métayage, type of land tenure whereby the cultivator (métayer) uses land without owning it and pays rent in kind to the owner. Pure métayage is a form of share tenancy involving payment of approximately half the annual output; the métayer’s family permanently occupies the land that it works. The term describes what was probably the dominant type of land tenure in 18th-century France, certainly in southern France, and in parts of Italy.
The typical French métayer’s holding was small, consisting of either a single compact unit or scattered plots. The landowner usually furnished the chief capital items, possibly including livestock. Custom, rather than written contracts, prevailed. With the increasing use of money contracts that accompanied the growth of a market economy after 1800, métayage yielded largely to simple peasant tenure.
The economic and social conditions from which métayage emerged in late medieval France, including great population pressure on a limited land supply, have at various times also existed in India, Japan, eastern Europe, and the southern United States and produced similar sharecropping systems.