1. A yard littered with straw, in which horses and cattle are wintered. Also attrib.
1787. W. H. Marshall, E. Norfolk (1795), II. 378. Cow-par, straw-yard; fold-yard. Ibid. (1789), Glouc., II. 76. His practice is to buy in large Welch bullocks at Gloucester…. He gives them the run of the straw yard the first winter.
1801. Farmer’s Mag., Aug., 251. Winterers, or straw-yard cattle, intended for next summer’s grass.
1844. Queen’s Regul. Army, 371. Horses bought in the Winter, are, generally, subject to diseases in coming from straw-yards, or from the open fields, into Stables.
1904. Blackw. Mag., Aug., 185/2. Spacious straw-yards for artillery bullocks.
2. slang. (See quot.)
1851. Mayhew, Lond. Labour, II. 138/2. The night asylums or refuges for the destitute (usually called ‘straw-yards’ by the poor).
3. colloq. A (man’s) straw hat.
1900. Westm. Gaz., 23 April, 9/2. The same hatter had sold two score ‘strawyards’ by noon to-day.
Hence Straw-yarder slang. (See quot.)
1853. N. & Q., Ser. I. VII. 342/2. A seaman … said that the captain … had manned his ship with a ‘lot of straw-yarders.’… I was told that a ‘straw-yarder’ was a man about the docks who had never been to sea.
