Metayage

Contract for metayage, papyrus, 35th year of Amasis II (533 BC, 26th Dynasty)

The Metayage system (Fr. métayage) is the cultivation of land for a proprietor by one who receives a proportion of the produce, as a kind of sharecropping.

Origin and function

Métayage was available under Roman law, although it was not in widespread use.^[1][2] It proved useful after the emancipation of Roman slaves as the newly freed peasants had no land or cash (the same phenomenon happened in Brazil and the USA when slavery was banned).

In what is now northern Italy and southeastern France, the post Black Death population explosion of the late Middle Ages combined with the relative lack of free land made métayage an attractive system for both landowner and farmer. Once institutionalized, it continued long into the 18th Century although the base causes had been relieved by emigration to the New World.^{[citation needed]}.

Métayage was used early in the Middle Ages in northern France and the Rhinelands, where burgeoning prosperity encouraged large-scale vineyard planting, similar to what the ancient Romans had accomplished utilizing slave labor. The hyperinflation that followed the influx of American gold made Métayage preferable to cash tenancy and wage labour for both parties. Called complant, a laborer (fr Prendeur) would offer to plant and tend to an uncultivated parcel of land belonging to a land owner (fr. Bailleur). The prendeur would have ownership of the vines and the bailleur would receive anywhere from a third to two-thirds of the vines' production in exchange for the use of his soil.^[3] This system was used extensively in planting the Champagne region.^[4] Bailleur was also used as the name for the proprietor under métayage.

In the eighteenth century c.75% of leased lands in western, southern and central France were sharecropped. North of the Loire it was only common in Lorraine.^[5]

In Italy and France, respectively, it was called mezzadria and métayage, or halving - the halving, that is, of the produce of the soil between landowner and land-holder. Halving didn't imply equal amounts of the produce but rather division according to agreement. The produce was divisible in certain definite proportions, which obviously must have varied with the varying fertility of the soil and other circumstances and did in practice vary so much that the landlord's share was sometimes as much as two-thirds, sometimes as little as one-third. Sometimes the landlord supplied all the stock, sometimes only part - the cattle and seed perhaps, while the farmer provided the implements; or perhaps only half the seed and half the cattle, the farmer finding the other halves. Thus the instrumentum fundi of Roman Law was combined within métayage.^[6] Taxes were also frequently divided, being paid wholly by one or the other, or jointly by both.

In the 18th Century métayage agreements began to give way to agreements to share profits from the sale of the crops and to straight tenant farming, although the practice in its original form could still be found in isolated communities until the early 20th Century.^[7] By 1929, there were still 200,000 Métayers, farming 11% of French cultivated land (same % in 1892). It was most common in Landes and Allier (72% and 49% respectively).^[8] As the métayage practice changed, the term colonat partiaire began to be applied to the old practice of sharing-out the actual crop, while métayage was used for the sharing-out of the proceeds from the sale of the crops. Colonat partiaire was still practised in the French overseas departments, notably Réunion^[9], until 2006 when it was abolished.^[10]

In France there was also a system termed métayage par groupes, which consisted of letting a sizeable farm not to one métayer but to an association of several who would work together for the general good under the supervision of either the landlord or his bailiff. This arrangement got past the difficulty of finding tenants having sufficient capital and labour to run the larger farms.

In France, since 1983, these métayage and similar farming contracts have been regulated by Livre IV of the Rural Code ^[11].

Localities

The system was once universal in certain provinces of Italy and France, and survived there in places until the end of the nineteenth century. Similar systems formerly existed in Portugal, Castile ^[12], and in Greece^[13], and in the countries bordering on the Danube. Métayage was used in French colonies, particularly after the demise of slavery. Also, because of its utility métayage spread to nearby British colonies such as Nevis, St. Lucia and Tobago.^[14][15] It still occurs in former French possessions, particularly in Madagascar^[16].

The term métayage is also applied to modern-day flexible cash leases in French-speaking^[17]Canada.

