Definition of "squirearchy" []

• The landed gentry considered as a group or class. (noun)

American Heritage(R) Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition. Copyright (c) 2011 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

• "From all that I could gather from her, I was led to suppose that he was a specimen of the idle, coarse-mannered, profligate, low-minded 'squirearchy' -- a result which might naturally have flowed from the circumstance of his being, as it were, outlawed from society, and driven for companionship to grades below his own -- enjoying, too, the dangerous prerogative of spending much money."
• "Free trade was never the French cup of tea, but Bastiat was determined to import the success of Richard Cobden's crusade against the tariffs that protected the grain-growing British squirearchy a.k.a., the "corn laws"."
• "The fact that he ascended to the leadership of the Ulster Unionists was something of an upset, since he is not of the Anglo-Irish "squirearchy" that for generations has controlled unionism in Northern Ireland."