metayer

See also: Metayer and métayer

English

Etymology

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.

See also

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 The imported definitions may be significantly out of date, and any more recent senses may be completely missing.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, G. & C. Merriam, 1913.)

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