heer

plural heers

1. A yarn measure of six hundred yards, or 1/24 of a spindle.

plural heers

1. A Dutch lord.

   […] ſo as I was for four Days and Nights together in State of one of your Dutch Heers after a Feaſt, looking ſtill when I ſhould vomere Animam; […]

   1725, Memorials of Affairs of State in the Reigns of Q. Elizabeth and K. James I. […], volume III, London: […] W. B. for T. Ward, […], page 387

   4 more examples

   Mr Irving, after writing, perhaps after printing one volume, and three-fourths of another, seems to have been suddenly struck with a conviction of the worthlessness of the materials that had thus been passing through his hands, and in a happy day, and a happy hour, he determined to fill up the remaining fifty or sixty pages, not with milk-and-water stuff about ghosts and banditti, but with some of his own old genuine stuff—the quaintnesses of the ancient Dutch heers and frows of the delicious land of the Manhattoes.

   1824 September, “Letters of Timothy Tickler, Esq. to Eminent Literary Characters. No. XVIII. To Christopher North, Esq. On the last Edinburgh and Quarterly Reviews, and on Washington Irving’s Tales of a Traveller.”, in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, volume XVI, number XCII, Edinburgh: William Blackwood; London: T[homas] Cadell, […], pages 295–296

   These two or three days past we are filled with reports from Amsterdam and other places in the Dutch Netherlands that the French King much falls off from his agreement with the Dutch, as they say, and that the Prince of Orange, who so lately was in great danger, is now highly complimented by all the Dutch heers.

   1913, F[rancis] H[enry] Blackburne Daniell, editor, Calendar of State Papers, Domestic Series. March 1st, 1678, to December 31st, 1678, with Addenda, 1674 to 1679. Preserved in the Public Record Office., London: […] The Hereford Times Limited, […], page 272

   The duke of Deux-Ponts was the only man of the German princes whom we saw there, and he came accompanied with 6 or 7 Dutch heers, his wife, and six or seven lusty Dutch wenches; […]

   1972, Maurice Lee, Jr., editor, Dudley Carleton to John Chamberlain, 1603–1624: Jacobean Letters, New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, →ISBN, page 31

   However, when I tell you that the Queen of England and the Duke of Edinburgh were there, and the King of Norway, and the Shah of Persia and Queen Farah Diba, and the Prince Michael of Greece, and Princess Marina, Duchess of Kent, and Prince Bertil of Sweden, plus nearly fifty assorted princes and princesses, dukes, barons, graafs and gravins, meurows and heers, you will begin to see just how high a high point it was in the Amstel’s history.

   1976, Christopher Matthew, A Different World: Stories of Great Hotels, Paddington Press Ltd., →ISBN, page 17