Metayage

Metayage System is the cultivation of land for a proprietor by one who receives a proportion of the produce, as a kind of sharecropping.

The system was once universal in certain provinces of Italy and France, and prevailed in places through the end of the nineteenth century. Similar systems foremrly existed in Portugal, in Greece, and in the countries bordering on the Danube. In Italy and France, respectively, it was called mezzeria 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 must obviously vary with the varying fertility of the soil and other circumstances, and which do 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--taxes too being paid wholly by one or the other, or jointly by both.

English writers were unanimous, until JS Mill adopted a different tone, in condemning the métayer system. They judged it by its appearance in France, where it has never worn a very attractive aspect. Under the ancien régime not only were all direct taxes paid by the métayer, the noble landowner being exempt, but these taxes, being assessed according to the visible produce of the soil, operated as penalties upon all endeavours to augment its productiveness. No wonder, then, if the métayer fancied that his interest lay less in exerting himself to augment the total to be divided between himself and his landlord, than in studying how to defraud the latter part of his rightful share; nor if he had not yet got rid of habits so acquired, especially when it is considered that he still was destitute of the fixity of tenure without which metayage cannot prosper, as 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.

Yet even in France, although métayage and extreme rural poverty usually coincided, there were provinces where the contrary was the fact, as it was also in Italy, specially 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.

In France there was also a system termed métayage par groupes, which consisted in letting a considerable 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 over the difficulty of finding tenants possessed of sufficient capital and labour to run the larger farms.