metayer

French métayer

metayer (plural metayers)

1. (of French and Italian agriculture) One who cultivates land for a share (usually half) of its yield, receiving stock, tools, and seed from the landlord.
   • 1829, The Foreign Quarterly Review, volume 4:

     The metayer furnishes his labour , his ignorance , and his good appetite ; the proprietor supplying an exhausted soil

   • 1848, John Stuart Mill, “Continuation of the Same Subject [Of Peasant Proprietors]”, in Principles of Political Economy: With Some of Their Applications to Social Philosophy. […], volume I, London: John W[illiam] Parker, […], →OCLC, book II (Distribution), § 4, page 338:

     A majority of the properties are so small as not to afford a subsistence to the proprietors, of whom, according to some computations, as many as three millions are obliged to eke out their means of support either by working for hire, or by taking additional land, generally on metayer tenure.

   • 1903, W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk:

     The legal form of service was theoretically far different; in practice, task-work or 'cropping' was substituted for daily toil in gangs; and the slave gradually became a metayer, or tenant on shares, in name, but a laborer with indeterminate wages in fact.

• metayage

• sharecropper

• metayer in Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary, G. & C. Merriam, 1913