362 
Metayage and its Applicability to England. ' 
implements, the landlord the immovables (land, buildings, &c.), and 
both parties share equally in the provision of stock and the partition 
of the produce, while the responsibility of management is mutual — 
the discretion of the landlord, in case of dispute, being exercised in 
some matters, and that of the metayer in others. On a few farms 
of superior quality the landlord’s share is higher ( e.g . two-thirds), 
while on some inferior farms he receives only one-third, — such ex- 
ceptional cases, however, need not be considered. The details of 
each contract of metayage vary according to the district, and are 
regulated for the most part by local custom — a sort of “custom of 
the country ” — as minutely codified in a Recueil des Usages ruraux 
de V Arrondissement. This little code, issued by authority, may be 
bought for a few sous in the local shops, and its contents are 
accurately known by the metayers themselves. They provide for 
almost every conceivable question which can arise affecting the 
joint or several liability of the parties, prescribe certain limits to 
the mode of cultivation, fix the approximate dates of successive 
agricultural operations, the rotation of crops, the quantity of 
manures, &c., and assume throughout the active co-operation of 
intelligence and goodwill on both sides. A lease, after the usual 
recitals, embodies any special stipulation which is agreed upon, and 
refers for the rest to the customs as defined in the Recueil. The 
little pamphlet of thirty-two pages duodecimo, now in use at'Laval, 
was drawn up in 1858 by a commission appointed by the prefect of 
Mayenne in 1855. The commission was aided by the agricultural 
society of Laval, the justices of the peace, notaries, solicitors, and 
experts ; and its labours are little more than a re-statement of 
customs already of hoary antiquity, applicable as well to farms at 
money-rents as to metayer-farms. The Recueil is judicially re- 
cognised as an accurate statement of local custom, but it has no 
binding force so far as the lease expressly provides to the contrary. 
Where no special provision is made, the parties are presumed to have 
agreed to be bound by custom. 
Metayage then is, in effect, an agricultural partnership. The 
fact that it is, on occasion, a loss-sharing as well as a profit-sharing 1 
enterprise relieves it of one criticism frequently directed against 
this form of co-operation. In other respects it may claim the 
merits, and is open to the objections, common to profit-sharing in 
general. An argument used by Adam Smith and most of those who 
have followed him is that it could never be to the interest of 
metayers to put their own capital into the land, “ because the land- 
lord, who laid out nothing, was to get one-half of whatever it 
produced. The tithe, which is but a tenth of the pi’oduce, is found 
to be a very great hindrance to improvement. A tax, therefore, 
which amounted to one-half, must have been an effectual bar to it.” 
But Adam Smith expressly states that he is referring to a metayer 
who, “having no stock of his own,” cultivated ‘only by means of 
1 Seethe paper on Profit-sharing in Agriculture, by Albert Grey, in this 
Journal, 3rd Series, Vol. II., 1801, pp. 771-793 . — Ed. 
