Alpha Book

[Sidenote: Hired Laborers]
While more prosperous peasants were becoming free-tenants, many of
their poorer neighbors found it so difficult to gain a living as serfs
that they were willing to surrender all claim to their own little
strips of land on the manor and to devote their whole time to working
for fixed wages on the fields which were cultivated for the nobleman
himself, the so-called lord's demesne. Thus a body of hired laborers
grew up claiming no land beyond that on which their miserable huts
stood and possibly their small garden-plots.
[Sidenote: Metayers]
Besides hired laborers and free-tenants, a third group of peasants
appeared in places where the noble proprietor did not care to
superintend the cultivation of his own land. In this case he parceled
it out among particular peasants, furnishing each with livestock and a
plow and expecting in return a fixed proportion of the crops, which in
France usually amounted to one-half. Peasants who made such a bargain
were called in France _metayers_, and in England "stock-and-land
lessees.


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