metayer

See also: Metayer and métayer

English

Etymology

(deprecated template usage) [etyl] French métayer

Noun

metayer (plural metayers)

1. (iof French and Italian agriculture) One who cultivates land for a share (usually half) of its yield, receiving stock, tools, and seed from the landlord.

   (Can we find and add a quotation of Milman to this entry?)

   • 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.

Related terms

• metayage

See also

• sharecropper

Part or all of this entry has been imported from the 1913 edition of Webster’s Dictionary, which is now free of copyright and hence in the public domain. The imported definitions may be significantly out of date, and any more recent senses may be completely missing.
(See the entry for “metayer”, in Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary, Springfield, Mass.: G. & C. Merriam, 1913, →OCLC.)