under-spur-leather

plural under-spur-leathers

1. obsoleteSubordinate, underling.

   1816, Walter Scott, The Black Dwarf in Tales of my Landlord, Edinburgh: William Blackwood, Volume 1, Chapter 12, p. 242, […] I have opened house, not only for the gentry, but for the under-spur-leathers whom we must necessarily employ.

   2 more examples

   […] if the Officers are allow’d to impose upon them, Under-Spur-leathers are always the Tyrants; a Government regulated by Laws, and Govern’d according to such Regulations, never willingly put it into the power of any Inferiour Officer to Tyrannize over his fellow Subjects.

   1704, Daniel Defoe, An Essay on the Regulation of the Press, London, page 5

   1711, Jonathan Swift, Letter to Esther Johnson dated 9 October, 1711, in Letters Written by the Late Jonathan Swift, London: C. Bathurst et al., 3rd edition, 1769, p. 61, I have instructed an under-spur-leather to write so, that it is taken for mine.