Criticism

British writers were unanimous in condemning the métayage system, until John Stuart Mill adopted a different tone. They judged it by its appearance in France, where under the ancien régime all direct taxes were paid by the métayer with the noble landowner being exempt. With the taxes being assessed according to the visible produce of the soil, they operated as penalties upon productiveness. Under this system, a métayer could fancy that his interest lay less in exerting himself to augment the total share to be divided between himself and his landlord and instead be encouraged to defraud the latter part of his rightful share. This was partly due to the métayer's relative state of destitution and with the fixed duration of his tenure - without which the metayage could not prosper. French metayers, in Arthur Young's time, were "removable at pleasure, and obliged to conform in all things to the will of their landlords," and so in general they so remained.^[18]

In 1600, the landlord Olivier de Serres wrote 'Le théâtre de l'agriculture' which recommends Métayage as cash tenants took all the risks so would demand lower rent while hired labour was expensive to manage.^[19]

In 1819 Simonde de Sismondi expressed dissatisfaction with the institution of métayage because it reinforced the poverty of the peasants and prevented any social or cultural development.^[20]

Yet even in France, although métayage and extreme rural poverty usually coincided, there were provinces where the contrary was the case, as it also was in Italy, especially on the plains of Lombardy. An explanation of the contrasts presented by métayage in different regions is not far to seek. Métayage, in order to be in any measure worthy of commendation, must be a genuine partnership, one in which there is no sleeping partner but in the affairs of which the landlord, as well as the tenant, takes an active part. Wherever this applied, the results of métayage appeared to be as eminently satisfactory, as they were decidedly the reverse wherever the landlords held themselves aloof. ^[21]

References and notes

1. ^ Cato, Marcus Porcius De Re Rustica CapitulaCXXXVI - CXXXVII
2. ^ Crook, J.A. (1967) Law and Life of Rome: 90 B.C. to A.D. 212 Cornell Univ. Press: Ithaca, NY. p. 157
3. ^ Hugh Johnson, Vintage: The Story of Wine pg 116. Simon and Schuster 1989
4. ^ Excerpts from R. Dion’s “ Histoire de la Vigne et du Vin en France“
5. ^ Sharecropping and Sharecroppers, T J Byres, page 18
6. ^ Crook, J.A. (1967) Law and Life of Rome: 90 B.C. to A.D. 212 Cornell Univ. Press: Ithaca, NY. p. 158
7. ^ Shaffer, John W. (1982) Family and Farm: Agrarian Change and Household Organization in the Loire Valley, 1500-1900 State University of New York Press: Albany. ISBN 0-87395-562-5
8. ^ Land Tenure and Political Tendency in Rural France: The Case of Sharecropping, S Sokoloff, European Studies Review, 1980, page 361
9. ^ "Le colonat partiaire" Clicanoo, Journal de l'Ile de la Réunion 15 May 2006;
10. ^ Art. L. 462-28, French National Assembly, Law No 2006-11 of January 5 2006 Journal officiel de la République Française of January 6, 2006;
11. ^ French Rural Code Livre IV Baux ruraux
12. ^ D. Vassberg "Land and Society in Golden Age Castile"
13. ^ Moreau-Christophe, Louis-Mathurin (1849) Du Droit a l'Oisiveté et de l'Organisation du Travail Servile Dans les Républiques Grecques et Romaine Chez Guillaumin et Ce, Libraires: Paris, pp. 258-261.
14. ^ Richardson, Bonham C. (1992) The Caribbean in the Wider World, 1492-1992: A Regional Geography Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, p. 74. ISBN 0-521-35186-3
15. ^ Marshall, W.K. (1965) “Métayage in the Sugar Industry of the British Windward Islands, 1838-1865" The Jamaican Historical Review 5:28-55.
16. ^ Dynamics in Social Service Delivery and the Rural Economy of Madagascar: Descriptive Results of the 2004 Commune Survey International Labour organization (ILO), (April 2005)
17. ^ Flexible Cash Lease Agreements/Contrats de métayage portant sur les cultures, Factsheet 812 (2001) Ministry of Agriculture, Government of Ontario accessed at [1] with English version at [2] June 20, 2006
18. ^ Cruveilhier, J. (1894) Étude sur le métayage Paris.
19. ^ The Economic Theory of Sharecropping in Early Modern France, Philip Hoffman, The Journal of Economic History 1984, page 312
20. ^ de Sismondi, Simonde (1819) Nouveaux principes d'economie politique, ou de la Richesse dans ses rapports avec la population translated as New Principles of Political Economy of Wealth in Its Relation to Population by Richard Hyse, Transaction Publishers: London (1991). ISBN 0-88738-336-X
21. ^ Cruveilhier, J. (1894) Étude sur le métayage Paris.

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 This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed (1911). Encyclopædia Britannica (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. 

See also

• Sharecropping
• Sharefarming
• Tenant farmer