of Blackmore’

   a. 1887, William Barnes, quotee, “William Barnes: 1800-1886”, in Geoffrey Grigson, editor, The Mint: A Miscellany of Literature, Art and Criticism, London: Routledge and Sons Ltd, published 1946, →OCLC, page 73

   2 more examples

   And Plough-month peters out . . its thermal power / Squandered in sighs and poems and hopeless thought, / Which corn and honey, wine, soap, wax, oil ought / Upon my farmling to have chivvied into flower.

   1967, John Berryman, Berryman’s Sonnets, New York, N.Y.: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, →ISBN, →LCCN, page 41

   “What? Why would you need a tractor?” / Melrose drew a fence around his farm animals. “It’s for the farm. Or farmling, perhaps. I don’t want to overextend myself. We’ll need the tractor to turn over the loam. Loam.”

   1995, Martha Grimes, chapter 17, in Rainbow’s End (A Richard Jury Novel; 13), New York, N.Y.: Alfred A. Knopf, →ISBN, page 130

   Synonyms: farmlet